If you want to improve your website’s SEO, you may have heard of an optimisation technique called backlinks.
Backlinks are links you create from one website to another (one of which is your site) that build authority with search engines.
SEO aims to increase a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Creating enough high-quality backlinks can improve your website’s ranking factor and appear on page one.
The question we are most often asked is how many backlinks I need to rank on page one of Google. The answer is not a straightforward numerical value.
How many links you need will depend on the type of site you run, the type of business you run, and the length of time your business has been operating.
We’ve gathered essential information below to help you understand backlinks, their role in boosting your business’s ranking, and how to effectively integrate them into your SEO strategy. This leads us to the importance of quality backlinks.
Quality Backlinks
When creating quality backlinks, you should aim to build links to your site from websites with high domain authority.
A high domain authority website is highly trusted by search engines and people searching for similar companies.
Creating links with companies trusted by humans and computer systems is considered the best quality backlinks.
Some websites allow you to check the domain authority of a site you want to build links with.
Using a website that checks the domain authority of the site you have built links with is an excellent place to start when trying to improve your SERP ranking.
When a site’s domain authority ranking is considered, sixty or above is excellent, forty to fifty is good, and anything below forty is bad.
Link building with websites above sixty is the best place to start; however, you should ensure that the websites you build links with are linked to your niche.
Using irrelevant companies to build links will damage your SEO over time. To maintain your site’s credibility, ensure your backlinks are from relevant and high-authority sources. Now, start building your backlinks.
Start Building Your Backlinks
When beginning to build your backlinks, the first thing to decide is if you will build them yourself or employ the services of a specialised SEO company to build them for you.
Link building is not particularly difficult; however, it is time-consuming and can be complicated when beginning the process.
Consider whether it would be best for your business to complete this process yourself or have a third party complete it for you.
Consider how much time you can put into building backlinks and if you have the skills to build high-quality links.
Also, you should consider the cost of outsourcing this process, especially if you are a new business. If you have not budgeted for SEO, you may spend more than you can afford to build links.
If choosing to complete the process yourself, you analyse your competitors’ backlinks using keyword searches in Google.
Searching for keywords relevant to your business and niche will show other companies offering similar products and services.
We recommend that you review the first five to ten companies on this list and analyse their backlinks using a site such as Ahrefs.
You can leverage the links your competitors use to build high-quality backlinks for your site. This leads us to calculate the backlink gap between you and your competitors.
Calculate The Backlink Gap Between You And Your Competitors
When calculating the backlink gap, you must know which keywords are relevant to your niche and business.
With a list of these keywords, you will then be able to calculate how many backlinks you will need to rank on the first page of a search engine.
Again, you must use a specialist site to complete the calculations. For the best results, we recommend that you continue to use Ahrefs.
First, find a website within the top ten ranked sites that offer products or services similar to your business. The website you find should also have a similar domain authority to yours.
You should review the strength of the backlinks on the site you first choose to examine. Look at only the Dofollow links and review those with an authority score above forty.
You can see how many high-authority links that company has that make it highly ranked in Google search results.
You aim to have more high-quality links for your website than your competitor.
If you have more high-quality backlinks than your competitors, you will rank higher than they do on Google. This leads us to understand why high-quality backlinks are good.
Why High-Quality Backlinks Are Good
High-quality backlinks are good because they are high-quality. High-quality links benefit your business by improving your site’s authority and helping you rank higher in SERPs.
The higher your website ranks, the more organic traffic it will receive, so including high-quality links should be a key part of your backlink strategy.
In addition to calculating the number of links you need, you should focus on building backlinks to websites that all provide high-quality content.
Focusing on building links with high-quality websites helps you avoid scam sites that can damage your domain authority. This highlights the importance of considering more factors than just links.
There Are More Factors Than Just Links
While link building is an important part of any SEO process, it will not help your site rank on page one in isolation.
Websites can rank on page one with backlinks and other SEO strategies. If you have fewer backlinks than your competitors and wish to increase your rank while building backlinks without Google penalties, there are several things you can also do.
Creating recognised content in search engines is a great place to start. Writing guest posts or commissioning a guest post or blog post with direct links to your website will help.
Guest posting is an increasingly popular part of SEO strategies.
You can also focus on on-page optimisation, ensuring that every part of your web page is optimised for SEO rankings.
Your digital marketing strategy should include exact page reviews to ensure that all titles, products, images, and descriptions are optimised for your competitive niche.
You should also consider the anchor text you use within your site, as Google analyses this when creating rankings. Higher-quality text is better than a larger quantity. This leads us to the question, are backlinks still important?
Are Backlinks Still Important?
Backlinks are important for a business as they remain the most used way for Google to apportion a domain rating to a website for ranking purposes.
