How I built 707 backlinks with a statistics page

Back in January 2022 I created a piece of link magnet content for standout-cv.com.

It’s a statistics complilation page called “Remote working statistics UK” and it’s attracted 707 links to date, including links from Indeed, Digital Journal, CityAM, AccountingWeb, Deloitte, and tons of authority sites within the job-search space.

I spent about 2-3 days researching and creating the page, and have only had to do one major content update since then.

And as with all link magnets, I’ve done no outreach or promotion for the page.

It ranks highly for terms like “remote work statistics UK” – so journalists find it, use it for their research, and link to it regularly, when writing new articles on the topic.

Here’s how I did it…

Research & choosing the topic

The first step in creating a link magnet is choosing a popular topic in your niche, that journalists are interested in, and likely to link to.

There are a few methods you can use to find a topic for a link magnet – on this occasion, I simply brainstormed some ideas around trends in the news and tested them in Google and Ahrefs to see which topics could generate links.

Standout CV’s core topics are job-search and careers, and in 2022 the world of work had seen massive changes after surviving the pandemic and numerous lockdowns.

Journalists were writing about these changes daily. (job losses, staff working from home, zoom calls etc.)

I knew that a data-driven page that provided writers with plenty of facts and figures around one of these topics would be extremely useful, and had potential to generate plenty of links from well-known websites.

Brainstorming

I started by creating a big list of potential topics for my Link Magnet by simply writing down some of the topics I had been reading in the employment news space recently, and scouring through news articles to see what type of data was being linked to.

When using this approach, it’s important to get at least 10-20 seed ideas, as you will normally find that many of them won’t be feasible.

My initial list looked something like this:

Testing

I then tested these ideas by simply typing them into Google and using the Ahrefs toolbar to determine 2 things:

1. Are links being generated to content on this topic?
2. Do I have a chance to rank content in the SERP?

Are links being generated?

Firstly I checked if the SERP for each topic has existing pages with links being generated to it, by looking at the Ahrefs chrome extension’s “referring domains” metric.

If I saw at least one page on the exact topic, with a good number of referring domains, I kept that topic in my list (ideally I like to see at least 2 or 3 to be confident a topic could work).

If I saw plenty of pages on the topic in the SERP, but they all had little or no referring domains, that’s a red flag. It means that journalists and writers don’t link out to that type of content, so I would remove that topic from my list.

Using this quick analysis, I whittled my shortlist down to this:

Can I rank content in the SERP?

Once I had eliminated all the topics with no link potential, I then had to determine which of the remaining ones gave me the best chance of ranking my content.

There are 3 key factors I had to consider here:

• Domain authority of sites in SERP – This isn’t actually the most important factor, but it needs to considered. You can outrank sites with much higher DRs than your own, if you produce better content, but it’s best to avoid SERPS that are packed with mega high DR sites like government and university websites.
• Quality of existing content – If I’m confident that I can create better content than the existing pages in the SERP, this is another signal that I can outrank it.
• Freshness of existing content – Journalists and Google both want to see fresh content (especially when it comes to data-focused pages). If the SERP is full of dated content, then a new page with fresh data has a strong chance of reaching the top spots.

More factors normally come into play as you start assessing the SERPs, but these are the most important ones to start with.

Here are a few that I crossed off the list, and why…

“How many job losses has Covid caused” ❌

This topic had great potential for links being generated, but the SERP was featuring far too many DR90+ websites like The House of Commons, World Economic Forum and UK Parliament, so it would have been quite difficult to outrank them, even with better content.

Also it was hard to find data on this subject that didn’t come directly from those pages in the SERP, so I would have struggled to create something truly unique and valuable on the topic.

“Hybrid working statistics” ❌

This was another highly linkable topic, but there was a lot of really good and highly relevant pages in the SERP already. The content was all created within the last few months, had some excellent data and was very well presented – it would have been tough for me to create anything notably better.

“How many workers use Zoom” ❌

This SERP was slightly competitive, with a few big names like Backlinko and BBC appearing, but there were some brands I didn’t recognise who had made it into the top 5 spots, which always gives me confidence I could do the same.

However, when I looked at the number of referring domains across all the pages, it wasn’t really that high, compared to some of the others I had in my list. So, I decided that the risk of trying to enter such a competitive SERP was probably not worth the relatively small amount of links I could earn here.

Why I chose “remote working statistics UK” ✅

So, I had “remote working statistics” in my list.

