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A freelancer competing with a massive agency. How cant I compete with 2,500+ backlinks?
Posted by on June 25, 2020 at 3:48 amI have recently branched out to include SEO in my web development services, but I feel grossly underqualified. One of my current clients is competing in local SEO against a company which has generated over 2,500 backlinks according to ahref’s backlink checker.
What has left me awestruck is whoever is running their campaign has taken the time to use free content hosting and blog services like netlify, brandyourself, [about.me](https://about.me), Blogspot, enetget, and just too many obscure places to list here. Around 76% of the links are dofollow according to ahref, and they are smashing it in local SEO.
This might normally be okay, but they have multiple versions of their website, all on different domains, which often rank on the top page together.So it has left me wondering, is this standard practice in local SEO? It seems to be very very successful, at least for niche services, but the amount of time needed for a campaign like this is unimaginable. Unless there is a way to automate it?
The good news is, somehow my client’s site is ranked 2-4 on average for 2 of the main services they offer. So I can beat some of their sites, but never their main one.
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13 Replies
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[deleted]
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What you need to do is concentrate on long tail keywords with high buying intent and then eventually as you build domain authority go for the big one’s.
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quality, not quantity. also unique domains > total links
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I am testing a specialty electronics ecommerce site with huge competition using schema markup and seems to be working. My orders are certainly increasing since using schema. I only have two inbound links and do not plan on spending time or money increasing links. I do not use any advertising. I am concentrating on good design, quality, speed and offering very responsive and friendly communication and service.
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You feel grossly underqualified, yet you offer SEO as a service line? What is you doin’ baby???
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Focus on other stuff before concerning yourself with backlinks. Backlinks are important, but only one part of SEO. Go over the technical stuff, then content and on-page, schema markup – especially local business schema, GMB and other relevant citations for your locations, and then backlinks, but the good kind – ask your partners (suppliers and distributors) to mention you on their websites, talk to influencers with a blog, etc. What your competitor is doing is either shady or very very expensive – in either case, it is unlikely they will be able to keep it up long term.
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[deleted]
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This is why I don’t offer pure seo, I’m not good enough.
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I competed the SEO company that kicked me out due to politics in company, I was on 3rd position in 7th month. It’s not that tough, start with lorem ipsum demo website, make your site live, change content one by one page with enough content, then do social, then local SEO, Schema and then auth links. “It worked for me, original content is a thing”. Note: I used siteliner free version to check if there was duplicate content.
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Care to share who the competitor is? Would like to have a look.
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You can look into blackhat ways to undermine the site’s authority. Or just start paying google…
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I have seen websites with better content and better quality back links beat competitor websites with 5x as many back links but mediocre on-page. You probably can’t compete with a small budget but I would focus on on-page, content, and a smaller number of higher quality back links. Work on reviews for their GMB too, that can increase your maps ranking.
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First thing to understand is that not all backlinks are created equally. For example, a link from a dot blogspot.com website is not going to carry the same weight as a link from a featured editorial on cnn.com.
It’s important to consider the backlinks of competitors but I think that it should only be done within the context of performance. If their website is outperforming your client on a tremendous scale, then really take a look at what kind of backlinks they have cause they’re clearly working.
If they’re not necessarily performing that much better, I wouldn’t obsess over the backlinks. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be working to earn your client’s site quality backlinks, just that is likely that your competitors backlinks aren’t what’s going to make the difference for them.
Someone can crank up a program like GSA and blast a domain with over a million links in a matter of hours but it’s not likely to to result in improved rankings because Google disregards those links these days.
Get 150 links from the top 200 editorial websites online however, you can go ahead and bank one retirement and start working on the 2nd.
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