Petcan, Insect Pet Food Startup, Gains 12,000 Keywords in 7 Months in 6 Unique Languages with only 25 Backlinks!

---

About Petcan

Petcan is an innovative pet food-based startup using SEO as their main growth channel. The insect pet food industry is extremely small, so to quickly reach a critical audience level, the NUOPTIMA team decided to localise instantly. 

Petcan’s site is still growing even though we stopped writing content in January and built 25 backlinks to the site. This is a masterclass in how to gain topical authority quickly and cost-effectively.

Team

Action Plan

The plan for Petcan was to gain as much topical authority in the pet space as quickly as possible. We targeted low competition keywords across 6 different languages and leveraged our in house team of international writers to produce SEO-optimised pieces.

Content Writing

The project began in September 2021, and we stopped writing in January 2022 to give Google time to catch up with our ferocious publishing velocity. It quickly became apparent that we had serviced Google’s desire for high-quality content exceptionally well and, in the last 3 months, have seen the site grow 1,700% without a single extra word of content. 

To make sure Google correctly indexed our site, it had to be set up for multi-language. To set up a site for multiple languages correctly includes: 

• Hreflang tags
• Localised meta tags
• Ensuring zero duplicates from the main language
• Google search console configuration for each language
• Localised keyword and content research for each geography

You can see some example blog pieces we wrote in the pet niche below.

Backlinks

We aimed to target low competition words, which meant we only needed a small number of backlinks to kick start the domain. After placing the initial backlinks, we paused publishing to allow Google to index the site. 

When Petcan is ready to target more competitive keywords, building localised backlinks in relevant geographical locations will be imperative. This will further cement its place as an authority in the eyes of Google.  

Interestingly, even though NUOPTIMA only placed 25 backlinks, Petcan now has 82 referring domains. This is because publishers have naturally linked to Petcan as they view it as an authority. That’s 57 free backlinks because the content quality is so high!