Our SEO competitors are big agencies with a headcount of around 50 staff or more… I am a one-man founder taking them on from the bedroom of my HDB in Singapore!
How can I outperform these huge Singaporean SEO agencies when it comes to beating them in search engine results?
It is normal to feel intimidated by your competitors. You input their domain into SEMRush or Ahrefs, and you see they’ve accumulated tens of thousands of backlinks. Outperforming them in search engine results can seem like an impossible task.
Here is a case study. I put in one of my top competitors into SEMRush. At first glance, it seems like my competitor has 71,100 backlinks.
To beat them, that must mean I got to build 71,100 backlinks in 6 months? That amounts to more than 10,000 backlinks per month.
The truth is, your competitor does NOT have 71,000 backlinks. Let me explain how to get the real number.
Not all backlinks are created equal. Generally, you can ignore backlinks built through black or grey hat strategies. These include backlinks placed in the footer of other websites, on forums, or in blog comments.
There are also backlink service providers on Fiverr that offer spammy backlinks.
How to Budget for SEO Backlinks Even Before Starting on SEO
According to an Ahrefs study, the average backlink costs $83. Note that this is before factoring in your content costs if you’re providing a guest post in exchange for a backlink.
By examining your backlink gap with top competitors, you can project what it might actually cost for your site to rank in the top search results on Google.
If my competitor has 71,000 backlinks, does that mean I need to pay $83 x 71,000 = $5.8 million to outperform them in search engine results?
Fortunately, no.
This is because not all backlinks are created equal.
Here’s an example of spammy backlinks from my competitor. I’m sure Google devalues these backlinks, yet they are still counted by most backlink analysis software!
Using Majestic SEO Filter Relevant Sites
Depending on your SEO philosophy, you can narrow down the backlink gap based on certain criteria. At our SEO agency, I typically prioritize relevancy first, followed by organic traffic, and then domain rating or authority.
I believe that domain rating and authority are vanity metrics. While they are factors, they should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Key Issue: Relevancy
First, I use Majestic SEO to filter for relevancy with the source domain’s trust flow. Sometimes the filter can be a bit buggy; if so, you can download the entire Excel sheet and filter manually.
I use the following filters:
- It is a Live Link
- It is Do Follow
- It is a Text Link
- It is Non Sponsored
- It is In Content
- Language is in English
Make sure you are analyzing the Root Domain, and not the URL!
Looking for Relevancy Using Source Domain Topical Trust Flow
I use MajesticSEO software because it’s the only SEO backlink analysis out there that breaks down relevancy to a numerical form. To understand it in depth, you can read more about it here.
I filter the results by examining backlinks from sites with a source domain topical trust flow rating of 10 and above, ensuring they are directly or niche-related.
For example, web design and online marketing are niche-related. Similarly, small business services and online marketing are related. However, construction and web design are barely related.
You’ll likely be surprised at the number of irrelevant backlinks your competitor has.
Next, download your filtered competitor backlinks with the initial filters and refine them further using source domain topical trust flow. Majestic SEO assigns multiple topical trust flow categories to each website, meaning one website can have several categories.
For example:
- Small business
- Small business services
- Construction
I take the top three highest-scoring categories, check if their scores are above 10, and ensure they are niche-related.
This exercise should reduce the number of backlinks your competitors truly have.
Next, I’ll further filter the remaining results using traffic indicators.
Using SEMRush to Filter Organic Traffic
I then use SEMRush to filter by organic traffic, considering sites with fewer than 300 organic visits to be lower-quality.
You can adjust these numerical filters based on your SEO hypothesis. Sometimes, I’m okay with blogs that generate at least 100 organic visits if they have high-quality content or exceptional relevancy (source domain trust flow above 20).
Take the filtered results from the previous step in Excel and upload them into SEMRush’s bulk analysis. You can do this with Ahrefs as well.
With SEMRush’s bulk analysis, you can pull the traffic data for these sites and match them side-by-side in an Excel sheet.
Now, you might ask, what about domain authority or domain rating? Personally, I don’t focus on domain rating or authority, as I consider them vanity metrics. I prioritize traffic and relevancy, as many high domain authority or domain rating sites don’t generate any relevant traffic—or any traffic at all!
Final Filter: Excel Formulas to Filter Out Low Quality Backlinks
I’d like to remove sites that I consider spammy and low-quality backlinks, such as forum comments, blog comments, and directories. You can also hire a virtual assistant to manually identify scraper sites and backlink farms. Yes, that’ll be extra cost and time. There are some things that can only be done manually.
For now, I’ll use an excel formula to flag some of these low-quality sites.
=IF(
OR(
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“.xyz”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“.info”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“.tk”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“.top”, A1)),
LEN(A1) > 20,
SUMPRODUCT(–ISNUMBER(MID(A1, ROW(INDIRECT(“1:”&LEN(A1))), 1)*1)) > 3,
LEN(A1) – LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1, “-“, “”)) > 2,
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“forum”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“directory”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“thread”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“directories”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“listing”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“discuss”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“discussion”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“board”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“list”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“classifieds”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“bulletin”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“faq”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“announcement”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“archive”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“community”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“Q&A”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“support”, A1)),
ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“help”, A1))
),
“Flag”,
“Keep”
The great thing is that you can do most of the filtering manually in an excel sheet. You do it once, then train a virtual assistant to handle it, so you don’t have to do the mind-numbing work.
Your Final Backlink Gap
The entire filtering process can be done manually in an Excel sheet. In the end, my competitor’s backlink count drops from thousands to just 129.
Calculate Link Velocity Required
From here, things are straightforward.
In this case, my competitor has 129 real backlinks, which theoretically means I need to build 22 backlinks per month for six months to catch up.
The cost of it will be 129 x $83 divided by 6 = $1785 per month. Note that this amount covers only link-building costs, excluding content, outreach team, data research required to put everything together. Yes, good SEO isn’t cheap.
Conclusion
In our experience, link building is one of, if not the top ranking factors for reaching page one. However, it is important to note that this link gap analysis process is not a be-all, end-all solution.
Original, helpful content that fulfil the users query is another crucial factor. Other important technical SEO considerations such as interlinking, silo structure, topical authority, and basic on-page SEO.
The costs estimated in this article also do not include content writing expenses for guest posts or content on your own website. You got to calculate your total projected costs for link building to include these other costs.
Nonetheless, calculating your backlink gap provides a useful estimate of what it might take to rank on page one of Google.
