Link Building for a Large Educational Project: 36% Growth in Referring Domains and TOP Rankings

About the Project

An online platform for continuing professional education and retraining in the CIS market approached our team.

The project already had broad semantics and significant search visibility, so our main task was to strengthen pages that were already close to top positions and grow the backlink profile of a large content hub.

Objectives

• increase the number of high-quality referring domains
• strengthen articles and program pages with high growth potential
• move more queries into the upper part of the search results
• support commercial sections through informational content and internal linking
• develop the website’s visibility in AI-generated answers for informational queries

Our actions

The project was already ranking for a large number of queries, so the real question was which pages stood to gain the most from additional link equity.

We split the semantics into thematic clusters based on current rankings, flagging materials that were close to the TOP 10 separately from those already on the first page but not quite in the top positions yet.

Our link-building plan combined informational articles with educational program pages, since the blog does several jobs at once: it attracts broad informational demand, feeds internal linking, and helps pass link equity to commercial sections. That’s why we strengthened not just pages directly tied to the product, but also materials that could pull users into the funnel through broader queries.

For external promotion, our team leaned on outreach placements on resources related to education, careers, psychology, and self-development. Crowd marketing came into play in discussions where users were choosing a profession or educational program, or exploring related topics. Submissions and directories rounded out the backlink base and supported the overall domain profile.

We distributed anchors with the project’s maturity in mind, so URLs and branded mentions made up the majority, while thematic wording came in selectively, mainly where a specific article or educational area needed a boost in relevance.

Priorities shifted over the three months rather than staying fixed. As pages moved through the rankings, we tracked where link support was already paying off and which materials were heading into more promising search results, and shifted part of the budget toward pages that were closing in on the TOP 3 and TOP 1 faster than expected.

Our experts also kept an eye on the project’s AI visibility across several platforms, including Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, tracking both how often the website showed up in answers and how many pages picked up additional visibility in generative search results.

Results

Over three months of our work on the project, the number of referring domains climbed from 1,329 to 1,814. That’s 485 new domains, or a 36.5% jump in the backlink profile.

The total number of queries in the TOP 20 grew from 17,230 to 18,058, adding 828 queries, or 4.8%. But the real momentum was in the upper part of the search results: queries in the TOP 3 rose from 4,280 to 5,544 (+1,264 queries).

Queries in the TOP 10 grew from 14,278 to 16,248 overall, up 1,970 queries, or 13.8%, while queries sitting in positions 11 to 20 dropped from 2,952 to 1,810. In other words, the growth mostly came from queries that were already ranking and simply moved higher.

The project’s AI visibility grew as well. At the time of measurement, the website was showing up in approximately 6.2 thousand answers across all tracked platforms, up by around 2.4 thousand. The Google ecosystem saw the most noticeable dynamics: AI Overviews recorded around 3.9 thousand answers (+1.1 thousand), and AI Mode reached 1.7 thousand (+834). Perplexity also grew, reaching 479 answers (+385), Gemini rose to 48 (+48), and Copilot reached 12 (+4). 

Conclusion

As a result of the work, the educational platform’s backlink profile grew by 36.5%, and queries in the TOP 3 jumped by 29.5%. The overall number of queries in the TOP 20 grew by just 4.8%, but the TOP 10 climbed 13.8%.

The project’s presence in generative search results grew too. The service recorded around 6.2 thousand appearances in AI-generated answers, driven mainly by growth in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. For a large educational project, these numbers reflect the chosen strategy well: we focused on selectively strengthening pages that already had accumulated visibility, working not just to expand reach but to improve ranking quality.