Google’s PageRank algorithm calculates a web page’s relevance by analysing website backlinks.
Over time, the quality of links on your website has become important, as low-quality links negatively impact your rating. Therefore, backlinks remain a vital part of any SEO strategy. This brings us to how many links you’ll need.
How Many Links You’ll Need
As discussed above, the quickest way to determine the number of backlinks you need to improve your ranking is to analyse your competitors’ backlinks.
Generally, you will need one or two more high-quality backlinks than your competitors for the same keyword on their web pages.
The number of backlinks needed cannot be determined without analysing your competitors’ site ranking and information.
If you determine that your website needs 125 backlinks to rank higher than competitors, do not create them all on the first day. This leads us to why the quantity of backlinks is good.
Why Quantity of Backlinks is Good
You may focus on the quantity of backlinks rather than quality for several reasons. You may be setting up a new site and need to increase the number of backlinks you have quickly.
The speed of the process with low-quality backlinks does not stop your site or page from moving up the rankings.
It has been found that the number of domains referring back to your site will steadily improve your ranking within Google.
If you are starting a new site or your ranking has stalled, focusing on building more links, even if they are not the highest quality, will still improve your ranking. This leads us to the question: Do I really need to build backlinks to my homepage?
Do I Really Need To Build Backlinks To My Homepage?
To build your website’s authority, you must create backlinks to your homepage. If Google does not recognise your site as legitimate, any inbound link to pages within your site will not benefit you.
The number of backlinks needed for your homepage varies by niche, but a strong link-building strategy should always target your homepage. This brings us to why the quantity of backlinks is bad.
Why Quantity of Backlinks is Bad
While a high number of backlinks can help your website’s rankings due to the number of URLs referring to your site, quantity over quality is not always the best option for a business.
If you are quickly trying to improve your website’s SEO through more backlinks, you risk link-building to one or more spam websites in your haste to increase the volume of backlinks.
Your page authority and website ranking will be negatively impacted for each spam website you are linked to.
If you focus on creating more links, they will likely be lower quality than those used by other pages. If other websites use higher-quality backlinks, they will have a higher domain authority because they use high-authority sites with fewer links in place.
There is such a thing as having too many low-quality links, as each backlink will have a lower value and page authority for your business. Understanding this helps us explore how to get a high quantity of backlinks.
How to Get a High Quantity of Backlinks
There are multiple ways to get a high quantity of backlinks in a short space of time.
One way is to create reviews and testimonials on external sites with links to your site. For example, if you run a restaurant, you can leave reviews on a site like Trip Advisor and include a link to your menu or homepage.
You can also contact influencers or owners of businesses in a linked market to your company and offer them free products in exchange for a review or mention on their site or social media platform. Always request that they include a link to your site.
Finally, you can use tools that tell you if your company or product has already been mentioned on another site.
If your company is mentioned without a link, contact the site owner to request its inclusion. This leads us to the next topic: Enough Already—How Many Backlinks Do You Need.
Enough Already—How Many Backlinks Do You Need?
The volume of backlinks you need to rank higher will depend on several factors. The factors include the number and rank of the competitors in your niche, how many backlinks your competitors have in place, and their domain authority.
We recommend researching the information needed for your SEO strategy. This brings us to the next question of how many backlinks to inner pages.
How Many Backlinks To Inner Pages?
Again, the best way to establish the number of backlinks you need to inner pages is to search for exact keywords and their rankings.
You should then review the top ten competitors for your niche and establish how many backlinks they have.
Look specifically at which pages have the most and least backlinks and how many backlinks there are to the homepage.
Again, you can use a tool to see the amount of content and volume of backlinks for each company you are interested in.
Using this information, you can determine the number of backlinks to your site’s inner pages, which provides valuable insights. This brings us to the next topic: how I analyse my competitors’ backlinks.
How Do I Analyse My Competitors’ Backlinks?
In addition to using a program as discussed above, you should look closely at your niche’s competitors.
You cannot just find out their number of backlinks and increase them by a set percentage to rank higher.
Google values various aspects of the link-building process differently, so you should find other sites with the same target audience and analyse their links.
You should find out which domains and pages your competitors are getting their links from and the content on their sites.
From there, the key takeaways are to mimic or improve on what they are doing to rank higher with Google. This brings us to the next important step, understanding how to check how many backlinks a website has.
How to Check How Many Backlinks a Website Has?
Several tools are available to check the number of backlinks each site you are interested in currently has. You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEOJet to find and analyse the information.
If unsure which tool suits you best, evaluate several options by considering their information, presentation, and cost to make an informed decision. This brings us to the sliding scale of brand authority, content, and backlinks.
