How Many Backlinks Do You Need?

Building links is one of the most important SEO tactics. When Google’s bots crawl websites, they focus on incoming links to rate a site’s authority. High-quality backlinks drive traffic to your website and often lead to increased revenue. Despite this, more than 55% of websites don’t have any backlinks at all. Of those that do, nearly 30% have fewer than three links. So, how many backlinks do you need to rank? 

Here, we dig into this question and go over how you can set realistic and effective goals for adding backlinks to your site. 

What Is a Backlink?

First, let’s define a backlink. Simply put, a backlink is a link on an external website that leads to a page on your own website. They are considered the strongest “referral” you can get online, especially if they come from websites that rank highly in Google’s search engine results pages. 

How Many Backlinks Do You Need To Rank in the Top Spots on Google?

So, how many backlinks should you look for as a baseline? As a very general rule, a good website has 40-50 backlinks to its homepage and 0-100 to each subpage.

Too few backlinks mean Google’s web crawlers won’t boost your pages in search engine results. However, too many can look like you’re receiving backlinks unethically, so they won’t be counted, either. The suggested range of backlinks is so wide because not every link is created equal.

How many backlinks you really need for an individual page depends on a few factors:

• How many links your page’s competitors already have
• Your website’s domain authority (your existing credibility in the eyes of search engines) 
• The quality of the links you are adding

We take a closer look at these considerations below. 

What Factors Determine How Many Backlinks I Need To a Page?

There is no magic number of links that guarantees a top-ranking page. Instead, consider the unique needs of each page you’re hoping to build up.

Domain Authority

Your domain authority determines how strong your domain is overall. Domain rating and authority scores are important as well. The rating shows a website’s power in its backlink profile, while the authority score focuses on the SEO performance of a website overall. These all work on 100-point scales: The higher the number is, the more authoritative the domain is. 

This is important for two reasons:

• Firstly, the higher your domain authority, the fewer backlinks you may need to beat the current top-ranking results.
• Secondly, a website with a high domain authority typically carries more weight when it links back to your site compared to a website with less authority.

This is part of what separates cheap “black hat” linking techniques from high-quality, credible linking services. A few high-quality backlinks easily outshine dozens of low-quality referrals.

Relevance 

Search engines are better than ever at spotting spammy, unhelpful link building practices. This includes links that make no sense and aren’t relevant to your site. If the sites that link back to you have nothing to do with what’s being discussed, it looks bad to web crawlers and likely won’t benefit you. Consider the following examples of relevant and irrelevant links:

• Irrelevant: A website focused on cooking linking back to a blog on HIPAA compliance.
• Relevant: A website focused on health and wellbeing linking back to a blog on the best vitamin supplements for women.
• Irrelevant: A website focused on pet care linking back to the services page of a car mechanic.
• Relevant: A dentist linking to an orthodontist’s blog on when to consider braces.

This seems intuitive, but it is another feature typically missed by low-quality link builders. Google is smart about crawling your links to see if they show your content as relevant to the sites the links are coming from. One relevant link from a relevant website may be worth much more than lots of links from irrelevant ones.

As an example, we took a site about grammar rules and examples and analyzed the backlinks going back to the site. Although the site has about 4100 total backlinks from about 743 referring domains, there are a number of those links coming from irrelevant sites:

You can see that some of the sites referring back have supe low authority scores and look to just be rss feeds or blanket listing sites with no relevancy to grammar rules or writing. Even though they are getting a number backlinks back from those sites, those links probably aren’t doing much to move the needle in terms of ranking higher on Google for high search volume terms.

Remember, link building is all about being helpful to real people who are browsing the web. Relevant links are the kind that could be naturally attracted with high-quality content, but they can also be added via the outreach of credible link builders.

Keyword Difficulty and Competitiveness

Like domain authority, keyword difficulty works on a 100-point scale. Winning a keyword with a high difficulty (aka a lot of competition online) is always going to be more difficult, and often more expensive, than winning a low-competition keyword. Keywords that have a higher difficulty will likely need more backlinks and higher quality backlinks than lower competition keywords in order to rank for them online.

Strategically selecting content on your site that already ranks for some keywords and has achievable competitors helps you get the most out of your link-building budget. This is part of why we suggest a consistent SEO blog writing plan for anyone hoping to improve SEO on their site. You need a lot of content to work with!

Currently Ranking Pages

Looking at the pages that currently rank in the top spots on Google for the keyword terms you’re trying to win is one of the best ways you can decide how many backlinks you need to win the top spots on Google.  You can use tools such as SEMrush to analyze how many backlinks the top-ranking results have. If the competitors to your page have dozens of links and multiple referring domains, you’re probably going to need at least as many backlinks as they have (or more) in order to beat them.

