When you promote a website in a highly competitive niche market, you need to implement a thorough content strategy and link-building profile. The key factor to success here is to choose the proper placements and to address all SEO tasks comprehensively. In this case study, we’ll discuss how to increase traffic for a legal website in the UAE fivefold within a year. In this particular case, the priority was to obtain quality backlinks from English-language platforms.
About the Project
Kirill Yandovskiy, an expert in international SEO, has a client that helps entrepreneurs set up businesses in the UAE and handle other legal matters. At the start of the project, the customer’s website had a monthly traffic of around 7,000 visitors.
The initial goal was to increase this traffic by several times and rank in Google’s top results for as many keywords as possible.
Approach
Kirill analyzed direct competitors and collected a semantic core. Based on this data, a strategy which focused on the following key areas was proposed:
Link Building
The legal services domain is challenging in terms of building a backlink profile. First, the direct competitors were websites that already had an established backlink base. Second, Kirill needed to keep to a reasonable budget.
Before the start of the project, around 800 referring domains linked back to the customer website. That’s enough for a good start but was insufficient to see significant growth in rankings for high-difficulty keywords.
To increase the backlink volume, Kirill placed approximately 20 rental links every month and added 10 guest posts through Serpzilla. All links were purchased from English-language sources—the UAE link-building market is limited but placements in the .com domain zone performed strongly.
The placements were selected based on the following criteria:
- An Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) of 50 or higher.
- The website receives organic traffic from Google.
- The opportunity to arrange placement in English-language articles within the .com domain zone. Initially, legal-themed sites mentioning Dubai in the title were chosen, later expanding to broader relevant English-language resources. Rental links were placed on pages mentioning the target geo-location within the content.
The anchor distribution ratio was set to:
- 30% non-anchor
- 30% anchor
- 30% mixed (“keyword + URL” format)
Guest posts contained exclusively anchor links.
The monthly link building budget was $1,000 ($900 was allocated for guest posts and $100 for link rentals).
Kirill ended up with the following strategy:
| Link Rentals | Guest Posts | |
| Cost per link | $5-10 | $50-100 |
| Links per month | 20 | 10 |
| Cost per month | $100 | $900 |
| Links per year | 240 | 120 |
Content
Semantic analysis and competitor research revealed that it was necessary to improve commercial page texts and regularly publish articles that would target search queries reflecting the target audience’s pain points and concerns. Kirill used Ahrefs’s “Top Pages” tool to identify popular competitor pages and search queries that were driving traffic.
Kirill’s team published approximately 10 expert articles every month. The key topics included detailed guides about starting a business in the UAE while also covering related queries.
Such content refinement allowed the team to get traffic across numerous high- and low-difficulty keywords. They managed to enhance the customer site’s topical relevance in Google and improve their commercial keyword SERP positions.
Usability of Commercial Pages
The customer site’s page templates needed to be reworked to ensure a better user experience. The team updated landing page structures by adding social proof, providing detailed information, and improving visual elements.
Additionally, all the standard technical optimizations for proper page indexing were completed.
As a result, conversions and user engagement grew, which, in turn, started sending positive user-behavior signals to Google. This significantly boosted traffic and generated more leads.
Results
Within a year, the team managed to increase the customer website’s traffic more than fivefold—from 7,000 to 38,000 monthly visitors.
Actual peak traffic numbers were even higher—reaching 44,000 visitors a month. However, the Google algorithm update in May 2024 impacted the performance:
Over one year, approximately 300 links were acquired. While this is a modest number, it perfectly demonstrates that by carefully selecting placements and approaching the process rationally, a website can obtain a solid SEO boost without extensive backlink growth. Combined with a high-quality content strategy and conversion rate optimization, Kirill’s team achieved impressive results and significantly increased organic lead volume.
Key Takeaways
Most of the links the team acquired were link rentals and they performed well. This kind of backlinks allowed the team to optimize the budget and drove the website into top positions on Google, resulting in a fivefold increase in traffic. One of Kirill’s focal points in link-building was consistency, and the team kept purchasing links every month. This proved to be one the key success factors because it signals to search engines that the website is active, relevant, and authoritative, which, in turn, positively impacts SERP rankings.
Kirill has chosen a flexible approach when it comes to placement selection, without strictly adhering to geo-location criteria and choosing platforms within the English-language segment. This also helped with the desired outcome.
However, success requires a comprehensive strategy beyond link-building alone. Combining link-building with content optimization and usability improvements yielded results— the website steadily builds authority and consistently improves its SERP positions.
Analyzing competitors and copying their link strategy isn’t enough. It’s crucial to recognize successful moves and blank spots in their approaches. Careful analysis and consistent implementation of a well-designed SEO strategy led the team to significant traffic and lead growth, which was proportionate to the invested effort.
