SEO Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated (Seriously)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again —
SEO doesn’t have to be complicated.
In fact, the simplest strategies are often the most effective.
I’ve worked with hundreds of clients across the globe, helping them increase organic traffic and climb the search rankings — with consistent, measurable success.
And honestly? There’s no secret sauce.
Our SEO process typically boils down to two key components:

✅ On-Site Audit

A complete technical SEO audit, plus a keyword strategy that balances quick wins with long-term ranking goals.

✅ Link Building

A strategic, high-quality link building campaign from relevant and authoritative sources.
To show you how this works in practice, I want to break down exactly what we did for a client in one of the most competitive niches out there: gambling.
Let’s get into it.

The Proof Is In the Pudding

Before we dive into the “how,” let me show you the “why.”
We implemented this strategy starting in June 2018, and the results were wild:
📈 Traffic skyrocketed from 506 to 21,946 monthly visitors in just months
💰 That translated to 76,000+ clicks from Google — turning into real affiliate revenue
![case study results gifs]

The Strategy That Made It Happen

Let’s be clear: this is one of the most competitive niches in SEO. Big affiliate payouts = elite-level competition.

The Challenge

When we started, the site’s Google traffic had flatlined .
The site was old and had been through multiple redesigns, CMS migrations, and other structural changes — not to mention years of link building (both good and bad).
Our first job was to reverse-engineer everything that had been done previously, clean it up, and rebuild a solid foundation.

Step 1: The SEO Audit

Technical SEO is often what moves the needle most. This site had a lot of legacy issues. Here’s what we tackled first:

🔐 Migrated to HTTPS

The site had mixed protocol issues — HTTP and HTTPS pages indexed, internal links pointing to both. We fully migrated to HTTPS, cleaned up all internal links, and implemented htaccess redirects for consistency.

🗺️ Sitemap Optimization

There were multiple bloated sitemaps with low-quality pages. We replaced them with a single, clean sitemap listing only index-worthy URLs.

⭐ Rich Snippets & Structured Data

The site had review content but lacked structured data. We implemented schema markup, which resulted in better SERP visibility and even triggered knowledge graph entries.

📝 On-Page Optimization

We rewrote over:

• 50+ poorly optimized title tags
• 150+ missing or duplicate H1 tags

🔗 Backlink Audit

The site had 300k+ backlinks — including a lot of risky old-school links from outdated strategies.
We completed a full manual backlink audit , disavowing anything toxic and identifying strong linking opportunities.

Step 2: The Link Building Strategy

Once we cleaned house, it was time to build authority.
But here’s the twist: with so many links already going to the homepage and core pages, adding more there wouldn’t move the needle.
Instead, we:
1. Identified internal pages ranking on page 2 for high-volume keywords 2. Focused link building on those pages to push them onto page 1br That’s where we saw the biggest wins in traffic and revenue.

The Most Powerful Links (And the “Secret Sauce”)

Our strategy was simple:
“Get backlinks from authoritative sites, surrounded by relevant, high-quality content.”
And the easiest way to do that?
👉 LinksThatRank.com
Now here’s where it gets interesting...
In the gambling niche, we discovered something counterintuitive:
Relevance doesn’t matter as much. Trust does. Rather than only getting links from gambling-related domains (which are often low-trust), we:
✅ Got links from high-authority sites in unrelated niches
✅ Made sure those pages were contextually relevant with gambling-focused content
Example: A car site publishes a gambling article, and links to our client. This outperformed traditional “relevant” links in the gambling space — likely because Google’s trust in the niche is so low, that authority outweighs relevance.

Ready to Rank?

If you’re in a competitive niche and struggling to move the needle, this exact strategy can work for you.
You’ve got two options:
1. Try to do it all yourself (time-consuming, technical, and easy to misstep)
2. Let our experienced team handle it for you
If you’re serious about SEO growth, we’ll take care of the heavy lifting — and who knows, you could be our next case study.