Link building: which winning strategies did these SEOs use?

A look back at the SEO Hero organic search contest, to study the best link building techniques the entrants used. More than 100 SEOs from around the world took part in the contest organized by Wix. The CMS launched the concept in mid-November 2016, hoping to restore its (badly damaged) reputation when it came to organic search. The goal of the game was to rank as high as possible on Google’s US SERPs for the phrase “SEO Hero”, which handed US entrants a language and home-turf advantage from the start. For four months, from mid-November 2016 to mid-March 2017, the participants worked hard to win the $50,000 Wix had put on the table.

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Above, screenshots of the SERP for the keyword “SEO Hero”.

Walid Gabteni, the contest’s overall winner, managed to rank his site seo-hero.tech on Google’s first page, in 3rd position. On the second and third steps of the podium are two other French SEOs: Paul with seo-hero.io and Stéphane with seo-hero.ninja, both of whom took their sites all the way up from position 90. France can be proud to have three of its own in the leading pack.

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In early March, Walid Gabteni managed to break out of the filter with seo-hero.tech. The question worth asking is: “how did he get out of the filter?”

There are several hypotheses:

• A large volume all at once,
• Plenty of new websites / linking,
• Anti-SERP-destruction protection.

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Walid Gabteni’s strategy for winning the contest breaks down into several phases. First, he built a genuinely useful new tool, which became the main subject of his site: a semantic suggestion tool for content. Why do that? The objective is simple — get people with a general interest in SEO to use it and find it interesting, which in turn makes it easier to earn links to the site.

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Phase 2? Brand the tool around “SEO Hero” as a real brand. Walid Gabteni even went a step further, creating social media accounts to post tutorials and practical information about the tool.

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For his site, Walid Gabteni chose a “light” strategy compared with his competitors: only 13 internal pages and fewer than 500 words on the home page. In the end, that strategy paid off, since he pulled ahead of competitors who in some cases had more than 1,000 internal pages and more than 3,000 words on their home page.

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Then, phase 3: the well-known link building phase. What is interesting here is his approach. The Wix contest was one of the rare contests where you had to follow Google’s guidelines (something of a paradox for an SEO contest, but why not!). Link building therefore had to be as clean as possible, and Walid Gabteni understood that very well.

So what did he do to earn links?

• Adopt a Growth Hacking mindset
• Use the value proposition of the tool, built for the occasion (and relevant to the SEO world), to make the site known to as many people as possible
• Share the tool in Facebook groups to start conversations
• Publish intensively on social media
• Target the sites where a backlink was realistically available
• Write articles for those specific sites with a backlink inserted; a “win-win” method, both for the site publishing the content and for his own
• Use “premium” expired domain names

Experience shows that in the short term (the length of the contest) the tool is not enough on its own. Only 20% of the links were natural links. So you need a solid strategy to make the site or tool known, and you also need to communicate as much as possible so that others take action and link to the site.

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