Most link building fails before the first email is ever sent, because the prospect list is a graveyard of direct competitors who will never link to you. SEO strategist Greg Digneo, who spends roughly eighty percent of his time on brand visibility for B2B and SaaS clients, has a better starting point: a Nexus document built entirely from people who share your audience but don’t compete for your customers.
What a Nexus Document Actually Is
The Nexus document is a living brainstorm of every non-direct competitor, hobbyist, and influencer with a marketing budget who already reaches the audience you want. Next to each name you write one concrete thing: the reason they would want to promote you. That second column is what separates a Nexus document from a scraped list of URLs. If you can’t articulate why a person benefits from mentioning you, they belong nowhere near your outreach and content link building pipeline yet.
Digneo’s logic is that the highest-leverage links come from relationships, not from tools. He points to influencers like Rand Fishkin, Lily Ray, and Mike King as the kind of audience-holders worth a real relationship, then works outward to the long tail of smaller creators, newsletter writers, and niche podcasters who are hungry for good guests and good stories.
This podcast, me going on your podcast right now, is way more valuable to me as a SEO agency than going through my content and being like, all right, is this content too long or is this content chunked? That’s way more valuable.— Greg Digneo, Unscripted SEO
Build the Document Step by Step
From blank page to outreach-ready list
Map your true audience
Write down who actually buys from you, then who else is already talking to those same people. Skip your direct competitors entirely; you want the adjacent orbit.
List non-competitors with a budget
Complementary tools, agencies, consultants, hobbyist bloggers, YouTubers, and newsletter operators who serve your buyer but sell something different. A marketing budget signals they value distribution and are open to cross-promotion.
Add the influencers who hold the audience
Named voices in your space whose mention or share moves the needle. These are relationship plays, not one-off asks.
Write the ‘reason to promote you’ column
For each entry, one concrete hook: a data set they’d cite, a guest slot you can fill, an audience you can introduce them to, a tool their readers would love.
Prioritize by audience overlap and reachability
Sort by how tightly their audience matches yours and how warm the connection is. Warm-and-overlapping goes to the top of the queue.
Outreach as a Journalist, Not a Pitch
Once the document exists, the outreach style is what makes it convert. Digneo’s rule is to approach people the way a journalist would: lead with a few genuine, value-driven questions rather than a scammy broken-link pitch or a naked link request. You are opening a conversation and gathering a real point of view, not spraying templates. That framing also gives you something to offer back, whether that’s a quote, a co-created piece, or a guest appearance.
This is the same instinct behind treating third-party mentions as more valuable than another on-page tweak. Rather than auditing whether your content is ‘chunked’ correctly, you spend the hour building a relationship that produces a mention, a citation, or a link you could never have earned from the keyword tool. If you’d rather have this run for you, our link building outreach service is built on exactly this journalist-first approach.
Track Whether It’s Working
Digneo measures visibility work through branded queries, which he calls the key indicator that the other stuff is working. He tracks them in Ahrefs because it’s easier than parsing Google Search Console, but he’s blunt that branded queries only matter if they tie back to revenue. Set a baseline before you start outreach, watch branded search volume climb as your Nexus relationships produce mentions, and keep revenue as the ultimate scoreboard. A rising brand-search line with flat revenue is a signal to re-check your funnel, not to celebrate.
The Nexus document is deliberately never ‘finished.’ Every new podcast you record, every newsletter that features you, and every influencer who shares your data becomes a warm node you add back into the list. Over months, that compounding web of non-competitor relationships becomes a durable link asset that no single algorithm update can wipe out.
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