The Links Guy, a specialized link-building agency, found themselves facing a common challenge among marketing agencies. Agencies are so busy delivering results for clients that they often neglect their own marketing.
Despite helping others boost their organic visibility through strategic backlinks, their own domain had been languishing in the search results. The irony wasn't lost on them—they'd been preaching the benefits of SEO without practicing it themselves.
The team knew they needed to start walking their talk. How can clients trust a link building agency that doesn't rank well themselves?
This disconnect between service offering and self-implementation needed addressing. How could they convince potential clients to invest in SEO if they weren't seeing the benefits themselves?
I sat down with Amit Raj, the founder of The Links Guy, to understand how they were able to generate a 100% increase in organic in just 6 months.
Challenges in a hyper-competitive industry
The SEO agency space presents unique challenges. TLG identified 2 distinct challenges that needed addressing.
- Extremely knowledgeable competitors who understand SEO deeply
- High content quality standards expected by clients
Navigating a saturated competitive services niche
The magnitude of the task ahead of Amit and his team was compounded by the fact that they compete in one of the most saturated niches online – SEO services.
This meant that their competitors shared TLG’s expertise in SEO, dulling any advantage they had.
As Amit put it,
"When it came to writing content for our own brand, we had a website which had only just been overhauled, and could almost be considered as a 'new website'. We also were in one of the most competitive niches since we're competing with other link building or SEO agencies."
Maximizing impact from clients guest posts
The second challenge focused on their core service offering. As a dedicated link-building agency, The Links Guy needed to ensure guest posts weren't just securing backlinks—they needed to drive actual traffic.
As Amit explained,
"While we are primarily a link building agency and offer only that service for our clients, we needed to maximize the impact of the guest posts we wrote. Part of that is ensuring our guest post articles are not only valuable from an audience point of view—but also valuable to search engines, and capable of ranking."
Agencies specializing in SEO face the highest standards for their own marketing. Their organic visibility serves as both a lead generation channel and a living portfolio of their capabilities.
The Links Guy used Surfer’s suite of content optimization tools to create comprehensive, authoritative content that satisfied both users and search engines.
1. Creating in-depth helpful content for TLG’s blog
Rather than producing thin content across many keywords, The Links Guy focused on creating definitive resources:
"For the TLG work, this meant that we were going to be creating very large, in-depth guides on link building. The goal here was to try and tackle each topic, and make it one of the best resources on the internet for that topic."
– Amit, Founder at The Links Guy
Writing long-form content can help your website in a number of ways,
- Authoritative resources build brand perception as industry experts
- Comprehensive resources attract more natural backlinks
- Longer dwell time signals stronger user engagement to Google
- In-depth coverage naturally incorporates relevant semantic keywords
At Surfer, we follow a similar approach with our guides on topics like "on-page SEO" and "keyword research"—creating exhaustive resources that rank for hundreds of related terms while conveying our expertise.
The Links Guy leveraged Surfer's SERP Analyzer to decode what made competing content successful:
"We could look at other competing pages for that topic, to understand what aspects of the topic they covered - and we could quickly run through them, while conducting our research for the content."
– Amit, Founder at The Links Guy
This competitive analysis revealed:
- Which topics competitors covered that they had missed
- How top-ranking content was organized
- Optimal content length for specific keywords
- Features like tables, FAQs, or calculators that enhance user experience
For example, here’s a list of popular topics covered by the top 3 pages for “relationship link building.”
By analyzing what already worked in the SERPs, The Links Guy could create content that met user expectations and search engine requirements—giving their pages the best chance to rank from day one.
TLG’s article on relationship link building is a good example of authoritative, exhaustive content. Nearing 4000 words and 24 headers, the article breaks down practical methods using examples and real life email exchanges.
Amit and his content writers followed Surfer’s content recommendations, using the Content Score to ensure their articles aligned with the content structure of the highest-ranking pages for their topics.
They also used Surfer’s Google Docs integration to write and collaborate on projects inside Google Docs, so multiple team members could contribute simultaneously while tracking changes.
