The agency specialized in link building for clients in competitive markets. Demand was steady, but delivery was heavy.
Finding quality backlink opportunities consumed a significant amount of the agency’s time, requiring extensive manual effort.
Competitor research was slow and often incomplete, and identifying sites open to guest posts relied more on trial and error than on reliable data.
Every backlink opportunity also required fresh content. Writing guest posts manually or outsourcing them slowed outreach even further and made scaling expensive and unpredictable.
The work was fragmented and inefficient.
As a result, the agency struggled to deliver predictable link-building outcomes, protect margins, and scale across multiple clients without adding more people.
The agency started by using Squirrly SPY. They simply pasted competitors’ URLs and immediately received detailed competitor intelligence reports.
Inside the reports, the backlinks section showed exactly:
This gave the agency immediate visibility into where competitors were earning backlinks and which sites were already open to external contributions.
Outreach shifted from guesswork to targeting proven, quality link sources. By focusing on sites that had already linked to similar businesses, they significantly improved efficiency and backlink acceptance rates.
To complete the service, the agency used Next Level Marketing AI to create guest blog content for outreach.
For each target site, they adjusted the target audience, tone of voice, and content focus so articles matched the expectations of the publishers they were pitching.
With these inputs set, the AI handled the entire writing process, from research to formatting and proofreading, in minutes.
This workflow allowed the agency to deliver non-generic, publisher-relevant content, making it much easier to secure backlinks without extra editing work.
With this setup, the agency was able to move from offering backlink research alone to delivering a complete backlink acquisition service.
What changed most was positioning.
The agency shifted from selling “lists of opportunities” to delivering a complete backlink acquisition service with clear, visible outcomes.
This increased the perceived value of their work, allowing them to justify higher pricing and retain clients for longer-term engagements.
Backlink research time reduced by 70–80%
Guest blog content creation time reduced by ~90%
Agency expanded from “research-only” to full backlink acquisition service
Outreach success improved due to publisher-relevant content
Same team supports more clients without hiring or outsourcing
Client retainers increased because the agency delivered results, not just data
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