And I didn’t like it initially.

The SERP was full of high DR big-brand sites like Forbes, Statista, Backlinko (again) and the content was pretty good.

But on closer inspection of the existing pages, I noticed one important factor… All of the data was from the US.

There was nothing serving the UK market, appearing in the results.

So I searched for “remote working statistics UK” and found that no pages were covering the topic very well.

Finding a modifier to a topic like this is a great way to side-step a crowded SERP and serve a new audience. In this case, there were bound to be plenty of British journalists looking for UK specific data on remote work, so creating a page full of UK specific stats on the subject was likely to be very useful – and much easier than trying to compete with all the good US ones.

Surprisingly there was only 1 good result in the SERP back then that really matched the UK query, and that was a survey from the ONS.

Now I wouldn’t normally advise going up against government websites, but in this case the page quality was very poor. They had all the right data but it was badly organised, making it extremely difficult for anybody to read and extract the data they want.

There were a couple of other statistics pages in the UK SERP, but their DRs were both around 40 and the content was pretty basic.

Here I knew I had a winning topic.

I could create a piece of content that the internet genuinely needed.

I was very confident that I would be able to at least reach the 2^nd spot here, and even if I couldn’t outrank the ONS piece, I would still be able to generate links, if I could create an outstanding piece of content with some new and unique data.

You don’t always have to rank top with a link magnet – it’s obviously what you aim for, but anything in the top 5 spots will usually attract eyeballs and links.

Creating the link magnet content

Now I had picked a topic with high link potential in a SERP I could rank in, it was time to create the content.

The aim is to create something MUCH better than any of the existing content available on the topic, and include lots of link-worthy data.

Here’s a quick overview of how I did it.

1. Analysed the existing page content in the SERP
2. Created a page structure
3. Collated and added data
4. Formatted the page

Analysing existing page content in the SERP

Firstly, I took a detailed look at the pages I want to outrank, to get a general idea of the type of content I need to include, and how I could improve on what’s already out there.

The type of questions I am asking are…

By answering these questions, I was then able to build a rough picture of what my page should contain and how it needed to be organised.  

Determine which data is generating the most links

Before starting to create the structure, it’s important to determine what data is generating the most links for the existing pages – so that you know what kind of data will be most important to your page.

If you know your industry well, you can take an educated guess at this, but the best way to do it, is by finding out for sure with Ahrefs.

Enter the existing URLs into Ahrefs site explorer, select the “exact URL” drop down, and click on the backlinks tab in the left menu, to see all of the pages linking to this URL.

By scrolling down the anchor texts you can see exactly which data point is being referenced in some of the links.

The data being referenced the most shows you exactly the type of data you need to include, to maxmise the link potential in your piece.

From this research, I found that there were a couple of data points that seemed to be pulling in 90% of all the links generated.

• How many people work remotely
• What percentage of the population work remotely

So I knew that I had to find some good data for those points and make them prominent in my piece.

I was also able to determine a few other data points that were generating a significant amount of the remaining links, such as:

• How many people work hybrid
• How often people work from home

This gave me some more ideas for data I would need to include

Creating a page structure

Once I had analysed the existing pages in the SERP and discovered which data was bringing in the most links, I was ready to start creating the page.

I started by listing out the core sub-topics of remote work, that I had discovered during the analysis stage, in a Google Doc.

I added any other related sub-topics that had popped into my head, these became my H2 and H3 headings for the page.

I also looked up some reports, studies and news articles on remote work, to find further sub topics to add to my list.

 It looked something like this initially.

At this stage, it’s just loose structure, and will change as I do more research and writing.

The aim is to create a structure that is going to produce a much more comprehensive report than any of the existing competitor pages, so I’m trying to list as many sub-topics as possible, and then break those topics down even further.

Then I add some questions or statistics that I already know will go into some of these sections, to start building out the structure some more.

I did all of this manually back then, but nowadays you can use ChatGPT or Gemini to ask for ideas and speed things up – however I would always recommend doing at least some manual research to be as thorough as possible.

Collating and adding the data

Once I had my structure and few data points to build from, I could start finding interesting data to add to my page.

I did this by searching my questions directly (e.g. how many people work from home in the UK?) and combing through many articles for data.

And searching for studies, surveys and whitepapers on the specific sub-topic or question (E.g. hybrid work report or survey on benefits of remote work)

I always tried to use reputable well-known websites as sources, like established news sites, consultancies, global brands, or niche brands that are well-regarded in the employment niche.

