Identify what brings in backlinks, instead of where they come from

Andreas says: “Analyse the content that’s attracting backlinks and not the backlink sources themselves.”

Does that mean determining why your competitor’s content deserves links?

“Yes. I’m not saying completely ignore the sources, but your time is better spent seeing why content is attracting backlinks in the first place. If you want to see what would work for you, it’s better to understand why that content is earning backlinks.

A lot of sites can buy backlinks but it’s much better to try and earn those backlinks. If you’re doing digital PR or improving the quality and volume of backlinks to your website, and you want your site to come through a core update or pass a manual review at Google, it makes a lot more sense to have a piece of content that’s deserving of those backlinks. If that piece of content looks weak compared to the many other versions on the internet, the reviewer can’t see why yours would earn more backlinks.

By analysing what your competitors are doing to deserve statistically supernormal volumes and quality of backlinks, you’re in a much more powerful position to produce the kind of content that’s deserving of those backlinks, which would stand up to a manual review or a core update.

To visualise statistically supernormal, imagine a bell curve, which characterises the normal distribution. You’ve got the average in the middle, where most of the data gravitates towards. Something supernormal would be much higher than the average. It’s several degrees further towards the extreme end. Anything that’s way above the average is what we would call supernormal.”

How do you determine which elements of your competitors’ content are likely to be the reason why it’s attracting backlinks?

“There are two levels at which you could do this.

At Level 1, you could do it purely on a site level. You take a major competitor and take all of their backlink data into a tool like Majestic. You look at the data, on a site page level, and look at the volume of backlinks to that piece of content – and the quality of those backlinks, using things like Trust Flow.

In statistics or data science, we look at the average for metrics like Trust Flow or volume of links to a URL. That gives you an idea of what normal looks like.

You can do this for any competitor’s domain name. If you’re Pepsi, you might want to look at Coca-Cola.com, go through Majestic, and load up all the URLs and the backlink data against all of those. Using data science, you can look at the normal number of URLs for that site. Then, you can start seeing which pages are way above normal in terms of volume and quality. Which pages are getting a supernormal amount of Trust Flow compared to what the site normally gets?

Then, you have a very scientific and automated way of quickly identifying the content that’s achieving supernormal results for that website. It makes it much easier for you to save time and start analysing what seems to be working really well for that competitor.

That’s Level 1.”

You also refer to ‘velocity’ in terms of link building. Are you looking at consistency as well as quantity and quality?

“Consistency is important. However, consistent effort is probably more important. Let’s face it, in the real world, you quite often get a piece of content like a press release or some news that gets a massive hit in the short term and then dies off.

When I talk about velocity, I am thinking about the rate at which you’re adding authority or backlinks to your website versus your competitors. As we all know in organic search, it’s all relative. You might say you’re adding tens or hundreds of backlinks per month – all genuine and high-quality because of the quality of your content – and you’re managing to generate interest in your content.

That’s all very well, but is it enough? That’s why you need to look into how you’re doing versus your competitors. What if they are adding thousands or several hundreds?

This actually segues quite nicely into the Level 2 analysis, where you don’t just look at your competitors’ websites, you look at your website and your competitors’. You don’t look at what’s normal for a given competitor, you look at what’s normal for your market.

That’s not just normal in terms of what would be considered normal or supernormal for the amount of citation a piece of content attracts, but also what is normal in terms of the velocity of links being added to your website. What’s the normal rate, and what content would achieve supernormal rates of velocity – in terms of authority and backlinks being added to your website, for your market?”

What do you mean when you say that SEOs are chasing link sources and they should be chasing target destinations instead?

“I may have a limited impression of the world, but a lot of SEOs trying to do off-page SEO tend to look at their competitors’ link sources and then, traditionally, they send an email to try and get them to link to their client or company’s content.

‘Hi. You’ve done a blog post on 10 Great Tools for Your Project Management. We’ve got a project management tool for the film industry. Would you mind including us and linking to us?’ That’s a very low-return activity. I’m not saying it doesn’t provide any return, but it’s a horse-before-cart way of achieving scale and effectiveness. Why not produce the content that attracts backlinks without having to ask for it? That’s far more powerful.”

If Google has already crawled a piece of content but backlinks don’t start appearing until weeks after it was published, is that a signal that the backlinks might be more artificial?

“Not necessarily.

You might produce something about tree houses, for example. It doesn’t have to be in season, but you’ve produced it because you’ve determined (from your audience listening data) that this is something your target audience is interested in. It could be that everybody’s on holiday, so there’s very little interest from journalists seeking data to write a tree house article.

Then, maybe, 2 or 3 months down the line, it comes out in the news that Keir Starmer has asked some company to build tree houses for his daughters. Suddenly, it can really explode, and you find that you’re getting a load of backlinks just because of the timing. There are unforeseen elements that can make your content look really good.

You need to produce content, but you also need to tell the world about it as well. You still need to do the outreach. It’s not quite ‘build it and they will come’, unless you’re already a highly authoritative site in the first place.

We quite often see that, suddenly, a journalist or an influencer comes across a client’s piece of content, and they love it. Then you’ve gone from chugging along to seeing a huge spike. The rest is history for that piece of content, at least for that campaign.”

You’re a fan of using internal search page data. What kind of data are you looking for from internal searches?

“Internal search pages often get backlinks, especially for e-commerce and retail. That can give you a lot of intelligence on your own e-commerce store regarding category pages or PLPs (Product Listing Pages). Is there a category page that you should have but don’t have, that the internal search URLs that are attracting backlinks indicate you should have a dedicated category page for? It can provide a form of intelligence for content you should have, but don’t have.

You can also do that for your competitors to see what internal search results pages are attracting backlinks on their websites. If you have a product that matches, is that something you could put on your website too? Not just for the sake of attracting backlinks, but also commercially, for making extra sales and revenue.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop working in spreadsheets. I’m not the only SEO person to say that. Start working with your SEO data in Python. I actually wrote a book on data-driven SEO, called Data-Driven SEO with Python. There are other resources as well, whilst my publishers and I would thank you for purchasing and reading the book.

Stop working with SEO data in spreadsheets. Start importing your data in Python. Learn data science – because Python is a subset of data science. Python will help you work with the data, but you really need the statistical mathematical mindset in order to see the data from different angles, ask better questions, and extract a lot more insights so you understand what you’re working with.

SEO is a very data-rich endeavour. There’s tonnes of data from your crawls, your backlink tools like Majestic, from analytics, search engine results pages, and your competitors. You’re not going to take a bicycle to a motor race. You’re going to take a motor car at the very least. Of course, with my client, I want to take a helicopter, but that’s another discussion.”

Is it necessary for every SEO to have a mathematical and statistical mindset nowadays or is there still a place for a creative, strategic SEO who’s not that good at data science?

“I recently had a discussion with my daughter, and she was saying how she loves the English language because she finds it more creative. I said, ‘You’re more creative in English because you know the grammar of English, and you have the vocabulary.’

I would argue the same with SEO and data science. Data science is highly creative but, if you don’t learn the building blocks, how can you be creative in something that you don’t have enough of an understanding of? If you’re very good at data science, you’re going to be much better at analysing content that works and doesn’t work. When it comes to preparing content briefs, or at least having a contribution to a content discussion, you’re going to be extremely well prepared if you apply data science to content data.

I’m not saying data science is going to make you a better writer, but it’s certainly going to make you much better at working with creatives who do produce the content, because you can help empower them.”

Andreas Voniatis is Founder at Artios, and you can find him over at Artios.io.