The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
This piece was co-written with James Wirth[1].
Links drive rankings — that’s one thing that technical SEOs, content marketers, digital PR folks, and even some of #SEOTwitter can agree on. But which rankings, and for which pages on your website?
If you’ve ever wanted to build links that impact rankings for specific pages on your website, we’ve got the guide for you.
Selecting pages for a targeted-impact link building campaign
Preparing a link building campaign often involves helping the client refine their goals in order to be able to effectively measure the campaign. The first step is typically level-setting based on what we can learn from available data.
Comparing link metrics against top competitors will help us size up the competition. Layered against estimated traffic, Page Authority, and SEO “difficulty”, and we’re able to better understand the opportunity. While this isn't particularly complex or inaccessible, it's likely deeper than the client has gone, and very often they’re happy to move forward with data-informed recommendations.
If we were preparing a link building campaign for Moz, for example, we might pre-select some sections of the site to focus on in the analysis.
Suppose we start with /products/, /tools/ the beginners guide pages (love those), and a few others that jump out. Here are a few pages from that list:
From here, we would compile a list of competitors based on top keywords for each of the pages. That will let us compare average metrics across the top competitors to the metrics for Moz’s pages.
This dataset represents the top 10 competitors from the top 10 keywords for each of Moz’s pages. Once