Intergastro is a website I’ve been looking at for a while.
They experienced strong growth during the last year and from what I know, it’s all on a tight budget. So I thought it’s time to dig in to find what they did to get there.
What I found was not surprising but also a great reminder that when basics are done correctly, it’s more than enough.
Page Speed:
As you can see from the screenshot, their speed performance is incredible.
And you know when the biggest improvement happened?
Cumulative Layout Shift in the last year, which is exactly when their jump in traffic began.
Internal linking
The internal linking at Intergastro is perfect. The navigation is perfectly indexable and very well structured to ensure every important category is crawled, indexed, and easily reachable for Google.
Each page is linked to each other through proper link usage.
Hubpages
The Hubpages they’ve set up are examples of simplicity that works. It interlinks everything it has to.
Simple but it works.
Branding pages
Brand pages are one of the keys to their success.
It’s one of the fastest-growing directories in 2020-2021.
They help them rank for hundreds of brands that don’t really have a strong search presence but still get a lot of searches.
So it’s the perfect mixture of keywords with quite a bit of search and a strong buying intent + low competition.
Topical Authority
One of the things I didn’t expect to see was the topical authority tactic that INTEGASTRO employs.
They have created “topical authority” around Eis which helps them rank easily for a lot of terms around it.
It creates a very efficient internal linking and it increases authority in the eyes of Google. The efficient link on the navbar only helps them push even higher internal linking power to these pages.
Result?
And that’s probably just the beginning of it.
No link building with a caveat
Another interesting fact is that they’ve done little to none link building which proofs that by focusing on that sometimes you can achieve great results without evening doing much of link building.
Although they’ve skipped the part with the link-building, they’ve done one very smart thing that seems to have worked pretty well.
They’ve interlinked each website they have as a “country-language” option. This helps them basically use each website as a powerful link that always sits on the homepage and helps power each other.
If you go back to WebArchive you can see the moment they added this button, it resulted in a very nice uptick in traffic.
All team effort
When you go back and see the beginning of their SEO success you realize something interesting.
Their website was god awful up until 3 years ago
It seems like about 2 years ago they began investing in SEO, running ads, and redesigned the site.
It has worked.