About The Links Guy Agency

The Links Guy is a data-driven link-building and digital PR agency based out of the UK. Leveraging advanced professional tools and proprietary solutions, they take link-building to the next level. In addition to link generation, The Links Guy also offers a range of SEO services, from pinpointing strategic keywords to implementing on-page optimization techniques. With this holistic approach, they ensure unparalleled results for their clients. The Links Guy has worked with companies in the Inc. 500, Silicon Valley startups, as well as medium-sized businesses from various industries, including SaaS, finance, B2C ecommerce, and many more. At the forefront of the agency’s operations is its founder and chief link-building strategist, Amit Raj, an experienced SEO consultant, digital marketer, and entrepreneur.

Objectives

➤ Scale the agency’s operations while prioritizing high-quality link-building.
➤ Have continuous and flexible access to a wealth of SEO and marketing data at a reasonable cost.
➤ Produce more high-quality educational content about ethical link-building.
➤ Become one of the top link-building services in the world.

Featured Products

SERP API: your one-stop data source of structured SERP data

➤ All major search engines, all possible locations
➤ Advanced SERP features
➤ Real-time results

About DataForSEO

DataForSEO is the leading provider of SEO data for the marketing technology industry. With an API-led approach to data delivery, DataForSEO is enabling hundreds of software businesses to enhance their products with reliable, accurate, and fresh data.

Background

Amit Raj, Founder of The Links Guy, embarked on his journey in the SEO and link-building space in 2015. Having gained strong experience as a freelance consultant, in 2016, he started his own company, Amit Digital Marketing.

Reflecting on his early experiences, Amit says, “What I identified back then, and still stands true today – is a real lack of services that can focus on high-quality link-building. There are a lot of brokers and services out there who can offer huge scale and handle hundreds of companies – but with the way Google’s algorithm updates are rolling out, there is a growing demand from companies who want to build links sustainably, ethically, and with a strong focus on quality at its core.”

Over the years, Amit’s consultancy evolved, and in 2021 rebranded into The Links Guy, a reputable link-building and digital PR agency. The company’s mission is to revolutionize link-building by emphasizing quality over quantity. As Amit puts it, they aim not just to generate links, “but to build links that will foster relationships, educate audiences, and drive business growth.”

From 2024 onwards, the agency is ramping up efforts to advocate for quality practices by “investing a lot more in putting out content that sheds light on what quality link-building should look like,” Amit shares. He underscores, “We are constantly striving to improve the quality of our service internally, but we also want to educate as much of our target audience as possible.”

Speaking of the agency’s aspirations for the future, Amit says, “Our vision is to become one of the top link-building services in the world – both as an agency and as a brand providing education about link-building and digital PR.”

Business challenge

The Links Guy faced a significant challenge as they aimed to expand the agency’s operations while maintaining the standard of creating high-quality backlinks.

Amit explains, “We’re not just interested in building any links, we want to strategically build them so we can efficiently move the client towards traffic, and revenue goals.” This strategic decision-making involves analyzing substantial data volumes, and as the agency’s customer base was growing larger, so was its need for data-driven insights.

Sometimes, the success of even a single client can be pivotal. Amit elaborates, “We had a very specific client in mind for a project, and previously, we were using a competing product with an API that could extract some of the same data. We faced two main problems there:

➤ Their API was expensive and we were locked into a monthly charge, regardless of whether we needed that many credits or not, and we could not “roll over” the credits to the next month.
➤ Their API documentation was very confusing and the developer was having a hard time understanding it. This made coding scripts very difficult.”

In short, at this point, the agency realized they needed a streamlined and more affordable solution for accessing data to scale their strategic decision-making.

Solution

To tackle the challenges associated with data access, The Links Guy started looking for a more user-friendly and cost-effective solution capable of extracting large datasets. This quest led Amit Raj to discover DataForSEO. He recalls, “I found DataforSEO due to a recommendation in a Facebook group. I looked into it, saw all the features and data they provide, and was pleasantly surprised by the range. I also felt they solved both of the issues we had with the previous data provider.” He further highlights, “The cost was also important, but looking at the costs and calculating it against other providers, I felt it was reasonable, and the “pay-as-you-go” option was very appealing, as opposed to being locked to a specific monthly package size.”

The promising potential of DataForSEO’s API solutions along with its convenient PAYGO model, and user-friendly API documentation perfectly suited the agency’s needs. Swiftly integrating DataForSEO into their operations helped The Links Guy save valuable time and resources while ensuring they could take on a large client and perform their job more efficiently without worrying about data access limitations. Amit kindly shares some of the behind-the-scenes details about their agency workflow and their DataForSEO API use case.

