I shall discuss two SEO case studies. I started both sites from ground zero. No domain authority. No aged domains. They were started in my Singaporean HDB bedroom.
The first site was built on passion, in the dating advice for men niche, and I eventually got it to around 20k global readers and sold it off. The second site is ThreeLittlePigs.Pro, this digital marketing agency site! These two case studies are different because the former focused on global search engine results and the second one is localised to Singapore.
Singapore SEO Case Study 1: MarcusNeo.Com (Sold to BeyondAges.Com)
I started a dating advice business blog for Singaporean men as my first business. That is how I got involved in SEO. I wanted to rank on page one on the search results and get clients. SEO was also how I generated my first ever sale. This also led to interviews on national TV and a couple of articles written for ChannelNewsAsia.
Targeted Keywords for MarcusNeo.Com
I targeted the keywords “dating coach” and “dating coach Singapore” in Singapore’s local search results.
The commercial keyword “dating coaching Singapore” also only had 20 searches a month back then. Yes, I sold my first ever $497 dating advice program by ranking at the top of Google. I started by copywriting, hoping someone would read my blog posts. I failed miserably and returned to full time university.
However, that put me on a sprint to learn more about lead generation, traffic generation and SEO. I attended two local Singaporean SEO courses from Singaporean SEO gurus. I failed many times by changing my meta descriptions, title tags and a whole host of on page SEO strategies, but it was eventually link building that moved the needle.
Eventually I managed to rank “dating coach Singapore” at the top of Google.com.sg search engine results. In spite of this, I generated more than 100k of revenue in this business. In hindsight, it was quite a feat.
Source: Ahrefs free keyword generator tool
From an SEO perspective, this niche was not that competitive locally and I was able to do it through a combination of internal linking and a couple of backlinks from local publishers.
I quickly realised I did not have enough clients from local SEO. 20 searches a month alone was not going to cut it, and I pivoted to Facebook advertising. One and a half years after advertising on Facebook, I got hit by multiple bans from Meta. I tried all sorts of tactics such as changing credit cards and making multiple accounts. The bans only got worse. Yes, I believe Meta tracks your account at a computer ID level.
Looking for a replacement traffic source, that is where I turned to global SEO. That was where the true learning curve kicked in.
The idea was to monetise my content globally, get ranked on Google.com, not just on Google.com.sg. That is where I learned about skyscraper link building and guest post link building. Initially, I hired a link builder on Upwork to build links to my skyscraper articles.
Here’s are our initial link building results. You can observe a high number of backlinks but poor organic traffic. Just a pathetic 22 on the Ahrefs dashboard.
The links were lacking in relevance, nothing grew, and I decided to take link building into my own hands. I learned outreach based link building and over the next six months, I built more than 50+ high quality backlinks, manually. It compounded, as my site eventually gained more links naturally.
Breaking Down MarcusNeo.Com Link Building Track Records
If I remember correctly, I paid around 2.5k USD for two to three months of link building efforts. Yes, and $500 for a setup fee.
That is around 10 links per month for September 2019 and October 2019, totalling 20 links.
However, the links came from sites that were not very niche relevant. I decided to stop working with the link building agency after a couple of months, as there was no noticeable improvement. In hindsight, my site might have just been in the sandbox phase.
My In House Link Building Efforts
I understood the importance of link building and hired an SEO consultant on Upwork that specialised in the Skyscraper method. Yes, links were coming in, but they were not very targeted.
I took it upon myself to learn link building and studied more. I signed up for online SEO courses and started managing everything myself, from backlink prospecting to cold outreach. I hired virtual assistants on Upwork to help and focused on building links from sites that were more relevant to my niche.
Since my site was about dating advice for men. I aimed for links from dating, relationship, men’s fashion, or men’s self improvement websites. From December 2019 to June 2020, I focused on building links aggressively. Traffic skyrocketed, and in early 2022, the site even crashed from the surge in visitors.
Tabulation of Link Building
As of writing this article, I have lost most of my tracking data. However, I have done my best to recover what I could and managed to retrieve these records.
| Month | Links Built |
|---|---|
| January 2021 | 2 |
| February 2021 | 2 |
| March 2021 | 7 |
| May 2021 | 1 |
| June 2021 | 7 |
| July 2021 | 4 |
| Total | 23 |
These high quality links were all built by my offshored link building team, and each one has been manually vetted.
Traffic Growth on Google Analytics for MarcusNeo.Com
The benefits kicked in after six months of link building, hitting 20000 readers globally in around 8 to 12 months.
I built the link building system to:
- Ensure the links coming in were from legitimate websites with organic rankings, organic traffic, and not link farms
- Ensure the links were coming from websites with relevance (I did this without fancy SEO tools such as Majestic SEO’s help, it was amazing)
Finally, even though my website had the majority of traffic from US and UK audiences, I could not convert the traffic from the US and the UK. That is where I learned about the concept of product market fit.
The site’s domain was my name and I wrote content under my own name. Long story short: trying to sell dating advice to Western countries written in an Asian or Singaporean context was not possible. I had a lack of experience living in Western cultures and a lack of proof.
The pandemic arrived, everyone could not go out for dates. An American company eventually cold emailed me to buy the site, and I agreed.
The site generated up to 20k readers a month (and more).
On Google Analytics, it showed that the site only started gaining traffic in July 2020. This meant that SEO takes more than six months to kick in.
Our link building efforts began as early as September 2019, but the site only started gaining significant traffic in July 2020. This was only after a solid 6 to 9 months of consistent work.
On the content end, I streamlined blog articles, combining them and making articles thicker. I also targeted lower competition, long tail keywords for each article. These combined strategies played a key role in driving a steady increase in traffic.
In conclusion, this SEO process has been one of trial, error, and persistence.
