SEO Link Building

Link Building Services Case Study – DUI Canada Entry

FWCanada are Montreal basted immigration law firm that provides specialist services that help US based clients gain access to enter Canada for work, for holidays and for immigration.

The Problem

With a number of websites supporting their services, Chief Attorney Marisa Feil was worried that one of their sites that focuses on helping clients with previous DUI (Driving Under the Influence of alcohol or drugs) was not doing as well as it should in the U.S. Google search results. Consisting of around 20 pages of informative content about the options available to those wanting to visit or immigrate to Canada, the site also contained a news and blog section that was kept up-to-date with relevant articles and information.

Because the site’s existing rankings were being supported by a large set of incoming links from another site owned by the business as well as a much smaller number of genuine incoming links, it was decided to broaden and diversify the incoming link profile. According to Google and the majority of SEO link building specialists, and my own experience, this is a sure-fire way to limit the risk of loosing rankings after Google algorithm updates and also encourages increased crawl rates and trust, that can boost search traffic from improved positions in the search results.

A potential difficulty the website faced was that it was built on an out-dated version of the Joomla! content management system, which is not only known for its lack of support for link redirection and meta data optimisation, but also lacks the free plugins and functionality available to website owners that use more modern content management systems such as WordPress.

The Solution

After crawling the website with a bunch of pro SEO tools such as Screaming Frog Search Spider and setting up error and rankings tracking campaign in Moz, I made my recommendation of a 3 day mini seo campaign to resolve some initial technical errors and optimise the main pages, then to support that with a few months of ongoing link building services that would seek out powerful links from other related, trusted sites.

After the initial crawl of all the site pages and reviewing all of the current and historic incoming links discovered by Majestic SEO tool, I had to inform Marisa that I had identified a whole series of errors made by her web developer over the previous years.

By looking deeper at the situation using Archive.org, I was able to illustrate that the structure of the site’s urls had been changed many times in the past and that a large proportion of the value from incoming links was being wasted.

Upset that lots of the hard work of creating, sharing and promoting informative content over the years had been wasted by the developer’s neglect of proper url management, I was able to set about working on a plan that would not only redirect the majority of the broken incoming links (to forward their value on to the current site pages) but would also inform the developer about how to resolve the same errors made on FWCanada’s other websites.

Broken Link Building

I was able to fix most of the url mismanagement problems by compiling a set of lists of urls other sites were linking to, lists of urls that Google Search Console identified as high authority, lists of urls Google Analytics historic reports indicated used to get lots of incoming referral traffic from – as well as lists of broken links still allowed to reside throughout the current website.

Then by using a spreadsheet to remove duplicate items and to prioritise which redirects were most needed, I was able to map all of the broken incoming links to their correct current urls. There was hundreds of them, but with Marisa’s help, we managed to prioritise a list of less than 100 redirects that we could map to our pages.

After fixing a bunch of broken internal links and optimising meta titles and descriptions for our target phrases we achieved a Google Search Console profile that was free of flagged warnings and a Moz report confirmed that there were no technical errors remaining in the site.

By completing this once-only phase of correcting the site errors and managing our redirects, we were able to go on to the second stage of garnering incoming links from other sites related to Canadian law and the issues travellers face when being denied access to Canada due to their previous convictions.

Off-site link building and outreach

Link building can be difficult because it is tricky to encourage other related site owners to cite your information and web pages without reaching out to them with suggestions of content that their website visitors would find informative – Even if the information you provide is exactly what they need.

However by developing a weekly plan that ensures each stage of the work is done effectively and by using a number of tools, it is possible to guarantee some of the site owners respond with either a citation, a mention, a link to our our site or even a bespoke article that provides value and answers to their readership’s problems.

Although links from social media sites don’t help with rankings, they can get your content out there, so be sure to share your latest content – And of course, producing content that is so good that you don’t need to promote to others is always the best solution. However getting to that level and creating popular, or even viral, content is not easy in what is often referred to as “boring” industries.

Over the years of optimising sites for better Google rankings I have developed a routine that spends a few hours per week in order to ensure that other sites link in to my clients sites, this can be supplemented with social sharing the posts and outreach work that encourages still other related site owners to link to the clients site as well.

It has got to be said though, that the most effective link building can be done by the client themselves. They have many contacts and friends in the same industry with their own websites that would be happy to mention or link to relevant content when encouraged. They often also have access to the “easy” links that can be acquired via Feedburner, Wikipedia, on their existing social profiles and on other web properties they or their team already own. This includes former domains they used and still own – which often has great value due to the domain and page authority built up over the years – that is often forgotten about and rarely tapped for the incoming link value.

The Results

Within 1 month of fixing the technical issues and implementing adequate permanent redirects in the DUI Canada Entry website, we saw a large increase in rankings on our target pages. This ensured a 70 per cent increase in organic Google traffic and continued to grow over the following few months of off-site link building until we were getting twice as much Google traffic each month than before I stated the campaign.

Keeping a close watch on your web designer is a wise step. If they show lack of skill or experience, by forgetting to implement your Google analytics code in the new site after a migration (as happened twice in 2013 and 2015) then this should raise the alarm bells. Designers don’t really design websites nowadays, as the role has changed over the years to adapting clients content to existing templates found in content managements systems. This has allowed many inexperienced designers to join the industry and forget that their real job is to manage the health and growth of their client websites rather than just check that they look nice.

Be aware though, that it is your business and if you see that anybody has changed your site url structure so that your pages are no longer visible where they used to be, you need to take action. Swapping from https and http urls without adequate redirection, switching between non-www to www urls and neglecting to fix broken links or manage urls correctly can trash your business or at least hold it back for years – don’t let it happen to you.

The Client Testimonial

Why not read more of my SEO service case studies or see my SEO packages and plans. Drop me a line to discover what is holding your website back in Google by requesting a free SEO review or get in touch to ask any question about your website and missed opportunities to help your business grow.