High-Quality Link Building for a Sex Shop: How to Double Organic Traffic for a Complex Niche

The client

In this project, the client was an online store specializing in intimate products. Founded in 2002, it primarily serves customers in the United States and offers a wide range of adult products, cosmetics, and various accessories.

The promotional objectives

Our client’s website is over 20 years old. As a well-known brand selling high-quality products, it has a prominent position in the market and good domain indicators. For example, it has a high DR (domain authority score from Ahrefs) of 60.

At the same time, the client’s team had no strategy for increasing organic traffic in recent years. They were also facing an uncontrolled increase in spam links to their site. These included links from low-quality domains that were in danger of being penalized by Google. They even faced a possible spam attack from competitors and turned to Netpeak Agencies Group to develop a promotion strategy to address all of these issues.

First, the Netpeak team conducted a full SEO audit of the site. Based on the results, the client decided to hire an SEO specialist for their in-house team but entrusted us with the extensive work of building a link profile.

Our link-building strategy comprised the following tasks:

1. Create a strategy for placing links to the affiliate’s site on third-party resources.
2. Using the strategy, improve the ranking of the site’s category pages.
3. As a result, increase organic traffic to the site.

These tasks formed an interesting challenge for us due to the specifics of the niche, as not all sites were happy to accept publications related to adult products.

Team strategy

When we first started working on link building, the client was still looking for an SEO specialist. So, Netpeak specialists decided to adopt the broadest possible strategy for building external links. For example, we developed recommendations for internal SEO because link building works better with well-tuned technical optimization.

Analysis and selection of key queries

At the very beginning of the collaboration, the client’s team had key queries (clusters of queries for specific categories) on which they wanted to build their link profile.

We analyzed a rather extensive list provided by the client’s team, and rather than promoting all key queries, we decided to select the priority queries for which we already had good positions.

Here is how we selected the key queries:

• Used Ahrefs’ keyword analysis tools to identify the queries being used by competitors.
• Analyzed our current positions for those queries.
• Determined the feasibility of promoting these queries, considering their complexity (Keyword Difficulty) and search frequency (Volume Search) according to Ahrefs.

Also, we used competitor analysis (more on this later) to evaluate the semantics in the desired niche and form the most relevant list of keys for link building.

Evaluation of the site’s link mass

The analysis of the domain’s link mass showed many dangerous links. That is links on low-quality domains with a large number of spammy queries, such as commercial ones with a direct entry keyword buy sex toys.

After investigating this, we somewhat confirmed the theory of a spam attack. Most importantly, we compiled a list of spam links for the partner’s team to reject, signaling to Google that they should not be associated with our site.

Competitor analysis

As part of the competitor analysis, we looked at the domains in general and also examined the priority categories and subcategories for promotion separately.

In addition to link-building factors, we analyzed the internal optimization of similar category and subcategory pages of competitors. This allowed us to identify several growth points for our site:

• Compared to competitors’ pages, the site pages contained very little text content, which could have a negative impact on their search engine visibility.
• Internal linking was incorrectly done and also insufficient.

After improving on these points, we could rank the site for less frequent queries that were not prioritized for promotion.

We also provided the client with recommendations on how to improve these items for better search engine optimization.

Selection and cooperation with donor sites for link placement

Many high-ranking sites refused to cooperate due to the specific nature of the subject matter.

Our requirements for sites were as follows:

• DR of at least 30. DR is an indicative indicator that allows us to filter out low-quality and non-authoritative sites.
• Monthly organic traffic of at least 1000 according to Ahrefs.
• The USA as the main country of traffic, based on Ahrefs.
• General thematic (sites about social life, health, relationships, etc.) sites and adult (18+) sites.

To diversify the link profile and attract the audience to the site, we decided to use crowd platforms with the following indicators:

• DR of more than 25.
• Organic traffic of at least 1000, according to Ahrefs.
• Total domain traffic of at least 50,000 per month, according to SimilarWeb.
• The USA as the leading country of traffic, according to Ahrefs.
• Exclusively adult-themed sites.

Content was a key factor. Due to the complexity of the topic, it was necessary to prepare extremely high-quality and informative articles that do not directly mention products from the client’s website. The client’s team was responsible for creating articles. This was absolutely the right decision because the writer’s deep knowledge of the topic and their professional skills made it possible to attract better sites for cooperation.

Promotion results

DR increased from 60 to 62:

*Ahref’s DR metric is based on the principle of a "logarithmic scale": the gap between DR 60 and 62 is much larger than between 20 and 22. This means that the higher the DR, the more difficult it is to increase it.

Also, the domain’s organic traffic increased from 20,000 to 41,000 per month:

Organic traffic to the priority section increased from 1,000 to 8,000:

For the priority promotion of categories and subcategories, we received the following results for queries:

During the collaboration, we received 21 guest posts and seven crowdsourced links.

Feedback on cooperation

Yuliia Vasylkova, Project Manager at Netpeak Agencies Group