Ecommerce SEO Case Study: From Zero to Page 1 in 7 Months
Follow our month-by-month ecommerce SEO case study as we built 128 backlinks and achieved page 1 rankings for competitive keywords in the groomsmen gifts niche.
Real Results: I'm documenting my entire journey building an ecommerce site from zero to page 1 rankings in under a year.
This is a real-time case study in the groomsmen gifts space, sharing exact strategies, link counts, and ranking movements month by month.
I'm starting my first ecommerce/dropshipping business and SEO will be my primary focus for the first year.
And guess what? I'll be documenting my entire strategy for you right on this page month over month as the brand goes from a zero-authority/no-traffic website to a page 1 ranking money-making machine in under a year.
🎯 The Target Niche
Website: groomsmengiftsource.com
Main Keyword: "groomsmen gifts" (~100,000 monthly searches)
Strategy: National ecommerce SEO with aggressive link building for premium gift items such as Tissot PRX
To launch a successful ecommerce brand with SEO, you need the following:
🚀 Essential Elements for Ecommerce SEO Success
- ✓A relevant domain name
- ✓Site with optimized homepage, category pages, product pages, and URL architecture
- ✓A smart content strategy
- ✓An effective and scalable off-page link building strategy
Month 0: The Plan
Let's start with knowing exactly what we're up against. I have a brand new site that I just purchased in March of 2020. There are no backlinks yet.
Since I'm going after a national ecommerce keyword where the main search term, groomsmen gifts, has about 100,000 month searches, I know I have a long way ahead of me.
📊 Competition Analysis
First I go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer or Linkio's Competition Analyzer to check how much raw power the top ranked results have.
Competition Breakdown:
- • 4 big authority sites (impossible to compete)
- • 3 specialty sites (my targets: DR 44, 37, 32)
- • 1 mid-tier site (maybe eventually matchable)
⚠️ Important Discovery
Ahrefs said the homepages of my competitors had 302, 332 and 229 homepage referring domains. However, Linkio's crawling determined the real numbers: 198, 281 and 187 homepage referring domains. The rest of the links are likely dead.
Of those numbers, 96, 192 and 99 are dofollow and indexed in Google. This becomes my goal.
💡 Key Insight
If Google didn't care enough to put an article into its index, you can bet it doesn't care about the links coming from that page. That's why I only focus on dofollow and indexed referring domains count.
My Goal: 100 dofollow and indexed referring domains to the homepage in about 3 months, which works out to 33 links per month.
📝 Anchor Text Strategy
Since my domain is a partial match domain, I chose the partial match settings and Linkio set my target percentages for me. At the end of this campaign, I want to have a perfectly natural anchor text profile - the type that big budget brands who don't care about SEO have.
📚 Content Topic Planning
More than a backlink's anchor text and quality matters these days. The topical relevance of the article matters too. Just like you shouldn't go out there and build 100 exact match keywords, you shouldn't guest blog 100 articles that all have your main keyword in the title tag.
🎯 My 3-Step Link Building Strategy
1. Custom Blogger Outreach Guest Posting
I don't really care about the metrics of the site I'm getting links from. DR 60, DR 8, DR 20 - it doesn't matter. What matters is that the site is run by a real person. If it's low authority or low traffic site, but in my niche, I'm happy with it.
2. Directory Link Building
As long as I don't have to pay for it, and the directory site is niche, I'll try to get website-name.com and naked URL placement.
3. Resource Page Link Building
Resource page links are great. They're niche relevant, usually contribute to my branded or URL anchor needs and the pages already have some age to them.
📈 End of Month 0 Stats
- • Website ready to publish
- • 70 category pages with unique content
- • Tracking 133 short and long tail keywords
- • Link building strategy defined
Month 1: Link Building Starts
I hit the publish button on the website and started building links. Here are the stats after 1 month.
🔗 Links Built: 42 Total
- • 26 Guest Posts
- • 3 Content Link Insertions
- • 9 Directory Links
- • 4 Resource Links
How I Built The 26 Guest Post Links
26 guest posts works out to about 1 a day. I asked the publishers to skip attribution where possible and most did. These were mostly low authority niche specific sites.