“For this client I mentioned before, we had this core issue – they were a very large news website in their industry, and as such, had thousands of pieces of content that ranked for hundreds of thousands of keywords. The client had tasked us to build a minimum of 50 links a month to their site, and the plan was to then potentially build links at an even higher velocity,” says Amit.

He continues, “So we wanted to use the power of data, to determine the following:

1. If we build links where should we point them to have maximum impact on rankings and traffic?
2. Which pages should we initially avoid or de-prioritize due to the keywords being too highly competitive? These were pages/keyword groups dominated by sites like YouTube, Amazon, and Healthline.”

Here’s the outline of the agency’s analysis process described by Amit and his team:

1. The team started with exporting the list of keywords and associated landing pages (which totaled around 50,000+ keywords) where the client ranked in the top 11.
2. Using DataForSEO SERP API, they scraped the top 11 SERP organic results for each of those keywords, capturing the client’s URL and the other 10 competing pages. In the end, they obtained a list of over 500,000 URLs.
   “This would have been difficult to achieve with other solutions, as DataforSEO is a comparatively fast API, and other solutions would have required manual extraction, running software on a computer, or would be a very slow API,” Amit shares.
3. Next, for each URL (the client’s URL and each competing page for each keyword), they gathered metrics like authority, number of backlinks to the page, and number of referring domains to the page.
4. With this data in hand, they run a simple “link gap” calculation – to determine how many more referring domains the client needed to feasibly beat the top competing page for that keyword. “We could also take an average of the domain authority of the pages outranking the client – to see if we are competing against “Higher authority” competitors, or “Lower authority” competitors,” Amit adds.
5. Finally, the analysis helped the team obtain a list showing how many links each client’s article needed, to compete with the top-ranking pages. This list was further divided into higher-difficulty and lower-difficulty SERPs.

Below is an example of the final output generated by The Links Guy team.

Amit further explains, “So in this example, we can see each keyword, how many referring domains we’d need in comparison to the top competitor, and the “Keyword classification” contains LDA (for low domain authority) or HDA (high domain authority) to indicate the difficulty level we can assume it to be, to get to the top. This enables us to create a priority order.”

He shares another illustration and continues explaining how the obtained insights enable them to prioritize pages for link-building based on keyword competitiveness and domain authority.

Amit describes, “This block highlighted in the red box, is the data on the keywords associated with a single article. The most competitive keyword shows that there is a referring domain link gap, of 10. This tells us we can estimate we need 10 links to compete for the hardest keyword. If we reach the top for this, we should expect that we also pick up the other keywords.”

He adds, “And what we did next, was simply replicate this calculation across all the other keywords. This helped us identify the pages to focus on, in order to increase the speed of results and ensure the client is making the most out of their investment in link building.”

Speaking of the results the agency’s data analysis and link-building efforts yielded for their client, Amit notes “With these data insights and our link efforts, we helped the client achieve growth in their overall organic traffic, of about 20 to 25% in the several months since we adapted our strategy around the results of that data. Of course, there are several factors that contribute to SEO success, and the client also had an internal team working on on-page & technical SEO, and PR.”

Additionally, The Links Guy agency benefits a lot from the cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness of DataForSEO’s API. As Amit explains, “All other products were much more expensive and would have taken more development hours, due to the nature of their API docs. I don’t have an exact figure, but it would have taken at least another month, and probably cost at least a few thousand dollars more. Not to mention, that it would just be for this single project. After that, the more expensive products would have incurred further costs once we had to take this process over to other future clients.”

He adds, “With DataforSEO, we have access to so much data that we would otherwise have to extract using multiple other tools (much of which requires manual extractions) or very expensive tools that would add a lot of costs. DataforSEO has a reasonable cost and a very powerful API system so we can more easily extract large amounts of data.”

The Links Guy also plans to explore DataForSEO’s Google Maps SERP API “as it is very powerful and will enable us to scrape an entire sector of a country or region,” says Amit. “A lot of our involves contacting legitimate businesses and trying to get content and links published on their blogs. If we can leverage DataforSEO for this, this will really help us do the prospecting process much faster.”

Amit Raj highly recommends DataForSEO to professionals and businesses from the digital marketing and SEO sector, naming the following three points he appreciates the most about the DataForSEO services:

• Customer support is excellent.
• Very useful API docs and literature.
• Reasonable cost and a very accurate and robust product.

In conclusion, The Links Guy’s success story showcases the transformative potential of DataForSEO’s data collection solutions for linking-building and digital marketing agencies. By leveraging our comprehensive and affordable API, Amit Raj’s agency managed to not only enhance the efficiency of their SEO endeavors, but also seize growth opportunities, and drive superior results for their clients.