Building a brand’s visibility is a complex issue.
Moreover, standing out in today’s competitive landscape is becoming increasingly challenging, no matter your industry or the AI tools available.
Growing your business comprises steps and channels, starting with niche analysis and finishing with digital technologies to share information about your product.
In this post, I will focus on how I created and ran a link-building campaign from scratch, which increased the website’s traffic by 579.27% within 16 months.
Standing Out In A Competitive Niche.
According to Gartner, worldwide spending on public cloud services is expected to reach $723 billion in 2025. Moreover, the US SaaS market share is also set to grow from 92 billion euros to 191 billion euros.
However, our planet has more than 5.5 billion Internet users, so there will always be opportunities to find and seize their attention. And someone will definitely love your service or product.
Reteno is an AI-powered messaging platform designed for app-first businesses to retain users and boost conversions. It was launched in 2022 and combines mobile push, email, and six more channels in a single flow.
Even its name suggests the niche is highly competitive, as the digital market offers many cloud instruments that contribute to retention and repeat business growth.
I started building Reteno’s backlink profile on the 1st of October, 2023, and discovered the platform faced several challenges:
- Domain Rating was 47.
- High competition from well-established brands.
- Struggles in gaining visibility.
- Limited organic traffic despite valuable content.
I crafted and used a link-building system focused on relevance, quality, and scalability to tackle these issues.
Understanding the Link Building Workflow
Any link-building campaign consists of particular steps aimed at achieving project goals. Here’s the infographic showing the process as it is.
Link Building Workflow
When exploring your niche and competitors, you should gather data over time through lists, templates, reports, etc. Next, based on these insights, you can build your strategy and launch an outreach campaign to secure high-authority backlinks, helping your project rank higher in organic search.
Here’s how it worked with Reteno.
Comprehensive Niche, Competitor & Keyword Research: Steps towards Better SERPs
With the help of SEO tools and Google, I began analyzing the industry to better understand the context approaches and find possible content and link gaps. As a result, I made a list of competitors and studied their link-building strategies. Digging deeper enabled me to confirm that their methods mostly focus on relevancy, domain metrics, link collaborations, and guest posting to acquire new backlinks.
Reteno holds a 24.82% search visibility by rank on Google (en-US). Over the past month, the platform gained 1,491 external links, marking an increase of 9. Out of 53 tracked keywords, Reteno ranks in the top 10 for 50 of them.
Overall, the dashboard clearly compares Reteno’s SEO performance against its competitors, highlighting areas like search visibility, backlinks, keyword rankings, and domain authority.
Leveraging the insights gained from this data, the team proceeded to conduct keyword research and analysis, focusing on creating industry-related content that aligns with high user intent queries.
As an example, we can consider a couple of Reteno articles that brought organic traffic thanks to choosing low and medium-difficulty keywords, relevant link prospectors, and personalized emails.
This table contains optimized titles in the first column, and long-tail keywords with low competition in the second one.
| Blog posts | Keywords |
| iOS Live Activities Explained: How Apps Use Them | live activities appsios live activities examples
ios live activities settings live activities ios 17 how to get live activities on iphone live activities android live activities |
| Test Group vs Control Group: Understanding the Difference | test and control statistical analysiscontrol test group definition
test group synonym a/b test control group marketing test group name test group vs control group |
Based on this data, we prepared an anchor list incorporating a mix of exact match, informational, and branded keywords.
Using targeted keywords, I looked for more relevant articles with strong DR, UR, organic metrics, and prospects to pitch to them effectively. I also leveraged personalized outreach emails to boost response rates.
Our approach was tailored to the specific domain requirements of the sites from which we wanted to receive backlinks, ensuring maximum effectiveness.
This table outlines the evolving domain requirements based on the blog’s growth metrics over time.
| First criteria for domain requirements (Oct’23 – June’24): | Second criteria for domain requirements (June’24 – present): |
| DR 60+ | DR 65+ |
| Traffic: 1000+ | Traffic: 10.000+ |
| Location: USA, Canada, UK | Location: USA, Canada, UK |
| UR: >3 | UR: >3 |
| Niche: mobile marketing | Niche: mobile marketing |
| Outbound Links vs Linking Domains: under 10% | Outbound Links vs Linking Domains: under 10% |
Beyond link exchanges, we strategically implemented guest posting as a key link-building technique to enhance SERP rankings.
So, by combining article and donor relevance with high DA/PA and carefully selected anchors, we made these articles demonstrate measurable growth over time, confirming the effectiveness of Google’s E-E-A-T approach.
Here’s the screenshot of the blog page on iOS Live Activities Explained: How Apps Use Them in Google Search over the past three months.
The data shows an increasing trend in clicks and impressions, particularly after mid-January, with notable spikes in both metrics around late January and February 2025.
Meanwhile, the informational keyword “live activities iPhone” has secured the article the top spot in organic search with a featured snippet.
Ranking for low or medium-difficulty keywords is a reliable way of standing out in a high-competition niche, especially for small businesses or startups. Just use and repeat this method, and it will definitely work!
In just 16 months, this strategy earned us 445 high-quality backlinks from domains with an average DR of 60+. Notable mentions include Venngage (DR 85), HostPapa (DR 89), OpenCart (DR 92), and Matterport (DR 92).
According to Ahrefs data, Reteno organic traffic surged by 579.27%, climbing from 547 to 3,700 monthly visitors. This also strengthened the website’s credibility, increasing its DR by 42.5%, from 47 to an impressive 67.
According to Google Search, Reteno’s performance shows a noticeable upward trend, indicating organic visibility and user engagement growth.
Around the latter months, there’s a clear increase in impressions and clicks, suggesting improved rankings or search demand.
My Key Takeaways for Successful Link Building
Working on Reteno’s case, I came to the following conclusions:
Building a strong backlink profile takes time, but it delivers lasting results and a worthwhile ROI.
User intent matters. Low-difficulty, long-tail keywords matter. They help businesses stand out in search results, especially in highly competitive niches.
Backlinks are more than just metrics, they bring a real audience.
Build relations and a solid link-building system.
Don’t try to go against search algorithms or ignore user intent. It won’t work, and worse, you could face severe penalties.
Creating link-worthy articles and visuals helps attract backlinks naturally. So, leverage your content marketing strategy. Google prioritizes high-quality AI-generated content over poorly written human posts.
Diversify link sources — a well-rounded link profile from relevant sites, blogs, and industry platforms strengthens SEO.
Regularly analyze performance and refine strategies to maintain Growth. Use the principle of rinse and repeat.
To Wrap It Up
The impact of our link-building campaign exceeded expectations. Here’s a breakdown of the results over 16 months:
- 579.27% growth in organic traffic.
- 870 new linking domains, boosting domain authority.
- Significant ranking improvements for target keywords in the competitive niche.
- Higher conversions for the platform due to increased visibility.
This case study proves that a data-driven link-building campaign can yield remarkable results in even the most competitive niche. Whether you operate an app engagement platform or any other digital business, prioritizing link-building can be the key to sustained visibility and long-term traffic growth.
