Build links to the right pages: A link opportunity analysis

Everyone loves learning a new link building tactic but people often forget to do a link opportunity analysis.

SEOs, link builders, and site owners obsess over getting links but don’t actually know where to send them once they secure a guest post or link insert. 

We all know backlinks to our homepage and informational articles help increase our site’s overall domain authority, but we want our money pages to rank. 

You know, those pages that will actually drive revenue, not just traffic—if they rank. 

For e-commerce, this would be category and product pages.

For SaaS, this would be solution and landing pages. 

For blogs, this would be all your “review” and “best of” content. 

Most people blindly build backlinks to these pages without considering their competitors.

You keep hitting your money pages with link after link after link. But as I’ve said previously, you can’t keep using the link building hammer to make a page rank. 

Yes, you want to have more backlinks than your competitors. But more often than not, there might actually be a better opportunity on your site that you’re unaware of.

So, don’t go blindly building links to pages on your site. Do a bit of analysis in the beginning to figure out what pages you want to focus on and, if they rank, what pages will bring us the quickest ROI.

Step one: gather a list of your money pages

First things first, click here to get my link opportunity analysis spreadsheet. Free of charge.

Simply make a copy of it in your Google Drive or re-create it in whatever spreadsheet tool you use.

Just please, don’t ask for permission to edit it. LOL . . . I will not grant you access. 

Let’s open it up and follow along.

Now, you want to figure out what pages on your site (or your clients’) will make the most money if they rank.

For this article, I’ll take an e-commerce category page as an example.

List your money pages within the spreadsheet. In addition, insert their target keywords and their current positions.

Optional: I also add a direct link to the page’s Ahrefs KW tab because I’ve found that building links will not just help the page rank higher for its given keyword but it also starts ranking for additional keywords.

For instance, the page in the image above targeting the keyword “leggings” might also start ranking for “pink leggings” or “green leggings” once you build some backlinks to it. 

Step two: input your competitors

Now you want to search your target keyword and see who is outranking you.

Simply plug your target keyword for each page into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and note down anyone ranking above you in the “Comp Url” columns.

In this instance, imagine you’re Ryderwear. Ryderwear is ranking number three for the keyword “leggings,” so I’d input the pages from lululemon and No nonsense into the spreadsheet.

Next you want to fill in the following info:

• Current est. traffic (your page)

• Potential est. traffic (of number one ranking competitor)

• Potential traffic gain (autocalculated)

• Current est. value (your page)

• Potential est. traffic value (of number one ranking competitor)

• Potential revenue increase (autocalculated) 

What you’re trying to uncover here is how much traffic and revenue your pages are currently bringing in and if you were to rank number one, how much of an increase would you see? 

As you can see from the image above, if Ryderwear were to rank number one for the keyword “leggings,” traffic would increase from 33,343 per month to 65,569.

And revenue would increase from $49,500 per month to $65,900.

Note: I am using Ahrefs estimates here. To get more granular, use Google Search Console and Google Analytics data.

Step three: review backlinks

Now you’re going to want to review the number of backlinks you have as well as those each competitor has.

One caveat — I only look at backlinks that meet the following criteria:

• Dofollow

• DR > 20

• Domain traffic > 1,000

Doing so weeds out a ton of noise. For instance, if you look at the keyword “scrunch butt leggings” that Ryderwear is trying to rank for, you can see that GymShark (ranking number one) has 28 backlinks and Ryderwear has 54.

One might think “Oh, I have more links pointing to my page and we’re just losing because GymShark has a higher domain authority.” 

But once you apply the DR and traffic filters from the backlinks report for each page, you find that neither page actually has any decent backlinks going to it.

It’s just a ton of spam/scraper sites. Now, one could conclude that Ryderwear might actually only need one or two high-quality links to start outranking GymShark for this query.

Side note: Feel free to adjust DR and traffic metrics according to your standards. I’ve just found DR 20+ and domain traffic 1,000+ to work well. 

Do this for each page outranking you and you’ll quickly start to see how many links you should try to build for each page to close the link gap.

