The GAP analysis is a process of looking at competitors in the market and understanding what they are doing to feature in a particular keyword search result.

Often times this can be obscured as direct research on some competitor URLs ranking are is driven by internal page authority and the external link equity is naturally accrued on other pages that are seemingly NOT money term related.

GAP Analysis and formulating link strategy is about a cherry-picking of top URL’s or sites you think would move the needle using logical reasoning and investigation in the market and competitor profile research.

A competitor with a million forum backlinks does not necessarily mean they have not disavowed the links and maybe ranking with a handful of good links that are blended in with internal page authority.

DA

Domain Authority (DA) is not like Page Rank. It’s a contentious metric chiefly used in the link building community and as a litmus test to filter out the junk.

Google insists that they don’t use domain authority—nor any metric like it—to rank pages.

A site with a high domain authority can easily be faked or Google could have even have penalised it while in the tool’s metrics it looks like a rockstar.

So when doing research ONLY look at Domain Authority as an indicator and one of well over 200 ranking factors.

We Rank Pages

Our task is thus to cherry-pick and use tools like ahrefs to find the golden nugget links for clients rankings and not quantify the replicate the bad ones.