Gutter Replacement Brisbane was a newly created brand. No history, no authority, no backlink profile — and a minimal budget to build one with. In a local trades market where established competitors had years of links behind them, the site had no realistic path to the top of the results without a foundation of genuine authority underneath it.
The brief was simple to state and hard to deliver: build a solid foundation of links across a brand-new site, without the budget that usually buys one.
With a limited budget, spreading links thinly across a dozen pages would have achieved nothing anywhere. So we did the opposite — we focussed solely on branded guest posts to the homepage, concentrating every link we earned on a single target.
Branded anchors, not exact match. Anchors used the brand rather than commercial phrases. In a trades niche where over-optimised anchor text is the fastest way to look manipulative, branded links read as what they are: real editorial mentions of a real business.
Guest posts on genuinely relevant sites. Each placement was earned on a site with a real audience — not a network, not a farm — so the link carried something worth passing on.
Consistency over twelve months. Rather than a burst of links and a long silence, we built steadily for a year, letting the domain compound its strength month on month while SEO consulting kept the on-site work aligned with it.
Over the past 12 months there has been an increase of traffic by 2.5x.
The focus on brand links to the homepage allowed the domain itself to get stronger — and a stronger domain helps rank the individual pages across the rest of the website, putting more keywords into the top 10 positions and driving traffic from them.
The sharpest measure of that is where it matters most: keywords in positions 1–3 more than doubled, from 21 ranked to 53. Those are the positions that take the clicks in a local trades search — and they were won on a domain that, a year earlier, did not exist.
