Case Study · Solo Campaign
UK Travel Brand: Three-Site Portfolio
A solo off-page engagement across a UK travel brand's three sister properties. I owned link building brand-wide and briefed the content side, growing authority and referring domains across all three sites with every placement vetted to the client's required Domain Rating floor of DR 15+.
The challenge
The client was a UK travel brand running three sister sites: an established flagship plus two newer properties. The flagship carried brand recognition, but the off-page picture was thin across all three. Going in, the earned referring-domain base was close to bare. The flagship had just 3 referring domains. The mid site had 14, and most were negligible, at a median authority score of 2. The newest site had none at all. So this was not a defense or a cleanup. It was building a clean, editorial referring-domain profile across three linked sites from almost nothing, and doing it without the shortcut a sister-site setup invites: pointing the properties at each other and calling that authority. Doing real outside link building while refusing that shortcut was the core of the problem.
A solo engagement, assigned and monitored by a UK-based SEO consultant who held the client relationship.
The plan
The approach stayed narrow on purpose: vet every prospect to the DR 15+ floor so nothing low-value diluted a base this thin, keep acquisition varied so each profile read as earned rather than bulk-built, and give the newest site's blank slate the most attention while lifting the other two off their weak starts.
What I did
I earned referring domains through four channels: directory and citation placements, guest-post outreach, and HARO-style expert-insight and roundup contributions, each vetted to the DR 15+ floor in Ahrefs before I pursued it. For pages that needed to rank, I also briefed the writer, target topic, meta title and description, keywords, and internal linking, so new content was built to use the authority the links brought.
Because these are sister sites, I stripped out every link they made to each other before reporting, cross-links between company-owned domains are not earned authority, and deduplicated referring domains across the three, so a directory listing all three counts once, not three times.
Property 1: Established flagship
The oldest domain, already carrying authority when the engagement began.
Traffic +77% (1,053 to 1,868/mo) · DR ~22 to ~26 · 3 to 45 referring domains · 68 live backlinks. Already an established domain, so gains showed up more in traffic than in raw Domain Rating. Total keyword count held steady while priority target keywords were driven into the top 1 to 3, concentrating the gains in positions that convert.
Property 2: Biggest mover
A newer property where the off-page build translated into the strongest growth.
Traffic +255% (315 to 1,119/mo) · DR 11 to 16 · 14 to 44 referring domains · 173 live backlinks. The strongest result of the three: a higher-quality earned link profile paired with real keyword growth. Tracked keywords rose 31% and top-3 rankings doubled.
Property 3: Newest site, authority focus
The smallest, newest property, where the work was foundational authority-building.
DR 9 to 16 · 0 to 8 referring domains · 5 live backlinks. The largest Domain Rating lift of the three, nearly doubling authority on a site starting from a low base. Organic traffic on this smaller property stayed volatile and never set a clear trend, including a one-off July spike that I do not treat as a result. The goal here was the foundational backlink profile, and the DR growth reflects that.
What I learned
Three lessons. Authority does not translate evenly: the same playbook produced a 255% traffic lift on one property and flat, noisy traffic on another, because site age, size, and content readiness matter as much as links. Small sites give unreliable traffic estimates, so on those I lead with Domain Rating and referring domains, not tool-estimated traffic. And pairing links with content briefs mattered: the property built around target keywords and internal linking moved the most.
Client anonymized under NDA. Referring domains are deduplicated and exclude cross-links between the sister sites; every link met the client's DR 15+ floor. Traffic is tool-estimated organic (one one-off anomaly not counted); Domain Rating is approximate Ahrefs DR.