A lot has changed over the last decade when it comes to link competition.
In most niches your competitors are building more good links and less ‘easy’ ones than they did in the past.
The days when you could just pop a page up on a new site, build 50 dubious links to it, and immediately start seeing cash coming in are largely gone in mainstream niches.
As our brand has become better known, and we’ve started to get leads from a broader audience, I’ve seen more and more enquiries from site owners looking to do something like buy five links and ‘see what happens’.
In the past that wasn’t a bad idea - usually competitors didn’t have many good links anyway, and things moved quickly on a page-level basis in the SERPS.
However, these days, the chances are that by the time you assess the impact, your competitors have added dozens of links to their sites and continued to move ahead.
Most of the time I discourage those potential clients from ordering such a small test right away, and instead go through what I’m about to share here - a good strategy to work out how far behind they really are and how many links they need to build to get back in the game.
If you don’t have the time to build these yourself or the budget to outsource, then you may wish to reconsider your strategy in the niche you’re targeting.
Knowing What Links ‘Really’ Count
Whether you’re scanning a competitor’s links or looking at a link report from a linkbuilding agency it’s important to have a strong idea of what a good link looks like.
This is how you assess how far behind you are, and how much the work you just bought has closed the gap. Assessing new links by building them slowly and waiting months just lets your competitors keep moving ahead of you.
It’s a fool’s errand to build 5 links a month to your site if most of your competitors are picking up 10 or 20. At best it’s a recipe for anemic growth, at worst you’ll never get anywhere before you quit.
Better links are harder to get, editorially given by a site (not bribed or hacked), and not just anyone can get one.
Here are some warning signs a link may not be powerful:
Don’t take any of this to mean that you shouldn’t acquire the ‘bedrock’ type links that all sites in your niche have.
For example, industry associations and directories, social profiles, active memberships in relevant forums and communities. Some of these will have mixed SEO value, often greater than 0, and often sending direct traffic too.
However, when you’re looking at a competitor’s list of 1,000 links to assess an equivalent value in ‘good links’ allocating most of these lower-quality or easier-to-obtain links with a value in the 0-0.3 range gives you a more realistic total to work with as your target to beat.
Assessing Your Competitor’s ‘Lead’
I’ll circle back to discussing how to pick the correct competitors to analyse but I wanted to quickly let you see how easily you can break a list down first.
To avoid any panic before we get to that - you won’t need do this for every ‘competitor’ that ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Some will obviously be out of reach initially/pointless to analyze during the early years of your site (e.g. huge DA90 authority sites that rank for a few of your terms).
My favourite strategy is to jump onto Ahrefs or Majestic and grab all their live backlinks (setting one link per domain and dofollow only).
If a site has 0-200 links I might look at them all and score them 0-1 on value. Where 1 is reserved only for high authority, editorially given links and most other things fall in the 0-0.3 range most of the time with the occasional good but not perfect link getting a high score 0.75+.
It’s very rare you see a competitor doing purely good work. If you do find one doing this then naturally they’re going