Link gap

A link gap is the difference between your website's backlink profile and those of your competitors — specifically, the set of domains that link to your rivals but not to you. Link gap analysis is a standard off-page SEO technique that produces a ready-made shortlist of potential backlink sources.

How link gap analysis works

The underlying premise is that if a page already links to several of your competitors in the same niche, there is a genuine chance it would link to you too — it clearly publishes topically relevant content and evidently references resources in your space. Tools like Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush compare your link profile against those of the competitors you specify and list the referring domains you are missing. The more of your rivals a given domain links to, the higher it should sit on your priority list.

Practical application

The output of a link gap analysis is a practical roadmap for link building. Instead of prospecting blindly, you get a concrete list of sites that already link to content in your niche — industry publications, directories, blogs, tool round-ups and resource pages.

The next step is qualifying those domains: discard low-quality prospects and focus on sources with real authority and traffic, then work out how each existing link was earned — a guest post, a mention in a round-up, or a resource link. That lets you craft a tailored outreach pitch. It is worth repeating link gap analysis on a regular cadence, because competitors' backlink profiles keep changing, and with them new gaps open up to fill.