Results: dramatic growth in just 6 months from data-driven content
The Links Guy's strategic implementation of exhaustive content resources delivered impressive results across multiple metrics, proving that their data-driven approach to content creation was working.
The initial results showed a remarkable improvement in organic visibility:
"We started seriously publishing content on our blog in early 2024, and if compare just the last 6 months, vs previous 6 months, we can see already, some significant movement."
– Amit, Founder at The Links Guy
Total clicks increased from 1.74K to 3.57K (105% growth)
Total impressions jumped from 254K to 1.16M (356% increase)
The average CTR improved from 0.7% to 0.3%.
As a result of this content plan, TLG increased its website’s domain authority and maintained consistent growth in the search results.
2. Optimizing guest posts for clients
Search engines don't just track keywords—they understand topics. The Links Guy used Surfer to create content demonstrating topical authority, improving publisher acceptance rates and search performance.
TLG’s writing team faced the challenge of incorporating SEO best practices while maintaining the quality of their content, as they were not well-versed in SEO.
"Our content team were not of SEO background, and were mostly used to a highly creative and journalistic approach to content writing. Less emphasis on SEO and keywords, and more on editorial standards and content depth."
– Amit, Founder at The Links Guy
Surfer bridged the gap between SEO requirements and creative writing, allowing TLG’s content team to focus on quality while ensuring optimization fundamentals were covered.
Surfer’s keywords panel made things easier in a number of ways.
- Writers could see content scores while drafting
- Surfer identified semantically related terms to include
- Content length and depth recommendations based on top-ranking pages
- The tool suggested headings and topics to cover
By following Surfer’s Terms suggestions, TLG’s content writers were able to include keywords that they knew were important but might not have included explicitly without the tool's guidance.
As Amit explains,
"Whereas before, the writer would only sprinkle a few keywords in or naturally include them in headings—the NLP suggestions and headings would give clear direction on what else could be included, or what additional points we should be covering."
They went from guesswork to data-driven suggestions
Results: Measurable impact on referral traffic
When The Links Guy began working with their client, a niche fashion accessories e-commerce brand, their initial strategy focused solely on securing backlinks without optimizing the guest post content itself for search visibility.
In early 2024, Amit pivoted to focusing on comprehensive topic coverage rather than just backlink placement.
This led to an increase of 35% in clicks and 67% in impressions when compared YoY.
The results were particularly impressive considering:
- The fashion niche was experiencing a general traffic decline
- Multiple Google updates were causing volatility
- Many competitors were seeing traffic losses
Amit also pointed out how his clients' guest posts are written for human readers, supported by consistent referral traffic data from GA4.
“...the referral traffic you can see is a very positive indication of content that is truly helpful and “human first”. Below is a snapshot of such observations where we had done a guest post and through the past 6 months continued to register trickles of traffic.”
Takeaways
Even SEO experts sometimes need specialized tools to break through competitive search landscapes – especially when starting from behind.
The benefits to TLG of implementing an SEO content strategy are clear. This isn't just about vanity metrics—it is about business sustainability:
- Lead generation: By increasing organic visibility, they can attract more inbound leads without relying on paid channels
- Market credibility: As an SEO service provider, having a strong organic presence reinforces their expertise
- Long-term growth: Building a content foundation provides compounding returns over time.
By optimizing guest posts for both backlink value and organic ranking potential, The Links Guy created assets that delivered ongoing value rather than one-time link placements—transforming their service offering while achieving better results for clients.
These optimized guest posts delivered:
- Consistent referral traffic months after publication
- Higher-quality traffic with better engagement metrics
- Improved publisher relationships due to content performance
In just six months, The Links Guy not only doubled their organic clicks but transformed their entire approach to content creation—both for themselves and their clients.
Success in SEO is usually a combination of several factors, underpinned by creating comprehensive, data-informed content that serves both search engines and users. TLG’s fashion client's 35% growth during algorithm turbulence proves this works.