Step four: decide where to spend your resources

As I’ve mentioned time and time again in this newsletter, we all have limited resources and figuring out where to deploy them is always a struggle. 

This analysis is supposed to help with that decision-making process because the correct decision is not always as direct as it seems.

Let’s take the two keywords from Ryderwear as examples.

Keyword: leggings

In this particular instance, lululemon and No nonsense are ranking above Ryderwear. But the backlink count doesn’t necessarily make sense.

• lululemon backlinks: 28

• No nonsense backlinks: 41

• Ryderwear: 33

When I see this, I always dive deeper into the backlinks. One thing I noticed was that pages with backlinks that point to lululemon have traffic:

Not only does the domain have traffic but the individual pages do as well. I’m not sure if this is the silver bullet, but it’s 100% something I would test. 

(hints why I keep telling you all to write guest posts that rank).

That said, you also have to look at every other potential reason, outside of backlinks.

• What is its overall domain authority vs. yours?

• How many internal links point to this lululemon page?

• What is the anchor text of the backlinks pointing to this page?

• What are the internal anchor texts pointing to this page?

• Is this page better keyword-optimized than yours?

• How many pages/articles cover “leggings” in some sense?

• And so on

This backlinks analysis doesn’t always have an answer, but it can point you and your team in the right direction.

Keyword: scrunch butt leggings

For the keyword scrunch butt leggings (I had no idea wtf these even were) you can see that GymShark and Alphalete outrank Ryderwear. 

As mentioned above, from a bird’s-eye view, this doesn’t make sense. Ryderwear has 54 backlinks while GymShark (number one) has 28.

Once you open up the backlinks tab and apply the appropriate filters, you find that none of your sites actually have any decent backlinks. 

All the top-ranking pages just have a bunch of scrapers, and I reckon that one to two links to Ryderwear’s page just might push it to the number one slot. 

Decision-making

Now, after you’ve done this analysis for each page, it’s time to start making decisions. As you can see, the answer isn’t always black in white. I believe that the world is painted in shades of gray, and this is especially true within business.

Best you can do is gather data and make informed decisions. Trust me, they won’t be perfect. This is where I find Jeff Bezos' 70% rule extremely helpful.

Here are the three main data points you should look at:

1. How many links you think you need to build to rank number one

2. The cost to build those links

3. The potential revenue increase for doing so

In the case of “leggings,” you could see a potential revenue increase of $16,400 per month if you overtake lululemon. But I’m not too confident that building links to this page will help. You already have more backlinks than lululemon. 

I would probably rate this at a confidence level of five out of ten. And when building links, I would test getting backlinks on pages that get traffic. Again, not just high domain level traffic, but the actual page itself that links back to Ryderwear. 

In the case of “scrunch butt leggings” you could see a potential revenue increase of $6,100 per month. 

It’s not as much as taking over “leggings,” but I’m much more confident in this. Call it an eight out of ten.

None of the top-ranking pages for this query have a single quality backlink, so you should be able to outrank lululemon with just one or two backlinks.

Note: Once I’ve built these links, I would transition to another page. You only need one or two links for this query, so don’t keep hammering it. Test your hypothesis, see if it works, and then readjust and prioritize.

Your Next Steps

Reading articles and theory is cool, but you know what will actually move the needle for your business?

Action. Don’t just read this. 

Implement it or send it to a team member.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Gather a list of all your money pages.
   

2. Find competitor pages that are outranking them.
   

3. Figure out the potential traffic and revenue increase if you start ranking number one.
   

4. Review your backlinks and your competitors.
   

5. Review all the data and make informed, strategic decisions that will bring in the most revenue.
   

6. Rinse and repeat every month.

And that, my friends, is how to figure out what pages on your site need links.

Don’t waste link juice sending backlinks to pages that don’t need them. 

Do a bit of analysis first and be strategic in your decision-making.

See you next week and, as always, hit me with any questions you may have.

All you have to do is hit “Reply.”

Much love ✌️