143
links built in 90 days
100%
from unique referring domains
33%
organic traffic growth off the June low
The Client
A browser-based video software platform serving millions of creators, marketers and media teams worldwide. The product spans editing, subtitling, transcription and AI-assisted production, monetised on a freemium model where organic search is the dominant acquisition channel.
They came to us with a fast-eroding organic footprint and a clear ask: rebuild authority on the commercial pages that drive signups, without touching anything that would put the domain at risk.
The Challenge
Video software is one of the most link-saturated verticals in SaaS. Competitors publish at volume, acquire aggressively, and defend the same head terms year after year.
By the time we audited the account, organic traffic had been sliding for six consecutive months. Rankings on high-intent product pages were being displaced by better-linked competitors, and a run of core algorithm updates had compounded the losses.
The brief was not growth at all costs. It was: stop the decline, concentrate authority on the pages that convert, and do it inside a 90-day window from May to July.
The Approach
We treated this as a recovery play, not a standard retainer — triaging the pages that had lost the most equity, then concentrating budget there instead of spreading links thinly across the domain.
Loss-weighted prioritisation
We mapped every page that had dropped out of the top five and ranked them by lost traffic value rather than lost position. Budget went where a handful of quality links would recover the most revenue-adjacent traffic — commercial product pages sitting one slot away from a meaningful click share.
Editorial link acquisition
In a category this competitive, product pages rarely earn links on their own. We built and placed long-form editorial assets one step up the funnel — the tutorials, comparisons and workflow guides publishers in the creator and marketing space genuinely cite — then routed that authority internally to the money pages.
One link, one domain
Every placement came from a domain that passed our metrics — topical relevance, Ahrefs DR 30+, real organic traffic, and no association with PBNs or content farms. All 143 links came from 143 separate referring domains. No repeat placements, no site-wides padding the count.
Steady velocity, tracked to the page
Velocity was held deliberately flat across the three monthly cycles rather than front-loaded, and anchor text was rebalanced toward branded and natural variations. Each placement was tracked against the specific URL it was meant to move, with underperforming targets reallocated mid-flight.
The Results
The charts below isolate a single priority page rather than a domain roll-up, because a page-level view shows the effect of the link build without everything else happening across a site this size muddying the read.
That page had been declining for six straight months. The slide flattened within the first weeks of the engagement, bottomed out in mid-June at roughly 104,000 monthly organic visits, then climbed through July to a peak near 138,000 — a 33% recovery off the low.
Traffic value followed the same curve, moving from a June floor around $22,600 to a July high of roughly $30,100. Across the full campaign we delivered 143 links over three monthly cycles, with the remainder distributed across the other priority pages in scope.
Why It Worked
Most recovery campaigns fail because budget gets spread evenly across a domain and nothing moves far enough to change a ranking. We did the opposite: fewer pages, more links each, and enough concentration on the highest-value targets to actually shift them.
The second factor was restraint. A declining site is the worst possible moment to spike link velocity or lean on aggressive anchors. Flat cadence and a clean, unique-domain profile meant the recovery held instead of buying a short-lived bounce.
Losing ground in a competitive category?
Tell us which pages need to move. We will show you the link gap between where you are and page one — before you spend anything.