Outrank your competitors with advanced link building techniques

By Maxime Doki-Thonon, co-founder and CEO of RocketLinks

In a world where SERPs (search engine results pages) are increasingly competitive, it’s essential to go beyond the basics of SEO to stand out. Link building, or acquiring external links, remains an essential lever for improving your rankings — provided it’s used strategically.

At SEO Square 9, I presented concrete methods to optimize your link building campaigns, drawing on backlink data analysis and 360° link building approaches. In this article, I’ll revisit the key principles I shared: the importance of competitive analysis, advanced link building techniques, and a practical example from the health insurance market to illustrate it all.

My goal: to give you the keys to strengthen your SEO strategy and outrank your competitors.

Back to basics: the importance of solid SEO foundations

Before diving into advanced strategies, it’s crucial to make sure your SEO fundamentals are in place. A high-performing site rests on three essential pillars, in addition to link building:

• Content: your pages must meet users’ needs with relevant, well-structured copy.
• Technical SEO: make sure your site is fast, well-coded, and has an optimized internal linking structure.
• User experience (UX): smooth, intuitive navigation contributes to visitor satisfaction and to your site’s rankings.

These elements must be fully mastered before rolling out a link building strategy. Why? Because without a solid SEO base, even the best backlinks will have limited impact.

Link building: the right questions to ask

When it comes to building a link building strategy, certain questions come up again and again:

• How many links should I build?
• What types of sites should I target?
• Which types of pages should I point these links to?
• What budget should I allocate? And for what ROI?

These are legitimate questions. Google doesn’t disclose the exact details of its algorithm, but observations based on real-world practice let us identify effective patterns for making the most of backlinks.

Analyzing the competition to spot opportunities

To understand what works in a market, you need to analyze the sites that already rank well. We use tools like Ahrefs and Majestic to extract key data:

• The number of referring domains (RD).
• Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
• The estimated value of organic traffic.

However, these tools require manual reprocessing, because the raw data is often incomplete or polluted by worthless links. That’s why we developed a tool that automates the cross-referencing and visualization of this data, enabling faster, more accurate analysis. On top of that, a noise filter is applied to exclude spammy sites and focus on high-impact backlinks.

Case study: the health insurance market

To illustrate how effective this approach is, here’s an example drawn from an analysis of the health insurance market. By studying ten key players, I examined metrics such as:

• The number of referring domains,
• Trust Flow,
• The estimated value of organic traffic.

Result: there’s a strong correlation between the number of quality backlinks and organic traffic. The sites with the most quality links also generate the most visits.

Focus on profitability: the cost and impact of a campaign

Calculating the value of SEO traffic

The value of SEO traffic is estimated based on the cost per click (CPC) of the keywords a site ranks for. Here’s the process:

1. Identify the keywords and their positions in the SERPs.
2. Estimate the traffic volume generated by each query.
3. Multiply that volume by the CPC to get a monetary value for the SEO traffic.

The Link Performance Indicator (LPI)

To evaluate the performance of link building campaigns, we use a key metric: the Link Performance Indicator (LPI), which weighs the total value of the links against that of the SEO traffic.

In other words, we compare the value of a link building campaign against the value of an SEA campaign.

It’s not a true ROI, but it’s the closest thing to it, and it lets you compare the effectiveness of link building campaigns across several sites.

In concrete terms, the sites to model yourself on are the ones with the best ratio between the amount potentially invested in link building and the value of the SEO traffic (in other words, the highest LPI).

Advanced techniques to optimize your backlinks

Here are a few strategies I use to maximize the effectiveness of link building campaigns:

1. Leverage pages that already rank: placing links on pages that already generate traffic delivers fast results and is often more cost-effective than creating new sponsored content.
2. Invest in second-tier links: this technique consists of boosting the visibility of sponsored articles by adding backlinks pointing to them. Allocating 20 to 30% of your link building budget to these links can make a big difference.
3. Diversify your backlink types: to stay natural in Google’s eyes, it’s essential to vary the types of links (homepage, internal pages) and diversify your sources.

Link quality: a decisive factor

How do you define a quality link?

The main criteria include:

• The organic traffic of the destination page.
• The relevance of the keywords the page ranks for.

We also analyze the market’s statistical norms to ensure our clients follow practices that look natural to Google.

Conclusion: master link building to surpass your competitors

When done well, link building remains a powerful lever for surpassing your competitors in competitive environments. By combining a detailed analysis of the competition with advanced approaches like second-tier links or links on pages that already rank, you can achieve significant results while optimizing your budget.

Since every market has its own specifics, it’s essential to adapt these strategies to your sector. Have questions or want to go further? My team and I are here to support you and build a high-performing SEO strategy together.

Maxime Doki-Thonon

Founder & CTO – Rocket Marketing ( Reech & RocketLinks)

Co-founder of Rocket Marketing SAS, a fast-growing company (60 employees, over €8M in revenue in 2019) that runs two solutions: Reech and RocketLinks, a sponsored-article platform.