Competitor Link Gap Analysis with an Acquisition Plan

Run the intersection for a B2B software company and four to six hundred domains link to three or more of your competitors and not to you. Thirty to sixty of them are reachable, relevant and worth an approach. The remainder are directories, syndication copies, dead sites, agency client-list pages and the same conference recap republished eleven times. Handing over the raw four hundred is what this work usually amounts to, and it is why the file goes unopened after the first week. Who you get compared against: Not the three names on your battlecard. We build the set from who actually ranks for the queries that carry money, which for a fintech usually pulls in a bank's content hub and a media brand nobody internally thinks of as a competitor, and from who your buyers shortlist you against when you lose. Five to eight domains, agreed with you before anything runs, because an intersection is only as good as the set it intersects. What survives the filter: Out go domains with no organic traffic, domains that link to everyone in the category as a matter of format, links we can identify as paid placements, and anything in a market you do not sell into. Then we read what is left. A domain stays only if we can write one sentence explaining why that specific editor would link to you. Where we cannot write the sentence, the row comes out, and the count in your file drops. What each surviving row contains: The URL carrying the competitor's link and the context around it. The person to approach and where they are actually reachable. The thing of yours that would sit beside or replace what the competitor offered. And an honest read of the effort: an email, a piece of writing, or a dataset you do not currently have. About a fifth of rows in a typical file come back with that third answer, and we would rather you see it now than after a quarter of outreach. The part that matters more than the list: The analysis closes with a short read on why the gap exists at all. Sometimes a competitor ran a survey three years ago and has been living off the citations since. Sometimes they sponsor the conference and you do not. Sometimes they publish an integration directory and free tools and you publish a blog. That paragraph is worth more than the spreadsheet, and we write it first, then check whether the domain list supports it. Timeline and format: Fifteen working days from the agreed competitor set. A spreadsheet and a document, walked through in a ninety-minute session with the people who will act on it. No dashboard, no login, nothing that needs a subscription to keep reading. Not included: The outreach itself. This is analysis and it is priced as analysis; if you want the approaches run, that is a different engagement and a different conversation. We do not audit your existing profile here either, because a gap file says nothing about the quality of what you already hold. Who this is not for: Teams with no capacity to act inside a quarter. These files age badly: at six months a third of the contacts have moved on and a third of the pages have been rewritten. Companies whose real problem is that nothing on their site is worth linking to, which we will say on the first call, and which no amount of target research repairs.