Link Gap Analysis That Ends in a Reachable List

A link intersect export is not a plan, and the difference is roughly a third of the rows. Across the last gap analyses we ran in igaming, about one link in three that a client lacked was unrepeatable at any sensible budget — shirt sponsorships, corporate acquisitions, regulator and trade-body citations, a journalist's personal history with a founder. Naming those and instructing you to stop chasing them is half of what you are paying for. What lands on your desk: One list, sorted by reachability, with a reason on every row. Each referring domain your named competitors hold and you do not falls into one of five buckets: buyable through an editor, pitchable with an angle you can actually produce, earnable with data you already hold, structural — you get it by being listed somewhere rather than by asking — or unreachable. Unreachable rows stay in the document with their reason attached, because otherwise somebody adds them back next quarter. How we choose the competitor set: You name up to four; expect us to change one. Clients name the operators they compete with commercially, while the SERP often shows an affiliate or comparison site holding the positions that matter. Each name is tested against your mapped queries, and anyone ranking on brand strength rather than links comes out of the set, because copying their profile teaches you nothing. The timing test: Gap exports treat every link as equal. We align each competitor's referring-domain first-seen dates against their ranking history on your mapped queries and mark the windows where acquisition preceded movement. This is correlation and it is labelled as correlation. What it does show reliably is which publication clusters a competitor built around before a page climbed, which is a far better brief than a list sorted by Domain Rating. Structural links, which most analyses miss: In gambling and regulated finance a real share of a competitor's standing comes from being listed rather than pitched: the Gambling Commission's public register of licensees, the FCA register, trade bodies, testing-laboratory and certification listings, responsible-gambling organisations, payment-provider directories. These are reached by satisfying a condition rather than by outreach, and they are usually the cheapest rows on the list. We check which you qualify for today and which need a compliance or licensing change first. Vertical specifics: For crypto we separate links earned by protocol documentation and developer citation from PR-driven coverage, because only one of those is repeatable by a marketing team. For banking and insurance we flag comparison and aggregator placements that are commercial deals rather than editorial, so you price them as media spend instead of briefing outreach against them and losing a quarter. Not included: Outreach execution. This ends at a target list with angles; placing them sits in the placement or programme service, and the deliverable marks plainly which rows we believe we can win and which we would decline to attempt. We do not produce a content plan for your blog, and we do not audit your own profile here. Who this is not for: Anyone who already has their target list and wants it validated — you will pay for a document that agrees with you. Anyone with fewer than three real competitors in the market, where the exercise has no signal to find. And anyone expecting estimated traffic value per link, which tools invent and we will not print.