Competitor link gap thesis for your money-page queries

You will not receive a list of every domain that links to three competitors and not to you. That export takes ten minutes in Ahrefs and most of it is noise: directories, aggregators, syndicated wire copies and sites that link to anyone. What you receive is a ranked argument about the thirty to sixty links actually holding your competitors' money positions, each with the reason they got it, the route and likely price of getting one like it, and a plain judgement on whether it is worth your budget. The method: We start from the queries that carry revenue, not from a domain comparison. Usually forty to eighty queries, agreed with you in the opening session. For each one we take the URLs holding the top ten and work at page level: which links point at that specific URL, when they arrived, what they arrived alongside, and whether the page's position survived a link being removed. A domain-level gap tells you a competitor is bigger than you. A page-level gap tells you what to do on Tuesday. Classification by route: Every gap link is sorted by how it could realistically be obtained: editorial, data citation, regulatory or licensing register, exchange and provider listing, sponsorship or event, community, partner and affiliate, and unbuyable. In gambling and digital assets the unbuyable share is large and it is the part that matters. Licence registers, regulator lists, exchange listings, aggregator integrations and data-provider citations account for a real portion of a mature competitor's advantage, and no link budget substitutes for a licence or an integration. Reading that share correctly is often the finding that changes the plan. What tends to come out: That two or three competitors each rest on a single relationship, and it is reproducible. That a fourth is strong on links you should not want and would not survive an enforcement round. That your own best pages are held up by fewer links than anyone assumed and are one removal away from a problem. We say which of these applies to you before we say anything about acquisition. The deliverable: A scored sheet, one row per opportunity, carrying route, estimated cost, expected difficulty, the desk or named person to approach where we know it, and a priority. Alongside it a written thesis of around twelve pages that argues the priorities rather than listing them, because the ranking is the part you will have to defend internally. Then a working session with your team, recorded, where we take the argument apart with the people who know your product better than we do. Not included: The outreach. This engagement ends with a plan you execute in-house, hand to your current agency, or bring back to us as a program. We do not bundle acquisition into analysis, because an analyst who will be paid to build the links has an interest in finding links to build. Also excluded: monthly refreshes, keyword research beyond the agreed query set, and content planning for your own site. Not for you if: The answer you need is that links are the reason you are not ranking. Sometimes they are. Frequently the finding is that a competitor ranks with fewer and weaker links because their page answers the query and yours does not, and when that is what the data says we write it down, send it with the invoice, and decline the link program that was meant to follow.