I wrote down the best stats I found into my structure to start filling out the content, and I saved the pages I got them from in the “sources” list at the bottom (an important feature for credibility of the page)

As I carried out the research I came across more interesting data,  which allowed me to add more data points to each section, and even create whole new sub-topics. For example, I read a report about hybrid working which also contained lots of data around the environmental impact of remote working – this was a sub-topic I hadn’t initially thought of but I ended including a section for it with 4 data points.

I ended up with over 100 data points – organised into a logical structure of 11 H2 headings, and 13 H3 headings.

This amount of useful data meant that is was (and still is) the most comprehensive collection of data on remote work in the UK.

Note: What I didn’t do here, is copy the existing remote work stats pages by simply regurgitating all the info they had – I used them for initial guidance, but I found my own sources and data to create unique content that was more useful to journalists.

Formatting the page

With all the written content completed in my doc, I transferred it onto a new WordPress post ready for formatting.

Formatting your page well is crucial for earning links.

Firstly, I needed the page to look good for journalists to be attracted to it, find it credible and be comfortable with using it as source.

Secondly, it needed to be easy to read and navigate, and the data needs to be mega-easy to digest.

Here are some features I added to achieve this.

Key stats section

I added a short list of condensed bullet points to the top of the article, that highlight the most important data from the page, and included the data points that I know journalists are already linking to.

This gives busy journalists a quick way of digesting the most useful information, and ensures that all readers see the most link-worthy data first.

Data visualisations

Using some of the raw data I collected, I created my own charts and graphs to visualise the findings – I used Powerpoint for these ones, but now I use Canva to create much better looking images.

This gives the page unique images that can’t be found anywhere else, and journalists can use them in their articles, and link back to the page as a source. It also makes it much easier for readers to digest the data, than trawling through rows of text.

Quote images

I scattered a few simple images that quote some of the more interesting facts from the study, throughout the page.

Again, I used PowerPoint for these, but I’m now using Canva to create much more polished and attractive images.

These break up the text, make the reading experience more pleasant, and also highlight linkable stats.

Source screenshots

I used Google Trends to uncover data for how many people are searching for “remote jobs”on Google in the UK.

Adding a screenshot of the tool not only visualises the data well, but also proves that I’m using trust-worthy sources in my study – giving my page more credibility.

Once I formatted the page and had it proof-read, I hit publish and linked to it internally from a couple of relevant pages.

Then I simply waited for the page to be indexed and start ranking, which took a few weeks.

The results

This page has generated 707 links to date (and will likely continue to generate more).

It’s attracted links from some hugely authoritative  websites like Indeed, Digital Journal, Deloitte and CityAM.

I’ve never had to do any outreach to get these links, and I’ve only done one major update of the content after publishing.

Rankings

At the time of writing this, the page currently ranks 2^nd in Google for “remote working statistics uk” in what is now a very competitive SERP.

It also ranks for lots of related keywords that journalists would search for on the topic, because the data is so in-depth and well structured.

So, it gets discovered by lots of writers every month, who often cite stats from the page and link to it from their articles.

Early results

When I initially created this page, I actually published it on a near new domain; jobdescription-library.com.

This was a side project of mine at the time, which was later merged into my main site standout-cv.com.

At the time that site was not even a year old and probably had a DR of around 20, yet the content still ranked for its intended keywords within weeks, and pulled in over 70 referring domains in 6 months, including a backlink from Indeed (DR92)

This proves that you don’t need huge domain authority to make successful link magnet content.

This piece was one of seven link magnets we created for the site, which grew it’s Ahrefs domain rating from zero to 47 in around 18 months – helping it generate over 6k visitors per month from organic search.

Cost savings

If you were to acquire 707 links from a traditional linkbuilding agency at an average of £100 per link, it would have cost over £70,000.00!

So, in addition to getting great results, this page has been extremely cost effective. Obviously it cost me nothing as I did the work myself, but even if I had outsourced the work to a highly paid contractor, I still would have saved tens of thousands of pounds, compared to purchasing the links from an agency.

Want some help getting results like these?

If you’d like some help creating link magnet content for your site,  so you can start attracting high quality links and growing your domain authority and traffic, book in a free strategy call with me.

Over a friendly 30 minute chat, I’ll provide you with a 12 month link magnet plan for your business.