The link building case study: #29 to #2 on a 93k keyword.

Starting July 2024, a twelve-month link building campaign aimed at two of Mac Duggal's highest-value collection pages: evening gowns and mother of the bride dresses. Every anchor was mapped to head terms and their long-tail variants, so each earned placement reinforced topical relevance. Both pages finished at position 2 on five-figure-volume keywords.

Evening gowns

The page opened at position 13 for evening gowns (17,000 monthly searches) and reached position 2 within the year. The gains spread well past the parent keyword.

Mother of the bride dresses

This page started at position 29 for mother of the bride dress, a 93,000-search head term, and finished at position 2. A 27-spot jump on the most competitive keyword in the collection.

Why it worked

The anchors in earned placements reinforced both the head terms and their semantic variations, which helped Google understand topical relevance and lifted core and secondary keywords together. That same authority paid off in AI answers. Large language models lean heavily on traditional SEO signals, so a stronger keyword-rich link profile meant more LLM-driven traffic to both pages. Link building still underpins performance in search engines and generative AI alike.

"By zeroing in on our most competitive collection pages and executing a smart link-building strategy, they helped us move from middle-of-the-pack rankings to dominating page one." Mac Duggal