We are asked all the time how much other clients see their rankings improve after EDU links are added to their link profile. It’s usually hard to quantify, since people building links like these are often doing other link building and SEO work.  But with this client, he did no other link building, this was his first foray into paid links.  His case study:

He bought 5 pages, and put 3 keywords on each page. These were not the most competitive words, 3 words long, and had California in the anchor text (since he only sells to people within his state). Because they were not too competitive, we recommended 5 pages to start, and if he likes the results, can run more pages without ‘California’.  The results, only 2 weeks later, are that one keyword stayed the same, one keyword went from #10 to #4, and one keyword went from #7 to #1! As these links season, we expect it will sneak up a little more.

We routinely do hear back from clients that their rankings are moving up, some of them amazingly quickly, within a few days.  But this case with no other SEO work done, it’s nice to have some concrete numbers.