The 2025 Link-Building Reality Check: How I’m Scaling Quality Backlinks at Setsail Marketing

1 | Why I paused a Monday morning to read a checklist

I was sketching out next quarter’s SEO targets when a teammate dropped LinkBuilder’s 33-page “Link Building Checklist” in Slack. A quick skim turned into underlines everywhere: from auditing our own profile to the exact quality-control steps most marketers skip. The doc reads like a flight manual for backlinks—follow it and you land safely; ignore it and you crash rankings.

2 | Start with home base: your own backlink profile

The checklist insists you can’t plot a route without a map:

• Pull a full backlink audit in Ahrefs (or your weapon of choice).
• Flag toxic domains—then disavow or remove.
• List the pages that already pull links so you don’t waste ammo.

At Setsail Marketing we run this audit every 90 days. It keeps our Vancouver SEO agency services honest and shows clients we’ll cut rot before adding fresh growth.

Learn more here → Our SEO & link-building service

3 | Define goals and the infamous “link gap”

The PDF makes goal-setting painfully clear: move target pages to Page 1, lift traffic, and tie results to revenue. Then it drops a gem: measure the link gap—how many quality links separate you from the top three results.

Here’s our adaptation:

1. Pull the top-three URLs for each keyword in Ahrefs.
2. Average their do-follow referring domains.
3. Subtract our count—that’s the gap.

If the math says we need 15 links but margins only allow ten, we pivot keywords rather than burn cash.

4 | Five outreach tactics that actually scale

The checklist lists twenty, but these five deliver 80% of our links and 100% of our sanity:

Tactic –– Why we love it –– Tool stack

1. ‍Competitor backlink analysis: Proven links, quicker prospecting
   
   • Ahrefs + Sheets
     
2. ‍Broken-link replacement: You help editors fix errors → instant goodwill
   
   • Ahrefs’ broken-link tool
3. ‍Unlinked brand mentions: Easiest “yes”—they already named you
   
   • Google Alerts
4. ‍Niche guest posts: Authority + brand exposure
   
   • ‍Pitchbox
5. ‍Resource-page placements: Evergreen traffic, high DA
   
   • Manual email + Webflow form

Learn more here→ Performance marketing & outreach process

5 | Quality control: the non-negotiables

Google’s manual actions haunt my nightmares, so we stole the checklist’s QC section and tattooed it on our SOPs:

• Topical relevance—hammock site ≠ plumbing blog.
• Domain Rating ≥ 40 (Ahrefs) or it goes in the trash.
• Pass the Backlink Blacklist (shout-out to LinksThatRank).
• Organic traffic > 500/mo—because if Google trusts them, we can too.

Only when a domain clears all four do we pitch. Yes, it halves outreach volume, but it doubles success rate and keeps penalty risk at zero.

6 | Content that earns (and keeps) the link

The PDF hammers one truth: your guest content must outshine the host’s average post. Minimum 1 000 words, clean sub-heads, multimedia, plus at least one internal link to the host and one external cite.

Our writer playbook adds three tweaks:

• Unique data point—a mini-case or stat from our own campaigns.
• Natural anchor text—exact match only if competitors use it safely.
• Visual slug—a branded graphic that makes the editor look good.

Editors remember who made their post pop—and they invite us back.

7 | Tracking & index checks—the step rookies skip

A link that Google never indexes is a tree falling in a forest. The checklist’s final four steps are non-glamorous yet critical: ensure dofollow, no UGC or sponsored tags, page is indexable, and log everything in a sheet.

We automate the sheet with Make: every time Hunter.io marks an outreach email “accepted,” it fires a webhook that records URL, anchor, DR, and index status. Saves an hour a week—enough for another pitch round.

8 | The 10-minute executive summary

• Audit first; detox bad links.
• Calculate the link gap so effort meets opportunity.
• Use scalable tactics (competitor gaps, broken links, mentions).
• Strict QC—relevance, DR 40+, blacklist cleared, traffic 500+.
• Publish stellar content that benefits the host and hides your footprint.
• Verify indexation or it never happened.

Pin this to your monitor and your link program will survive algorithm swings.

Ready to close your own link gap?

If your backlink profile reads like 2017 and your rankings show it, let’s talk. Book a 20-minute SEO Growth Audit—I’ll benchmark your domain against this checklist and hand you a revenue-first plan.