Where they started
Rankings had been frozen at positions 4–8 for the better part of two years. The content team was good: the pages targeting their head terms were thorough, well-structured, and matched intent. Every audit came back the same way: nothing wrong with the pages, everything a little short on the domain. Their DR sat at 44 while the two competitors permanently above them sat in the high 50s, mostly on the back of links from business and finance press. The site had never earned a link a journalist would choose to give; it had directory listings, a few partner mentions, and guest posts. That was the wall.
What we did
- Built one annual salary-benchmark study from their own product data. The platform already held anonymized compensation data across thousands of companies. We turned it into a report with numbers no competitor could publish, which is the only thing that reliably earns editorial links.
- Pitched it as a data source, not a link request. Business and finance reporters cite benchmarks; we gave them a citable figure per segment and a clean methodology page, and let the coverage compound. 87 editorial links landed across 5 months.
- Pointed the new authority at the pages that were already close. The links lifted the whole domain, but the top-3 jumps happened on the head-term pages that already sat at 4–8. They were one authority tier away from winning, and the study supplied it.
- Wrote nothing new. No fresh content pages shipped during the engagement; the keyword and traffic gains came entirely from existing pages rising once DR crossed into competitor range.
The plateau broke in months 4–6, exactly as the coverage cleared. This only works when the pages are already good and authority is the single missing input. It is not a fix for thin content. Here it was the whole story.