Dear Douglas,
We have 7+ years of experience in the adult, especially in the escort niche. So I might be able to help you out a bit here and there. We worked with several escort SEO projects, agencies and escort directories as well. As a reference, one of those is TopEscortBabes.com - which is among the top 3 international escort directories worldwide.
For an escort agency, just like the one you've worked with, I would recommend the following action plan, when it comes to SEO:
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Technical factors: if we would start a new escort agency site, we would definitely start to optimize it for Mobile (even AMP), as that's over 65% of escort related searches as we've experienced
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On-Page technical factors: make it fast-fast-fast, if you are going to use JavaScript to have the best UX with some fancy things included, a secret weapon can be to use a Prerendering solution that you give to the Google User Agent - note that the mobile and desktop version should be the same, so go with a responsive design
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On-Page SEO: not much to tell you here, check the top competition and try to use TF-IDF on-page analyses to gather keyword density, keyword types and content length data
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Off-Page SEO: here comes the tricky part as you said, but the easiest solution is this:
- use MOZ or other backlink checker tools, collect the backlinks of ALL YOUR COMPETITORS first (20-30, the more the better)
- delete all URLs (links) that are duplicated (intersection), so you will keep one each of them
- use MOZ DA/PA to make an order of the possible link partners in an excel sheet or software of your choice
- go and try to get all the links that your 20-30 competitors have - hire someone or do it in-house
I know this just scratched the surface, but I guess this is the safest and easiest way to see some early results, as many of the links you gather will bring referral traffic as well, even if they are no-follow, besides of the SEO value.
Hope I could help you and others who read this post!