Is anyone actually linking to us?
This one usually comes up for one of two reasons. Either somebody sent you a report with an authority score on it and a strong hint that the number should be higher. Or an email arrived offering high-quality do-follow links at a suspiciously round price, and some part of you wondered whether you were missing out.
You’re not. But links do still matter — that hasn’t changed nearly as much as people hoped it would. What’s changed is how little of the link-building industry is worth paying for.
What I do here
Read the profile you already have
Where the links came from. How much of it is genuine editorial mention versus directory filler someone bought in 2016. Which links have quietly died. And whether anything in there is actively working against you rather than just sitting inert.
Find the gap that’s actually a gap
What competitors have that you don’t, and — far more useful — which of those are realistically gettable. A national newspaper link isn’t a gap. It’s a fantasy with a line item next to it.
Unlinked mentions
Places you’re already named without a link pointing back. Cheapest wins on this entire list, and the ones most consistently ignored because they’re unexciting to report.
Something worth linking to
The honest version of link building is having something on your site people have an actual reason to reference: a tool, a dataset, an explanation that’s better than everyone else’s. Slower to build. Survives algorithm updates that wipe out the bought stuff.
Outreach at a realistic scale
Fewer, better-aimed approaches to people who plausibly care, with a subject line that isn’t a template. The hit rate is low by nature. I’ll tell you it’s low before you pay for it rather than after.
What you get
An audit of the existing profile with anything genuinely toxic flagged, and a disavow file only if one’s actually warranted — which is a good deal rarer than it gets sold as.
A shortlist of realistic targets with a reason attached to each. And, where it’s the right call, a piece of work on your own site designed to earn links rather than ask for them.
Read this before you buy any of it
This is the slowest-moving lever in SEO, by a distance. Technical fixes can show up in weeks. Content structure can show up faster than that. Links take months to accumulate and longer again to register as authority. If you need something to move this quarter, spend the money on the other two and come back to this when there’s runway for it.
And the things I won’t do, so there’s no misunderstanding six weeks in: no private blog networks, no bought placements, no reciprocal link schemes, no paid guest-post farms, and no “sponsored post” that’s a link wearing a fig leaf.
That isn’t squeamishness. It’s that they get devalued, some of them can earn you a penalty, and the ones that do neither simply stop counting — at which point you’ve been renting something you thought you’d bought.
Get the profile read first
Link signals are one of the four areas in the Diagnostic. It’s the cheapest way to find out whether links are your real bottleneck or a distraction from whatever is.