Challenge
Okara.ai entered a highly competitive AI tools market, competing for commercial keywords dominated by well-established brands and high-DR domains. The challenge was to rank for bottom-of-funnel queries, searches with real buyer intent like “private ai chat,” “reddit agent,” and “AI CMO”. Building domain authority from scratch required a targeted link-building strategy tied directly to the pages targeting these commercial terms.
Objectives
- Identified high-intent commercial keywords in the AI tools niche with achievable KD scores and mapped them to dedicated landing pages.
- Built a link acquisition program focused exclusively on target pages for commercial queries, every link pointed at a page with a ranking objective.
- Created content specifically optimized for bottom-of-funnel intent: comparison, alternative, and feature-specific pages for AI privacy, agentic tools, and marketing AI use cases.
- Monitored new referring domains per target page to ensure link velocity tracked against ranking improvement, closing the loop between link building and organic outcomes.
- Tracked keyword position changes weekly for commercial terms, using SERP movement to prioritize the next round of outreach and content refreshes.
Keyword Ranking Wins
| Keyword | Position | Monthly searches | Intent |
| private ai | #1 | 14,800 | Commercial |
| private ai chat | #2 | 4,400 | Commercial |
| reddit agent | #1 | 2,900 | Commercial |
| ai cmo | #2 | 1,600 | Commercial |
| private ai model | #3 | 1,200 | Commercial |
| ai for private use | #4 | 880 | Commercial |
| reddit marketing agent | #1 | 590 | Commercial |
| private llm | #3 | 480 | Informational |
Impact
Link building focused on commercial pages drove measurable ranking improvements across the highest-intent queries in the AI tools niche. Pages where new referring domains were acquired consistently climbed into page-one positions, with the “private ai” cluster now owning the top of the SERP.