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.
In SEO and digital PR, there is a lot of discussion surrounding how and why brands need to close backlink gaps in order to rank high and be competitive in the SERPs.
But what about tackling competitive SEO from the opposite direction by creating link gaps?
In this post, I’ll share a framework that we use at JBH[1] to help us create hyper-niche and relevant digital PR campaigns[2] that will earn links on sites where our clients' competitors aren’t found, and highlight the strategic importance of creating these gaps for SEO success.
What are link gaps, and how do we find them?
On a very basic level, a link gap is the difference between the sites linking to multiple competitors, but not to you.
It’s really easy to discover these sites by performing a link gap analysis[3] (using a tool like Moz’s Link Intersect Tool[4]), comparing the backlinks you have to those of your competitors. At the end of your analysis, you’re left with a list of websites you should try and earn a link from — this is called closing the link gap, and is common in most SEO strategies.
Closing link gaps makes a lot of sense. For example, if someone is linking to a site in a particular industry or vertical, it’s likely they’d be keen to link to a similar site. And if your competition is ranking well, then you’d expect those links to be contributing to that.
But if we flip that theory around and start to think about