Review competitor backlink analysis before you size the bundle
A rival's link profile tells you where the bar sits. It does not tell you what to buy, and the difference is where resellers go wrong.
Use a rival's profile to size a bundle, not to copy it. Copying a link you cannot see the reason for is how a quote turns into a guess.
What a rival's report can honestly tell you
Export the competitor's referring domains from Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic. Read the list, not the total. Three hundred referring domains that are mostly scraped directories say little; forty from real publications in the niche say a lot.
Count how many of those domains look like places you could also reach. Many will not be. In our catalogue you can filter by niche and language, so you can see whether comparable donors exist and what they cost per row, which gives you a floor for the client's spend. The rest of the gap is content and site quality, which links alone cannot close.
Date every export. A competitor profile in Ahrefs changes from week to week as links appear and vanish, and a number you quoted in October may look wrong in December. Writing the export date on the quote protects you from a client who re-runs the report on their own.
Finish with the client's own page. If the page that should rank is thin, slow or not indexed in Search Console, no bundle will fix it. Say so before you take the money. Then use the scorecard to choose donors, and price the work with the shelf labels so the client sees one number.
A practical note on tools. Ahrefs, Semrush and Majestic each run their own crawler and each sees a different slice of the web, so two reports on the same rival will not agree. That is expected. Use one tool consistently for a given client and write its name on the quote. Switching halfway makes the numbers meaningless.
There is also the question of intent. Ask why. A rival may have earned its links through a study, a tool or a press mention, and none of that can be bought from a catalogue. Look at what sits on each linked page before you decide it is a gap you can fill with placements. Sometimes the honest quote is a smaller bundle plus advice to publish something worth citing.
The review, in order
- Pick the three rivals that currently show for the client's main query in Google.
- Export referring domains from one tool and note the date; tools disagree.
- Sort out junk: scraped lists, forums spam, unrelated languages.
- Count credible donors per competitor and note what niche they sit in.
- Check each competitor's most linked page, because that is what earned the links.
- Match comparable donors in our catalogue and add their row prices.
Clerk's rule of thumb
Size the first bundle at half the gap, not all of it
If rivals show forty credible donors and your client shows ten, do not quote thirty at once. Quote ten to fifteen over a quarter, check what the client's pages do in Search Console, and then decide the next step.
- We offer no detox or disavow tool; Search Console has a disavow file for that job.
- A rival's old links may be gone by the time you read the report.
- Never quote the number of links a competitor has as a target.
Example read-out (hypothetical numbers)
| Competitor | Referring domains | Credible after cleaning | Suggested read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rival A | 310 | 40 | Strong niche press; study their top page |
| Rival B | 95 | 22 | Local mentions; a modest bundle can match |
| Rival C | 1,200 | 30 | Mostly scraped; ignore the headline total |