Starting with a niche local site, hiring an SEO agency, and transitioning to an international blog taught me that success in SEO remains hugely reliant on high quality link building. It also taught me lessons that go beyond SEO. It showed me that traffic isn’t everything.
Singapore SEO Case Study 2: ThreeLittlePigs.Pro
I purchased the site in July 2021. The goal was to provide SEO services to small businesses in Singapore, do digital marketing, lead generation, and all that usual stuff as a digital marketing agency.
I did link building from September 2021 to March 2022. I left the site inactive for a couple of years because life got in the way. I only restarted activity in June 2024.
The bottom line: Google is not too favourable of inactive sites.
Domain Age
Our check was on 29th August 2024. Threelittlepigs.pro was registered on Monday, 5th of July 2021. It is 3 years, 1 month and 24 days or 1,151 days old.
Site Inactivity
The site was registered on 5th July 2021 and was generally inactive until September 2021. I started to build some backlinks using the Skyscraper method and did some guest posts towards the end of 2021. However, life got in the way and I left it inactive till June 2024.
Yes I know, I am not a perfect SEO… neither is anyone.
Link Building Efforts in 2021 and 2022
| Month | Number of Backlinks |
|---|---|
| September 2021 | 4 |
| October 2021 | 1 |
| December 2021 | 8 |
| January 2022 | 1 |
| February 2022 | 2 |
| March 2022 | 2 |
| Total | 18 |
Link Building Efforts in 2023
Life got in the way. Nil.
Link Building Efforts in 2024
So much has changed in just a couple of years. I learned to implement AI in my content creation, backlinks prospecting, and link vetting processes. Not to mention that Google also implemented the September 2023 Helpful Content Update that crushed many small and independent publishers.
Link building ThreeLittlePigs.Pro data
I started link building again from June 2024:
| Month | Number of Backlinks |
|---|---|
| June 2024 | 2 |
| July 2024 | 6 |
| August 2024 | 8 |
| September 2024 | 6 |
| October 2024 | To be Confirmed! |
| November 2024 | To be Confirmed! |
| Total Year to Date | To be Confirmed! |
Getting Stuck in Google’s Sandbox
I suspected we got stuck in Google’s sandbox from our inactivity. The initial link building did not take off. You cannot really help it much but stay continually focused on three aspects: content quality, building better quality backlinks, and technical SEO in hopes of getting out of the sandbox.
Content Quality
Google has taken what some say is an extremely tougher stance on people first, high quality content. Google’s Core Updates in 2024 affected many independent publishers, and the entire affiliate SEO industry crumbled. Hubspot lost 80% of their SEO traffic because many of their articles had no connection to their core CRM platform.
I started writing on legal marketing case studies and law firm marketing strategies specific to the Singapore industry.
High Quality Backlinks
Rand Fishkin from Moz suggested that relying solely on acquiring lower quality links from SEO specific directories, article submission sites, reciprocal links, dofollow blog comments, and forum signature links could potentially extend your time in the sandbox.
The backlinks we were acquiring were high quality by my standards. So… no change to this.
Technical SEO
The usuals: make sure your site is technically optimised for speed, mobile friendliness, and has a clear URL structure. Then implement on page SEO practices like using the right heading tags, alt texts, and so on.
I added an author box for EEAT signals but that is about it.
Link Building Results in 2024
Our site eventually got recognised by Google and got out of the sandbox.
Our site ranked on pages 3 to 5 within 4 months of link building efforts on Google. We were beyond page 100 before that!
I also want to point out that our domain is ThreeLittlePigs.Pro, not ThreeLittlePigs.sg, which might have given us an extra localised ranking signal boost. The goal is to demonstrate ranking for brands and not to abuse loopholes in Google’s current algorithm that may prioritise exact match domains.
Less than half a year in, our agency even got our first ever SEO lead!
ThreeLittlePigs.Pro Local SEO Results
Keywords rankings wise, our legal marketing agency got ranked for “law firm marketing” in the local maps pack, a keyword with around 100+ search volume.
“Law firm marketing” has a search volume of 170 and a SEMrush keyword difficulty score of 30 (data as of February 2025). Our site is also ranked for “marketing agency for lawyers” and “legal marketing agency” on the traditional SEO results on Google.Com.Sg.
Were We in Google’s Sandbox?
The SEO community generally agrees that it takes 4 to 6 months on average for noticeable improvements in a website’s keyword rankings and organic traffic. This may correlate to the notion of a Google sandbox. To second this, Ahrefs conducted a study on over 2 million keywords. They found that only 5.7% of newly published pages make it to the top 10 results on Google in one year.
Whilst Google Sandbox remains an unofficial concept, the hypothesis can be viewed as informally valid. Many new and inactive sites experience a delay in ranking.
This could be Google’s caution with new sites. Or simply a lack of authority signals or social and brand signals. An article published by Moz argued that Google has cranked up the authority weightage on branded terms in their helpful content update. They argued that the update is not solely about content quality but rather about the ratio of branded search volume to link signals.
The recent Google helpful content algorithm updates affected many small publishers, especially affiliate sites.
This also means that doing SEO and link building in isolation and not having your brand mentioned in other areas of the internet may negatively affect your brand ranking signals.
Threelittlepigs.Pro isn’t really big on social media. There are not many likes or follows on our social media. It is said that social signals may be one of the factors that can help you escape the sandbox. However, for basic social signals, I got our agency’s Facebook profile, Instagram profile and LinkedIn company page up.
Conclusion on My SEO Case Studies
Oh, the years spent staring into the SEO black box! Today, the approach is to focus on truly original content, acquiring high quality backlinks and maintaining user experience. The cliche is true, but Google is getting really good at recognising original content. Yes, not your A.I. spun ones.
