So I am sharing with you a pure white hat SEO case study I did not purchase links, outreach for links, no guest posts, or anything. All links that were acquired were done so naturally by people simply linking to the website.
Also, this was in the security industry which the competition are using heavy Black Hat SEO tactics such as fake reviews, link farms, PBN's, almost all use spammy tactics as well.
Since I am heavily involved in this industry I will be discussing this tactic as if it were a handyman.
This case study was done over the course of 16 months:
First and foremost all the content was hand written by myself or a close team member and we started off with our primary keywords/phrases such as page/posts Handyman, Handyman Near Me, and other specific categories or topics about handyman work. These became our primary pages. We then created blog posts about different easier to achieve keywords such as "How a handyman can save you thousands" "Are handyman services cheaper than hiring an electrician" "Can handyman companies work on plumbing?" etc.. from those pages we then inner linked to our primary pages. We had some articles that were relevant to May things that happen around that time of year which you can see our uptick which is related to people purchasing homes around this time of year.
As time went on we noticed links coming in and we never disavowed any of them as I do not believe in using a tool that was built to remove spammy links you built. We did not build them and therefore I wasn't worried about them and usually don't. Rarely are they an issue I have seen manual penalties before but wasn't in the picture when they occurred so I have to assume they built them or a previous SEO company.
So that's pretty much it, really high quality content and focused on specific things that people were looking for and inner linking to primary pages and with our high quality content people linked to us.