Site Authority Breakdown:
- • 3 sites with DR above 50
- • 4 sites with DR 30-40
- • 22 sites with DR 10-20
They are all niche specific sites so I don't mind the lower DA.
How I Built the 9 Directory Links
I scraped Google's search results with 2 search operators:
(Keyword) + directory
(Keyword) listing inurl:advertise
I also exported competitor directory links from Ahrefs. This turned into a list of about 400 opportunities and I hired someone to go through the list one by one to submit to sites where I could get a free listing.
How I Built The 4 Resource Links
I scraped Google's search results with 2 search operators:
(Keyword) inurl:resources
(Keyword) inurl:links
That yielded 238 opportunities. We found the emails and sent them a pitch for inclusion. 30 people replied and got 4 links out of it.
📊 SEO Rankings Update
The average ranking across 133 keywords went from nowhere to position 85 (page 8).
The short tail high volume keywords did not reach the top 100 at all but many longer tail ones did.
Month 2: Lots of Links, Small Gains
Recapping May 2020 activities: Ahrefs shows a backlink profile growth to 87 links. We continued the same activities outlined in the earlier months with most of the links coming from blogger outreach.
The process here is very straightforward: Prospect blogs in my niche, email 5 websites a day, follow up with them up to 4 times, and publish content with the ones that say yes – hopefully without attribution.
📈 Rankings Update
Our rankings went from average of position 85 to position 39 for 133 keywords.
My 3 "main" high volume keywords moved from not top 100 to positions 50, 27 and 28 respectively. Two long tail keywords made it to the bottom of page 1 and most others are spread across pages 2-6.
Month 3: Big Rankings Gains
June 2020 actually was not a great link acquisition month. We only were able to build 2 links this month. Mostly this was due to a lack of focus across several key team members, including myself.
Even with that said, We saw great rankings movement this month.
🚀 Rankings Progress
Compared to last month, which had an Average rank of 39, we're seeing some great progress. The average rank improved to position 32.60.
💡 Smart Strategy Tip
I actually don't have all of these products in the ecom shop. For example, I rank for "groomsmen gift pocket watch" but don't actually have any pocket watches.
After you set up your shop, you can start ranking pages in advance and add products after getting some success in organic search. In the meantime, I used it like a category page but embedded a RoundupWiz pocket watch listicle that links out to Etsy and other places.
You can see the impressions and clicks count all going in the right direction. We've got a long long way to go, but early progress is looking good, it's promising and I'm optimistic about this campaign.
Month 4: Growth Continues
It's the middle of the year and wedding season is in full effect. Well, it would have been if not for the pandemic. Regardless, we continue our hard work.
🔗 July 2020 Links Built: 23 Total
- • 19 new guest posts
- • 4 link insertions
- • 21 links went to homepage with branded anchors
These values are based on 65 referring domain links that are both dofollow and indexed in Google.
⚠️ Anchor Text Strategy Note
If you're wondering why my keyword anchors are pretty high compared to what the ideal suggestion is, I'm OK with being a little more aggressive with keyword anchors on newer sites that don't have many links yet.
It's most important to have closer to ideal percentages as the link volume starts getting higher, because that's when it becomes a pattern to Google. In the early days, there is a lot more leeway and you can get faster rankings by being a bit more aggressive (IMO).
📈 Rankings Update
Compared to last month, the average rank moved from 32.60 to 28.42.
Scored our first featured snippet this month which is good news. Multiple keywords are now on page 1 of Google.
A lot of these pages are ranking because of my listicle strategy so I decided to try monetizing this traffic with Etsy affiliate links. Google search console estimates 250 organic clicks this month. Progress is looking good so far.
Month 5: Biggest Moves Upward
We've continued to see steady gains in rankings and traffic.
🎯 Major Achievement
The average ranking across all keywords is now 22, up from 28 last month.
