The challenge

Nabava.net was our first Croatian client. We weren’t sure if the link building approach we developed for the international market will work here as well. 

Fortunately, it worked better than expected. Nabava.net is a known brand in the local market, which definitely made bloggers and editors more open to collaborating with us. 

The main challenge with with this project was deciding which products and product categories to focus our link building strategy on as they feature thousands of different products. On top of that, we had to think about seasonal trends and new products being added on a regular basis.

The strategy

The foundation of the whole project was strategic link-building through guest posting on niche-relevant blogs, magazines, and news sites. 

None of Nabava.net’s competitors seemed to be actively investing in SEO. This left the door wide open for us to boost the rankings of specific pages by selectively building a small number of links to a lot of different product pages and categories.   

There were three main factors we considered when defining our link building strategy:

1. What are the most profitable product pages and categories
2. Keyword research to check the traffic potential for existing product pages and categories
3. How seasonality trends impact traffic potential for, you guessed it, seasonal products 

Over the course of the project, we actively built links to dozens of different pages. At any point in time, we had at least one active evergreen category (like gaming consoles and smart watches) and one seasonal category (like winter tires). 

When building editorial links through guest posting, it can take a while before your posts (and links) go live. This is especially true when you are working with big news and business sites that have a strict editorial calendar. 

This is why we started building links for “winter tires” in autumn and focused on “school products” in summer. The articles went live just as the topics become popular and Google had plenty of time to index those backlinks.

This approach helped us to more than double their organic traffic. As a product price comparison brand that earns money on an affiliate model, this jump in organic traffic had a direct impact on their profits.

The results

Here are the results after 14 months, backed up by a few screenshots from Ahrefs.

Our link building strategy boosted website traffic by 104%, from 280K (October 2021) to 570K (February 2023).

All of the links we have built raised the authority of the overall domain which gave a slight boost to all of their pages. Since they feature a huge amount of products and categories, this cumulative effect played a big role in doubling their organic traffic.  

That said, most of the pages we actively build links to have seen a more significant jump in traffic. One of the best examples is their “smart watches” product category.

The first backlink went live in January 2022. Twelve months and 39 backlinks later (from 13 unique domains), and now that page receives around 19k monthly visitors, up from 10k where it was when we started. 

This project confirmed that you can get great results from link building and content marketing, regardless of the size of your market. You just have to be strategic about your efforts to ensure a good ROI.