Link Gap Audit for Health and Food Category Leaders

The list you get back is shorter than the one you are expecting. A raw intersect of three wellness competitors in Ahrefs and Majestic typically returns somewhere between 400 and 900 referring domains you do not have. Strip the syndication copies, the expired-domain networks, the directory sludge, the sites that link to every brand in the category for a fee, and the publications that will not link to a commercial domain under any circumstances, and what reaches you is usually under sixty. Each of those rows says who to approach, with what, and why they would say yes. What arrives: A decision document, not a spreadsheet export with a summary tab. Sixty or so named opportunities, each with the competitor page that earned the link, the reason it was earned, the named editor or writer involved, and the specific asset you would need before an approach is worth making. Roughly a third of those assets usually do not exist yet on your site, and the document says which ones to build first and what it costs you to skip them. How the gap is actually computed: We pull from Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush together, because their crawl overlap in health publishing is worse than any of them advertise, and we reconcile against your own Search Console links report. Then we look at every candidate domain by hand. That is the slow part and it is the part being paid for. A domain rating tells you nothing about whether a site's editor is a person, whether its health content carries a review byline, or whether it sold its links section to a broker in 2023. Why most gap reports are wrong: They compare you to the competitor set you named rather than the competitor set the SERP shows. In health and food those diverge badly: your real link competitors are often a publisher, a university health centre and a retailer, none of which are on your board deck. They also count links a competitor earned through something you cannot replicate, such as a sponsorship, an acquisition or a founder's alumni network, and present it as a gap you can close. We mark those unavailable and take them off the total, which makes the number smaller and the plan honest. Scope boundaries: This is an audit. We do not do outreach inside it, we do not write the assets, and we do not disavow anything. There is no ongoing tracking dashboard. It is a decision you can act on with your own team or take to another agency, and we have no objection to the second, which is why the document names publications rather than hiding them behind a portal. Also excluded: Toxic link cleanup, which is a different piece of work and, for most brands who ask, an unnecessary one. Penalty diagnosis. Anchor text distribution scoring against an arbitrary ideal ratio, which is a metric invented by tool vendors. If we find a genuine problem in your existing profile while working, you get told inside the audit at no additional cost, but it is not what you are commissioning. Not for you if: You want a number for a board slide. The finding will usually be that a competitor's advantage came from two assets and a decade of relationships rather than from volume, and that is not a slide that plays well. Also wrong if you have already decided to buy links and want justification, because the document will not provide it, or if your site has under a hundred referring domains, at which point a gap analysis is premature and you should be building the first citable thing on your domain instead. Timing and access: Two weeks from the point we have read access to Search Console and Analytics and a named competitor list. We will add to that list ourselves from live SERP data before starting, and we will tell you which of your named competitors were not actually competing with you.