The Sliding Scale Of Brand Authority, Content, and Backlinks
When asking how many backlinks I need to rank, you should also check that you have created brand authority on your homepage, identified the power pages within your site included appropriate content on those pages, and built high-quality backlinks.
If you can build a big enough brand trusted by Google that your homepage ranks first, you can relax a little about creating links to inner pages on the site.
Content is important for ranking higher than competitors. A power page with main keywords and optimized content will boost your rankings. Now, let’s explore how many backlinks a new website needs.
How Many Backlinks Does A New Website Need?
It is a recognised fact that the more high-quality links a website has, the more organic traffic it will receive.
When setting up a new site, the key is to ensure that any new links are of high quality to improve domain authority with Google.
Creating five to seven new, high-quality links each month for a prolonged period will greatly benefit new sites.
While gradually increasing the number of links you build, you should regularly review the site’s domain authority.
As this increases, you can gradually increase the number of links you build each month.
In addition to creating links, ensure that you create content that is relevant to your niche and will link to your SEO strategy.
If you don’t continue optimizing your site as you increase link building, you will waste your time. This brings us to the question of whether the quality of your backlinks is more important than the quantity.
Is The Quality Of My Backlinks More Important Than The Quantity?
When considering how important backlinks are to your site, there are benefits to both high-quality and high-quantity backlinks.
A higher quantity of backlinks allows more search traffic to be directed to your business.
However, if the quality of those links is low, then Google will not rank you as high, and therefore, more backlinks would be needed to get a better ranking for search results.
The answer to this question can become circular, so we recommend always focusing on the quality of the links you build.
If you need to build many backlinks quickly, ensure the sites you link to are legitimate, not scams. Now, let’s explore the importance of writing great content.
Write Great Content
When looking to write great content, you should identify the keywords that will help you optimise your pages and ensure that those keywords are used.
If you are creating a guest post, you may choose to have several guest posts use the same keyword to build authority.
Alternatively, you may choose a longer piece of content that covers multiple keywords and variations of those keywords to improve traffic from search results.
Include anchor text that includes your keywords to add more context.
If you outsource content writing, ensure you provide all key information needed for optimal ranking. Now, let’s explore how many backlinks per day is safe.
How Many Backlinks Per Day Is Safe?
Many companies will advise that creating a high volume of links daily will result in Google penalties; however, that is not always the case.
If you create a large volume of links per day in a natural way, you will not receive a penalty.
So, if a video or post on social media goes viral that relates to your niche, and you create a link to it along with thousands of other business owners in that and linked niches, this is natural.
If the anchor text looks like a random link or scam, Google will lower your ranking due to reduced authority. This brings us to whether you should build more links from the same website.
Should I Build More Links From the Same Website?
Building multiple links from the same domain will benefit your link-building strategy. However, when building multiple links from the same site, you should ensure backlinks from multiple pages within that site rather than the same page each time.
If you receive links from the same page repeatedly, Google may flag this as spam, which can damage your ranking.
If you’ve identified a trusted domain from which you can build multiple links to your site, proceed with this strategy. This leads us to the next important question: how many backlinks does my website have?
How Many Backlinks Does My Website Have?
To determine your site’s link count, use a backlink checker tool. This provides information on the number and quality of links. Now, let’s focus on building high-quality backlinks to content.
Build High-Quality Backlinks To Content
When building links to your homepage or inner pages, ensuring high quality for each link you create is better.
Spending time ensuring correct keywords and well-written content saves money and sustainably improves your ranking. This leads us to the next topic: what is a quality backlink profile?
What Is A Quality Backlink Profile?
A quality backlink profile relates to all of the information Google can find about your site’s backlinks.
This will include if the source is trusted within your niche, that the link is not spam, that the link is to a site with a high domain authority, and much more.
Algorithms assess your site’s backlink profile to determine its ranking. Fewer high-quality links are more beneficial, so the question is how many high-quality backlinks I need.
How Many High-Quality Backlinks Do I Need?
The number of high-quality backlinks you need will depend on the target keyword you use to increase your SEO.
You should check each target keyword against other websites in your niche to see how many high-quality backlinks that site has.
To ensure your domain ranking is higher, you should aim to have at least one more high-quality backlink than the website you are competing against.
This type of link-building strategy will ensure that you do not spend time creating more backlinks than are actually needed to achieve your goal.
Final Thoughts on Backlink Strategy
Effective link-building is crucial for improving your website’s SEO and securing a higher ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Focusing on quality over quantity can enhance your site’s authority and drive more organic traffic. Conduct thorough keyword research, create high-quality content, and build backlinks from reputable, relevant sources. Regularly monitor your backlink profile and adjust your strategy based on competitor analysis. Balancing quality and quantity in your backlink strategy is key to sustainable SEO success.
