Link Building Case Study: 8X More Traffic & 2,700 Links in 5 Years

Novorésumé is a SaaS company offering resume and cover letter templates.

Though they were already working with other link builders, they wanted to stay ahead of the competition by driving more traffic to their main product page.

After identifying some problems with the links built by these other link builders and determining the right approach, we started working with them and getting early wins.

After 5 months, their: 

  • Website’s organic traffic increased 2.9x, reaching 2.2M/month
  • Main product page’s traffic increased 3.6x, reaching 523,000/month

5 years later: 

  • We successfully built over 2,700 high-quality links 
  • Their domain’s organic traffic increased 8x, reaching 4.48M/month
  • Their main product page’s traffic incrased 7x, reaching 1.1M/month

This link building case study will explain how we built high-authority links (from sites like Shopify and The Independent) for Novorésumé despite them being in a highly competitive industry.


You’ll learn:

2 Challenges Novorésumé Was Facing Before Working with LinkPitch

Let’s set the stage.

Prior to working with us, Novorésumé had:

  • A Domain Rating (DR) of 38
  • About 12,500 backlinks from 600 referring domains
  • About 771,420 monthly traffic

They’d already been working with other link builders and had done some outreach on their own.

But they were struggling to rank higher and drive more traffic due to two main factors…

Challenge #1: Tough competition in a big player industry

The resume building niche — and the more general job search industry that encompasses it — are extremely competitive. 

For sites like Novorésumé, getting to rank for their most important keywords is an uphill battle because they also have to compete with some of the largest tech companies in the world.

For example, Novorésumé faces several big competitors in this space, like Microsoft, Canva, and Adobe. 

Challenge #2: They were working with other link builders that weren’t generating high-quality links

Novorésumé had worked with some link builders before hiring us — but they were building low-quality links.

When they first reached out to us to work together, we spotted some of these low-quality links and had to break it to them.

For example, we spotted two notable problems:

  1. Some of them were obviously paid backlinks
  2. The anchor texts were over-optimized

Paying for links and over-optimizing anchor texts are black hat techniques that go against Google’s guidelines, and they can cause a site to receive a penalty. 

At best, this can cause a site to lose traffic and rankings, but at worst, it can cause a business to lose a significant source of revenue that could take years to fully recover from (if at all).

Why Novorésumé Chose LinkPitch Over Low-Quality Link Builders

Novorésumé (and most of our clients) end up working with us because they can tell we’re trustworthy. 

We always strive to be honest and transparent, and the people at Novorésumé appreciated that.



The truth is, a lot of link building services out there aren’t great. They aren’t very open about the link building approaches they use (which often involve risky, black hat link building techniques), and they don’t care too much for link quality.

At LinkPitch, we use white hat link building approaches to get high-quality backlinks, which is what Novorésumé needed to improve their rankings without risking a penalty.

Thankfully, we got great link building results from the get-go, and it started to reflect quickly on how their pages were ranking. 

Our Strategy for Novorésumé that Built 2,700+ Backlinks

Throughout the years, we’ve used various link building approaches to earn new backlinks for Novorésumé, including:

  • Resource page link building
  • Broken link building
  • Unlinked brand mention link building
  • HARO

We started by building high-quality links to a specific page: their resume templates page.

This was one of our top priorities because it was one of their three main product pages. 

Building our first authoritative links with resource page link building

We started running resource page link building campaigns to build links to their resume templates page. 

To do this, we looked at their competitors’ backlinks to find pages that gathered career and job search resources.

These were mostly university libguides, Career Center pages from universities, and career pages from government sites or public libraries.

Here’s an example of a link we got for them on a professor’s personal page:


With this technique, we managed to build approximately 20 high-quality links to Novorésumé’s templates page.

Only a couple of months later, the organic traffic for that specific page had grown almost 3x.

Though resource page link building allowed us to build some links to Novorésumé’s templates page, we quickly found out that we couldn’t rely on it alone. 

Many academics (an audience that made up the majority of the people we were reaching out to) don’t like the idea of students using resume templates. 

So, we had to use alternative strategies that would work better and get links more consistently.

Scaling with broken link building

While looking for more strategies we could use to build links for them, we found some broken link opportunities from direct competitors. 

This allowed us to use broken link building to build a lot of high-quality links to Novorésumé’s resume templates page – and other pages, like their guides on “how to write a cover letter” and “how to write a resume.”

We now had two strategies that were getting us high-quality backlinks.

5 months after starting working with them, their organic traffic was already close to 2.3M/month (from an initial 771,420/month).

Our key to continuous success? Always adapting by finding new strategies

We built around 40 initial links through resource page and broken link building. 

But we continued to adapt and test new strategies because we needed to scale our link building to keep up with the competition. 

So our next move was to build links to other content on their site that they had relating to careers and the job search process. This content made great linkable assets for outreach.

For example, Novorésumé built examples of resumes for famous people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos that were getting picked up by journalists and writers. 

This allowed us to implement unlinked brand mention link building into our set of strategies. 

Here are a few examples of unlinked brand mention links we built for them on CareerBeacon and The Independent:

Later on, we also started doing HARO link building for them. Though most of the links built using this strategy were homepage links (as are most HARO links), they came from very authoritative domains, making them great links to add to the mix.


Here’s an example of a link we earned using HARO:

Even though this is a homepage link, it’s in a very relevant article on an authoritative site for CIOs and IT leaders.

How we added more value by offering content suggestions

Throughout the years we’ve worked together, we’ve used our link building expertise to offer Novorésumé honest and valuable SEO advice.

We often suggested the type of content they should create that would make great linkable assets for outreach.

For example, a few years ago, we noticed a gap in Novorésumé’s blog content. Though they had content on several aspects of the job search process — interviewing, resume writing, cover letter writing, using job boards, etc. — they didn’t have any content on networking.

So we suggested they write an article on networking tips, and they went on to build out several other articles on this topic.

This helped us build over 50 high-quality links to their networking articles. 

Here are a few examples from The Graduate School at the University of Utah and University College Cork:

Eventually, most of the articles that they created from our suggestions ranked on the first page of Google:

Novorésumé’s SEO Growth After a Long-Lasting Partnership

As the links kept coming in, and Novorésumé’s traffic kept increasing, they continued to increase their link building budget up to as much as 5x the original amount.

This was a vote of confidence from them because of our results. 

Since we started working with Novorésumé, we’ve helped them increase their:

  • DR from 38 to 74
  • Amount of backlinks from 12,963 to 573,617 (from 606 to 121,201 referring domains)
  • Monthly organic traffic from 771,420 to 5,894,020 (7.6x higher) 
  • Number of keywords ranking from 48,989 to 543,703 (11x higher)

However, we can’t take all of the credit! 

Novorésumé has shown a lot of flexibility in terms of the pages we can build links to and the content they’re willing to create – which has allowed us to create more link building opportunities.

Need Help Building Backlinks from a Link Building Partner that You Can Trust?

If you’re looking for high-quality backlinks that deliver results, head over to our contact page and drop us a message for a free consultation. 

We’ll carefully assess your website and give you our take on the best link building approach for your case, whether that means working together or not.

aaron-anderson-profile

About the author

Aaron Anderson is a 9-year SEO veteran, who has been a full-time link builder for the last 4 years. He cares a lot about delivering quality work to clients, and prides himself on being a trusted voice in an industry that is challenging for clients to navigate.

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