Acme is 24 DR points behind bigwidgetsco.com with a backlink profile that's contracting (down 33 RDs over 90 days net of new links). The page-2 keyword cluster — 920 keywords positions 11-20 — is the largest single upside; pushing the top 25 onto page 1 would close ~30% of the SoV gap to widgetwarehouse without any new link building.
| Severity | Finding | Fix required |
|---|---|---|
| HIGH backlink_health | Referring domains down 33 in the last 90 days The backlink profile is contracting — 18 new RDs vs 51 lost over 90 days. Sustained shrinkage signals a stale outreach engine, decaying digital PR or removed link placements. | Pull the lost-links report from Ahrefs, categorise by reason (removed / nofollowed / source-page-deleted), prioritise reclamation outreach on high-DR losses. |
| HIGH backlink_health | Exact-match anchor share is 17.4% Exact-match anchor share above ~5% on a non-brand domain is the strongest pattern Google's Penguin successors key on. Manual actions for "unnatural inbound links" are usually preceded by this signature. | Stop building exact-match anchors. Existing exact-match anchors on low-DR domains should be considered for disavow after manual review. |
| HIGH backlink_health | 23 toxic-flagged referring domains Ahrefs flags referring domains as toxic when they show spam-network patterns (PBN footprints, identical anchor floods, expired-domain redirects). At 20+ toxic linkers the profile is at risk of an algorithmic discount. | Outreach for removal first; disavow the rest via Search Console after manual review. |
| HIGH competitive_gap | DR gap of 24 points vs bigwidgetsco.com A 24-point DR delta represents ~2 years of catch-up in link earnings. The competitor's higher authority compounds on every keyword — they need fewer on-page signals to outrank for the same query. | Audit bigwidgetsco.com's top-pages-by-referring-domains report and reverse-engineer their best link-earning assets (linkable studies, free tools, original data). |
| MEDIUM competitive_gap | 5 content-gap keywords (5,120 combined monthly volume) Competitors rank top-10 for these keywords with no presence from acmewidgets.com. Combined volume represents recoverable traffic competitors are capturing one-sidedly. | Cluster by intent and produce category-level content briefs. Start where competitors rank with thin / outdated content. |
| MEDIUM share_of_voice | bigwidgetsco.com holds 42.4% of the market vs your 6.5% The category leader is 36 percentage points ahead. Their compounding visibility means they win every freshness signal and every newly-discovered query. | Audit the leader's content + link velocity. Match publication cadence in the top 1-2 verticals; ramp link-earning programme. |
| LOW visibility | 29% of keywords sit on page 2 A stacked page 2 (920 of 3,200 ranking keywords positions 11-20) is the largest reserve of pickable traffic on most sites. These rankings already proved topical relevance — pushing them onto page 1 is cheaper than ranking new keywords from scratch. | Pull the page-2 export, prioritise by volume × KD. Refresh content to match SERP intent, add internal links, build 2-3 contextual external links. |
| MEDIUM keyword_opportunity | 5 page-2 keywords scored as pickable (5,140 combined monthly volume) These keywords sit positions 11-20. Closing the page-1 gap is usually a content + internal-linking refresh, not a from-scratch build. | Sprint: pick top 25, refresh content to match top-3 intent, add 3-5 internal links per page, include in next outreach brief. |