traffic · 11 months
visibility
rankings
links built
Attracting international students is hard enough — being invisible online makes it impossible. A well-known university in Norfolk was watching its traffic decline while competing institutions pulled ahead in search. Their off-page SEO had been neglected entirely, and with a tight deadline to turn things around, they needed a partner who had done this before. That's how Link Building HQ got involved.
The university's backlink profile was too thin to support meaningful rankings for competitive Master's program keywords. Without authoritative external links, Google had little reason to surface them over bigger, better-connected institutions. Internally, the marketing team lacked both the time and specialist expertise to run a sustained link building campaign. Every month without action was another month of declining visibility and missed enrollment opportunities.
We applied our proven education-sector playbook — building a diverse, authoritative backlink profile within a tight 11-month window.
In-depth analysis
We mapped the university's existing backlink gaps and identified high-authority educational directories, research journals, and niche blogs as the strongest link-building opportunities aligned with the institution's academic programs and target student profile.
Content creation
We produced compelling guest posts for reputable education websites and developed resource pages on the client's site — designed to naturally attract mentions and backlinks from other blogs, journals, and academic platforms.
Strategic outreach
We secured 150+ placements across authoritative educational publications and research journals, building a diverse backlink profile that signalled credibility and relevance to Google across all of the university's key program areas.
| Google Position | February 2023 | January 2024 | Before → after | Percent Increase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | 05 | 28 | 0% | |
| 4–10 | 21 | 71 | 0% | |
| 11–50 | 28 | 60 | 0% |