As was mentioned above, you’ll also want to consider the Domain Authority of the pages you’re competing with. If the website pages beating you have a higher domain authority than your site, they’ll have a slight edge. You’ll need to make up that difference with either more backlinks, higher quality back links (from high domain authority sites), or more relevant links.

If you have SEMrush, you can do this competitive backlink analysis exercise using their backlink analytics tool. Simply put in the URL of the page you’re hoping to get to rank in the top spots on Google and compare it against 3-5 of the pages currently ranking in the top 1-5 spots on Google for that term. For a simple way to find that info, you can go into incognito mode on Google and just type in the keyword to see what comes up.

For this example, we used the keyword term “common idioms” and the page “grammarmill.com/common-idioms/” as our example page we hope to win for that keyword. Here is the graph:

You can see that although our page has the lowest domain authority score of the other top ranking pages, we do have the edge on referring domains as well as backlinks over the bottom two competitors on that list. To beat out those sites, we may need to focus more on a link building strategy that raises our overall DA (domain authority), more so than just getting links back to that individual page.

To beat out the the other two sites we’d need to not only raise our existing site DA, but potentially add a few hundred more backlinks (or focus on getting fewer, higher quality links from sites with high DA), as well as look a getting links from more referring domains. So while this analysis shows we’re at least in the mix for the top 5 spots on Google for this keyword phrase, in order to get our page to the top 1-3 spots could take some intense link building work.

Internal Linking

The number of internal links a page receives impacts how many backlinks a page needs as well. Studies show that, like backlinks, internal links allow a website to rise in the ranks of Google’s search engine results pages. You’ll want to balance the number of backlinks you seek with a solid internal linking strategy. 

Create internal links to pages on your site that you want to rank the highest, making sure to use keywords in the anchor text. Ensure the links are from relevant content since the text surrounding the anchor text is also a factor in Google’s algorithms. 

How Does My Overall Strategy Impact How Many Backlinks I Need?

Google encourages organic backlinks, but they can be hard to come by. A high-quality, white-hat link building strategy is a great solution, but to maximize your investment in each and every link, you need to consider how it fits your overall SEO content strategy. Luckily, you don’t always need a ton of backlinks to find yourself in the top 10 on Google.

If you want a better ranking with fewer links, choose three to five keywords to optimize on each page, focusing on those with low keyword difficulty scores. Use these keywords in the right HTML locations for Google’s bots to crawl.

Your content also needs to be relevant to the user’s search intent. Search your chosen keywords and look through the first few results to get an idea of what type of content Google is looking for. After you publish each page, add a few internal links that are relevant to your content. Finally, when you identify content that is close to performing well, work on adding high-quality backlinks. 

How Do I Get Backlinks To My Site?

You can attract backlinks naturally through high-quality content. However, to get the number of backlinks you need to rank, you may need to work with a professional link building service. 

Create High-Quality, Original SEO Content

Google looks for quality over quantity. The best thing you can do for your internet presence is to create high-quality, original content that offers value to your readers. Business websites with blogs get more backlinks than those without, so blogging is an excellent way to start. High-quality content on your website also provides the perfect jumping-off point for strategic link-building projects that will get you to the number of links needed to rank substantially better. 

Think about the products and services you offer. What information might a reader need in order to understand those products and services better? A good blog offers a combination of long-form and short-form content. It includes high-quality keywords, professional photographs, video content, infographics, or other types of information. The best SEO blogs are updated anywhere from 1-4 times per week and are regularly audited and updated to ensure the best keywords and content available.

Blogging can be a time-consuming process, so don’t be afraid to reach out to professionals for help. You can purchase SEO blog writing services that not only provide the content you need but also include link-building services to help amplify them. 

Get Rid of Broken Links

Broken links can wreak havoc on your ranking in Google’s search engine results pages. Use a relevant tool to search your website for any broken links and correct them regularly.

Take it a step further by seeking out broken links on other websites as well. This requires an outreach strategy that is polite, complimentary, and informative. If you notice broken links on a website that could be changed to direct to relevant content you’ve written (thus making a backlink to your website), create a well-structured email to send to the website’s owner. Compliment them on their content and express what you enjoyed. Then, point out the broken links. Finally, close your email by mentioning links on your website to replace the broken links. With any luck, you’ll receive an email back and secure a backlink. 

Let Us Help You Determine How Many Backlinks You Need

How many backlinks you need to rank in the top spots on Google varies greatly from page to page. We can help you find the right number to target that is strategic while being as cost-effective as possible.

Now it’s time to implement your new link building plans! BKA Content provides a variety of SEO services, including strategic blogging and link-building services. We have a proven track record of excellence and are ready to help you rise in Google’s rankings and create your own successful website. Contact us to set up your SEO services!