Recurring client work
Backlink opportunity research
This was one of the two main recurring responsibilities of the placement. I looked for sites that could plausibly link to a client, checked whether the opportunity was workable and recorded each one with the reasoning behind it.
Sections on this page
Scope
What the work involved
Campaigns needed a steady supply of link prospects. My part of that was research and documentation. I produced candidate lists, checked them and wrote up what I had found in a shared sheet with a short reason attached to each row. I did not send outreach and I did not agree placements.
The output had to be usable by someone who had not done the research. A row saying that a site looked good carries nothing. A row naming the specific page, the context a mention would sit in and any constraint on the opportunity can be acted on.
Discovery
Discovery with Ahrefs
Competitor backlink data was an important discovery source. Ahrefs Site Explorer (opens in a new tab) shows who already links to a competing business, which is a productive starting point because those publishers have demonstrated an interest in the subject.
Competitor data describes what worked for a different business with a different budget and reputation, so I used it to generate candidates and checked each one against the client's own situation before recommending it.
What competitor data settles
A referring domain on a competitor profile establishes that the publisher links to businesses in the sector. Whether the same publisher is workable for this client depends on the page, the client's fit and the campaign budget.
Tools
Ahrefs features learnt and used
The placement involved learning a set of Ahrefs features, and some of them map directly onto this workflow while others were part of the wider training.
| Feature | Role in this research |
|---|---|
| Site Explorer (opens in a new tab) | Used for discovery from competitor backlink profiles and for looking at a candidate site's own profile. |
| Batch Analysis (opens in a new tab) | Used to compare many candidate domains at once so a long list could be ordered before manual review. |
| Content Explorer (opens in a new tab) | Learnt as a topic-led discovery tool for finding publishers writing about a subject. |
| Content gap and competitive analysis (opens in a new tab) | Learnt during the placement as a way of seeing which subjects competitors are visible for. |
- 01
Assemble candidates
Referring domains taken from competitor profiles in Site Explorer.
- 02
Remove the unsuitable
Drop candidates that are irrelevant to the client's sector before spending time on them.
- 03
Compare in bulk
Run the remaining list through Batch Analysis to establish a sensible review order.
- 04
Open and read
Visit the pages that survive and look for a genuine place a mention would belong.
- 05
Record with reasoning
Log the page, the reason and any constraint such as a stated fee, so the row can be acted on later.
Judgement
Qualifying an opportunity
Qualification meant opening the page and reading it. What I was looking for was a passage that already made the point the client's page supports, since that is where a link is useful to the reader.
| Question | Answered by tools | Answered by reading the page |
|---|---|---|
| Is the domain established in this subject? | Yes | Confirms or contradicts it |
| Does the article cover the topic properly? | Partly | Yes |
| Is there a passage a link would fit into? | No | Yes |
| Does the site accept contributions? | No | Usually stated somewhere on the site |
| Is there a placement fee? | No | Often stated, otherwise found on enquiry |
Relevance is a property of the specific article, and two articles on the same strong domain can differ completely, so qualification happened page by page. The budget then decided whether a qualified opportunity was workable at all.
Constraint
Commercial feasibility for SME clients
The practical constraint that shaped this work was commercial feasibility. In the backlink research, SME campaign budgets made commercial feasibility part of qualification, and some otherwise suitable opportunities became unrealistic because the expected cost exceeded the budget available.
That moved my attention towards smaller publishers with a genuine audience in the client's subject, and it made checking for stated pricing an early step so that time was not spent qualifying something unaffordable.
The research process therefore developed towards assessing the overall practical suitability of an opportunity.
What each row carried
Rows recorded the constraint as well as the opportunity. Knowing that a publisher charges more than a campaign can spend is useful information in its own right, because it stops the same candidate being investigated again later.
Process
The working document and AI filtering
The same considerations recurred across the backlink research, so I consolidated them into a detailed working document setting out what to check and what ruled an opportunity out. I then used AI to remove clearly unsuitable opportunities from a discovery list before reviewing the remainder myself.
This was my own research workflow within the placement. The manual review stayed in place, because whether a page has a passage where a mention reads naturally is a judgement I made by reading it. The reasoning is set out in developing repeatable research criteria.
Outcome
Value and limitations
Value to the company
The research produced prospect records carrying the reason and any cost constraint next to each entry, including the candidates that were rejected, which is what allows a reader of the sheet to see why an entry is there.
I cannot report how many placements resulted from this research. Outreach and negotiation were handled by others, so what I can describe is the research and the reasoning handed over, and each entry would still need a decision from the person acting on it. The Ahrefs advanced link building course (opens in a new tab) supplied link building material I worked from, alongside the backlink fundamentals covered in the DTMS training.