How To Find Link Building Opportunities From Competitors

I’m presenting you a case study about JuGo Graphic Design, a freelancer willing to understand how his local competitors are using SEO to generate leads. Just apply the learning to your business.

In today’s issue:

Julien is the freelance graphic designer behind JuGo.

Julien find leads by cold emailing businesses to provide them with graphic design services. He is also creating an inbound lead generation funnel on X.

Similarly to many freelancers, Julien did not pay attention to his competitors while managing his business. And now that he wants to use SEO, he realizes that knowing his market is essential to understand who he is facing.

When I asked him about industry competitors, he realized that he did not know any of them. And of course, he did not know his SEO competitors neither.

Julien being a freelance graphic designer, we can assume that his direct industry competitors are other freelance graphic designers and small graphic design agencies serving solo and small businesses.

Note that while his X account and one of his websites are in English and used to serve clients worldwide, we are currently working on his French website to improve his ranking locally.

A simple Google SERP for a primary local keyword will help to find his main competitors.

Julien lives in a city called “Vitrolles”, which is near the famous French city of “Marseille”. Julien is also a “graphiste”, literally “graphic designer”.

When businesses search for a graphic designer in these places, they would logically type “graphiste vitrolles” or "graphiste marseille”. The customer intent for both keywords is clearly commercial.

Using Semrush Keyword Overview, you can see that the monthly search volume is 20 (small but realistic) for “graphiste vitrolles” and 390 (significant enough) for “graphiste marseille”.

Julien wants to be the reference graphic designer in his city. As such, we looked at the SERP results for the keyword “graphiste vitrolles”.

Here are the results:

Note that we've been able to position Julien on the first page of Google SERP by simply asking Julien to register himself on a few relevant platforms with a strong DA/DR.

What matters for your business is to be seen by your leads, not to rank your website in itself. As such, being present on platforms will not only increase your website authority, but also make your profiles from these platforms visible in rankings.

If you look at the results pages, you will see that Julien registered on the following online directories:

Because this is an easy keyword to rank for, even if our SEO work has not really started yet, Julien is already well visible with the application of our advice. Of course, the goal is to rank him and his website #1 for this keyword and others, but this is a topic for another newsletter.

By looking again at Google's results, you can discover that:

1.Many of JuGo's SEO competitors for the keyword “graphiste vitrolles” are online directories and platforms. Not just businesses.

2. The following online directories rank well. Julien should register on these ones:

3. His direct key industry competitors are “Lg Créa'com” and “Studio 13 Com” because they are present on Google Map in page 1.

4. The first industry competitor's website is ranked at the end of page 2, called “Icone Internet”. It seems that the websites of the graphic designers are not SEO-optimized. “Studio 13 Com” is ranked in page 3 and “Lg Créa'com” is nowhere to be seen.

As we are working on an off-page SEO analysis of JuGo's competitors, we build this datasheet comparing the off-page of JuGo to that of his 2 key competitors.

A few observations:

In conclusion, by conducting a quick audit with a Google search, you can already gain a lot of knowledge about yourself, your industry competitors, your SEO competitors, and you can find opportunities to be visible on page 1 and 2 of the SERPs.

In addition, you can leverage free tools like Ahrefs Website Authority Checker and Ahrefs Backlinks Checker, as well as Moz Link Explorer, to get fine-tuned data about your off-page SEO and that of your competitors. You can dig deeper by conducting a competitor off-page SEO audit to obtain the relevant backlinks used by your competitors and act upon them.

In JuGo's case, it seems the SEO of his industry competitors is not much better than his own. Reaching rank #1 on this keyword - and others - should not be difficult by creating locally-oriented content and adding backlinks.

In your case, well, let me know. Apply the content above or reach out, I'm here to help.