Our big time keyword, "groomsmen gifts", has made a big move – going from position 74 to position 26 in the past month.
We're starting to see 20+ organic visitors a day now – all related to some groomsmen gift searches.
What Did We Do This Month?
Basically just built 10 homepage links. But it's the way we've built links these past 5 months which is really responsible for the gains you're seeing now.
📊 Link Building Stats
According to Linkio, of the 130 links that Ahrefs found, 75 of them are passing SEO value (dofollow and indexed).
Of those 75, 71 point to the homepage.
Strategy: Branded homepage backlinks from relevant sites on relevant articles. About 15 links per month over the past 5 months has done the trick so far.
Month 6: So Far so Good
We've continued to see steady gains in rankings and traffic.
📈 Progress Update
The average ranking across all keywords is now 20, up from 22 last month.
Some of the longtails are starting to cram up into the top half of page 1.
💰 Traffic Value
About 30-35 hits per day is the new normal. Keyword CPCs in this industry are $1.50-$2.00 per click.
If you do the math, I'm getting around $1,500 worth of free traffic monthly now.
Basically just built 8 links. The campaign is pretty rinse and repeat at this point. I set up the pages 6 months ago and put together a link building plan:
- I would pitch local wedding vendors content
- That content would be about groomsmen gifts, bridal party gifts or wedding resources
- I'd mostly build homepage links, and I'd diversity the anchor text the same way a high end brand would
These anchor text choices are not an accident. We're working off competitor data to build the percentage targets, and the mostly inexperienced freelance team I have working on this project, is effortlessly making the right choices using Linkio's anchor text suggestion module.
How's this translating to money? We've made a few sales. I've added Etsy affiliate links a few days ago and made our first commission there yesterday.
Month 7: Upward Trend Continues
Almost like clockwork, we've continued to see steady gains in rankings and traffic.
📊 7 Month Campaign Statistics
Link Building Results
- 136 Referring Domains (94% to homepage)
- 128 from blog outreach
- 0 paid links
Average Link Metrics
- Average DR: 24 (Median 20)
- Average DA: 20 (Median 20)
- Average Ahrefs Traffic: 4,800 (Median 270)
Link Source Breakdown
- • 103 Local Business Links
- • 15 Wedding Blogs
- • 12 National Wedding Companies with a Blog
On average, this works out to 18 links per month.
📧 Outreach Campaign Statistics
What kind of outreach do you need to do to get volumes like this? We emailed 15 prospects per business day with 2 followups every few days.
Total Campaign Stats:
- Prospects Emailed:3,837
- Prospects Replied:754 (20.28% response rate)
- Bounced/Unsubscribed:259 (6.86%)
- Success rate from replies:17%
- Overall success rate:3.4%
💡 Why These Numbers?
A 20% response rate is solid for cold email. The success rate should be better but there are two factors that impacted this number:
- Most targets were local businesses - sometimes really busy to follow through or not super sure about how to proceed
- Lackadaisical oversight from me
🎯 Key Takeaways from 7 Months
📊 High Flow
Maintain high opportunity flow with consistent outreach
📝 Large Lists
Build prospecting lists of at least 300 per month
💪 Stay Consistent
Keep investing in keeping this pipeline strong
🏆 Final Results Summary
Starting Point (Month 0)
- • Brand new domain
- • 0 backlinks
- • 0 traffic
- • Not ranking for any keywords
After 7 Months
- • 136 referring domains
- • Average position 20 for target keywords
- • Multiple page 1 rankings
- • $1,500/month worth of organic traffic
- • Featured snippets captured
The Formula: Consistent outreach + niche relevance + homepage focus + natural anchor text = sustainable SEO growth
💡 Lessons Learned
1. Quality Over Metrics
Low DR sites in your niche are better than high DR sites outside your niche
2. Homepage Focus Works
94% of links to homepage with branded anchors creates natural profile
3. Consistency Is King
15-20 links per month creates steady, sustainable growth
4. Volume Matters
Email 15 prospects daily, expect 3-4% success rate, scale accordingly