Most businesses start link building by aiming at the biggest search in their market: “Austin plumber”, “Cabo real estate”, “project management software”. It’s an understandable instinct, and it’s usually the slowest way to see results. Those searches are held by sites that have been collecting links for a decade. A few new links won’t move you past them this quarter.
The faster route is to find searches where the competition is weak, win those first, and use that momentum to climb toward the big ones. Here’s how we think about it when we build a plan.
1. Start from pages you already have
Links work best when they point at a page that already deserves to rank. Before picking a single keyword, we look at your site and ask which pages are strong enough to compete: a detailed service page, a community guide, a comparison post, a page with real listings or real prices.
If a page is thin, links won’t save it. If a page is good but nobody links to it, that’s where links pay off fastest.
2. Look at who ranks, not just how many people search
Search volume tells you how popular a search is. It doesn’t tell you whether you can win it. For each candidate search we look at the current top results:
- Big portals and national brands (think Zillow, Yelp, Amazon, G2) are hard to move. Their strength comes from millions of links.
- Established local or niche businesses are beatable with steady work over six to twelve months.
- Thin pages, old forum threads, directory listings or exact-match domains in the top results are the signal we look for. If Google is ranking a weak page, it’s telling you it hasn’t found a good answer yet.
3. Favour specific searches over broad ones
Specific searches have fewer competitors and clearer intent. Someone searching “closing costs buying property in Los Cabos” or “emergency plumber open Sunday Austin” knows exactly what they want, and they’re closer to becoming a customer than someone typing a two-word phrase.
Good places to look:
- Questions your customers ask before they buy: costs, timelines, how-to, comparisons.
- Sub-areas and categories: a neighborhood instead of the whole city, a product type instead of the whole store.
- Qualifiers: price ranges, “near me”, “for beginners”, “vs”, “alternatives to”.
4. Map one search to one page
When two of your pages target the same search, they compete with each other and both rank worse. We give every target search one page, point links at that page, and keep anchors consistent so search engines understand which page should win.
5. Sequence the plan
A good plan isn’t a list of keywords. It’s an order of attack:
- Months 1–3: specific, low-competition searches on strong existing pages. These are the wins you see first.
- Months 3–9: mid-sized category and area searches, supported by the authority the early links built.
- Months 9 and beyond: the big head terms, once your site has the strength to compete.
6. Pick sites your customers actually read
Links from sites with a real audience in your niche do more than pass authority. They can send visitors, and they read naturally. A real estate article on a travel and lifestyle site read by your buyers beats a link on a generic “write for us” blog every time.
How BuyLinks does this for you
This is exactly the research our AI does when you ask for a free plan: it reads your site, checks who ranks for your searches, finds the ones you can win soonest, and builds a month-by-month schedule of placements on hand-checked sites. You can see a real example here.