Client Overview
This case was shared with us by Kirill Yandovskiy, an expert in international SEO and a long-time user of Serpzilla. His customer, a chain of wine stores based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, faced significant challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vietnam saw some of the harshest lockdown restrictions and offline stores forced to close due to complete absence of any live customers. Kirill’s client needed to quickly pivot to online sales to keep the business afloat.
Before the Backlink Campaign with Serpzilla:
Two Years After the Campaign Start:
The Challenge
Kirill’s client faced several tricky challenges. The primary one was the typical fresh-website-challenge: the new website had zero traffic and domain authority. Prior to Kirill joining the project, their SEO efforts were minimal, mostly limited to basic metadata adjustments.
This made it impossible to rank for high-volume, high-difficulty commercial keywords and even most of mid-level difficulty ones.
The other major challenge was quickly scaling online sales before of other wine stores in the Ho Chi Minh urban area could catch up and doing so in the middle of a pandemic.
Working within a limited budget, Kiril’s priority was to deliver quick SEO wins that could support future sales growth.
Business Goals
To drive more orders, Kirill’s client focused on standing out in Ho Chi Minh’s search results — while many competitors were already moving online during the lockdown.
The client wanted to drive more sales through their website and to make their wine shop highly discoverable in local Google searches, particularly in Ho Chi Minh City.
Strategy and Decision-Making
Given the tight budget, Kirill decided to focus on a cost-effective yet impactful SEO tactic: renting backlinks.
Serpzilla was selected as the primary platform for link-building because it provided relevant and scalable backlink opportunities, sometimes at a fraction of a price Serpzilla’s competitors offered.
Kirill chose Serpzilla specifically due to several other reasons:
- Its comprehensive database of English-language sites and geolocation filters.
- Thematic filtering options that could be finely tuned.
- Efficient workflow features, such as bulk keyword configurations and automated URL retrieval from Google searches.
Implementation
Kirill went for a link-building strategy using Serpzilla that was both methodical and result-oriented:
- Selecting Potential Referring Domains: Kirill filtered prospects based on Trust Flow scores (20+), Domain Rank (10+), keyword presence in titles, and existing organic traffic.
- Quality Assurance: Each potential referring domain was manually reviewed to make sure that it demonstrates authentic design, content relevance, and user-friendliness.
- Anchor Text Distribution: A strategic mix of anchor text types was used: 30% non-anchor, 30% mixed, and 30% exact-match anchors.
To start with, Kirill targeted approximately 130 keywords. They were primarily high-volume informational keywords popular internationally (especially from India). For Vietnam, Kirill focused on transactional local searches like “wine shop near me.”
Results
One of the primary goals of the campaign was to yield quick first results which could be capitalized on when the client’s website gained some domain authority and visibility. And it was achieved within a month:
- Domain Rank (DR) increased impressively from 0 to 16 within the first month
- Organic Traffic rose from essentially zero to 10 daily visitors within the first month, eventually climbing to approximately 50 visitors daily (about 1,500 visitors monthly), marking a 5-fold increase compared to initial results.
- Backlink Profile grew from an initial 20 referring domains to 50 within the first month, eventually reaching a maintainable number of 200-300 domains after two years.
Notably, two years after the project started, the site’s monthly organic traffic according to Ahrefs increased dramatically from just 7 visitors per month to 541 — a 77-fold improvement.
Client Feedback
Feedback highlighted both the progress made and the limitations imposed by the budget. Ideally, they hoped to improve content, invest in both permanent and rental links, and tackle technical SEO, but their tight budget made it challenging to address everything at once.
The focus was placed on on-page SEO and rental links as an effective starting point. The efforts on local SEO worked great as it allowed to generate organic local traffic for queries like ‘wine shop near me’.
While the client was happy with the improved visibility, they noted that wine order volumes remained somewhat inconsistent. This suggests that with additional investment in areas like content development, the results could have been both stronger and more stable.
And yet, the client recommends Serpzilla as the perfect solution for very limited budgets which still makes backlinks from top niche websites affordable and effective.
Take a look at the results in Google Search Console:
Key Takeaways
- Combining local SEO with targeted link-building in English-language domains through Serpzilla is exceptionally effective and budget-friendly.
- Serpzilla rental backlinks provided notable and immediate improvements in domain authority and traffic.
- Even minimal SEO budgets can yield impressive results if the link-building strategy is executed with attention to project specifics and context.
Kirill strongly recommends Serpzilla for similar SEO challenges, highlighting its effectiveness, ease of use, and significant return on investment, particularly for businesses operating within budget constraints and niche markets.
