How Many Backlinks Does My Site Need to Rank Well on Google?

One of the most frequently asked questions is “how many backlinks do I need to rank?” and almost everyone in the SEO industry has one answer to it:

“It depends…”

Today, we are going to unearth the answer to this question with some real facts. However, be mindful that so many factors influence the ranking on Google and you should keep them in account.

That said, let’s first understand why backlinks are so important for search engine optimisation.

Significance of Backlinks as a Ranking Factor

We all know that backlinks are one of the most important factors established by Andrey Lipattsev back in 2016. They are links from other websites that point to yours. For example, if you link an external website from your page, they’ve got a backlink from you.

When one website links to another, it signals search engines that the linked website offers value and is a trustworthy source.

The more high-quality backlinks your website gets, the higher chance it has of ranking well in search engine results pages (SERP) and getting more organic traffic.

A study by Ahrefs has found that over 90% of the pages get zero organic traffic from search engines like Google. The biggest reason for the same is they don’t have enough backlinks from quality sources.

As the image above explains, the more unique referring domains your site has, the higher the search traffic you get. Referring domains are nothing but backlinks from unique websites.

The data here may not imply that the backlinks help you rank at the top position, however, it’s an observation that for good ranking, you need to build more quality links. Apart from that, here’s why backlinks are significant part of SEO for your website:

Authority: Backlinks are votes of confidence from other reputable sites and signal search engines that your website is a trustworthy source of information. They help establish credibility and authority for your website and aid in your rankings in SERP.

Relevance: In addition to authority, backlinks also help search engines understand the relevance of your website from the linked source. For instance, if a healthcare or SaaS website links back to you, search engines will consider that your website also belongs to the same industries. This way search engines can better understand the content of your website and position you higher in relevant search queries.

Brand Awareness: Another important reason to build backlinks is to increase brand awareness. Backlinks act as a brand awareness campaign that helps you attract more customers from other sites. You can leverage the thousands of monthly visitors from authoritative websites to reach new customers.

Is It Possible to Rank Without Backlinks?

Understand that backlinks are an important part of your SEO strategy and a major ranking factor, however, it’s not the only factor that Google considers. There are several other ranking factors including quality content, technical SEO, user experience, level of on-page optimisation, and others.

These factors do impact your website’s ranking and may help you rank higher in SERP even without many backlinks. A website with excellent content that satisfies user/search intent, provides a great user experience, and is technically optimised can do well on SERP.

For instance, major authority sites don’t bother building links for their content platforms and can rank higher autonomously.

But these sites are an exception and not a norm, thus, most startups taking the route of SEO will need a certain number of backlinks from high-authority sites.

Also, as established from Ahrefs’ study, backlinks have a greater impact on your Google SERP rankings. Additionally, ranking high without building any links may take longer and require more effort.

Overall, building a diverse and high-quality link profile for your website can significantly improve your website’s authority, relevance, and visibility in SERP. While you can rank without building any backlinks, particularly in a less competitive niche, it’ll require a tremendous amount of work and effort.

How Many Links are Necessary for a New Website to Rank?

Often the first question most brands have before starting a link-building campaign is, how many backlinks do I need to rank? Understand that link building is a recurring process where you obtain a set number of links every month or a quarter.

And there is no fixed number to quote that can help you easily rank on the Google. However, according to the Ahrefs study, over 66% of the pages have zero backlinks while only 2.1% have 10+ backlinks and only 0.08% have 100+.

The study had already established that most pages don’t get any traffic from search engines. This helps establish the correlation that pages that don’t have any backlinks also don’t get search traffic.

Additionally, the number of links required to rank higher and get search traffic from Google varies depending on the competition, keyword difficulty, link quality and relevance, content quality, and more.

Generally, the more quality links you build, the more likely you are to rank high in search results. To build as many quality and relevant links, you need to form a solid link-building strategy. While you do so, focus only on the quality of links rather than the quantity of links.

For instance, 5 backlinks from high-authority domains have more value than 25 backlinks from irrelevant and low-authority domains.

Thus, start building a strong backlink profile for your website and focus on providing value to the audience that lands on your page from other sites.

For the same, start blogger outreach to find sites and blogs belonging to your niche and pitch them for a guest post opportunity. Besides you can also utilise several other ways to acquire quality links through your link-building campaign.

Apart from the backlinks, you should also focus on the key areas of your website optimisation such as technical SEO, on-page optimisation, page speed, and more. While you may successfully build hundreds of links, if your page isn’t optimised to rank, all your effort will go in vain.

To address this, you must give equal attention to other ranking factors besides backlinks for a comprehensive SEO strategy.

How to Create a Quality Backlink Profile?

A high-quality backlink profile is created when you acquire backlinks from high-authority sites. A high-quality backlink should meet the following requirements:

• It’s coming from a high-authority page which also has more links to high-authority domains.
• It’s relevant to the niche of the website it's coming from.
• The source is trustworthy and does not indulge in spammy activities.
• It’s coming from a unique referring domain than the ones that already exist.
• It’s not a reciprocal link or link exchange.

Search engine algorithms do check these requirements when assessing the backlink profile of a website to determine whether it has quality links or not. The more quality and relevant backlink from the high-authority domains you have, the more qualitative your backlink profile will be.

Moreover, Google has reduced the value of reciprocal links since webmasters exploited it in the past to gain leverage over the competition. Thus, to maintain a quality backlink profile, it’s better that you acquire reasonable links from different and relevant sites than hundreds of links from the same IP address and irrelevant sources.

How Many Backlinks Each Page on Your Website Should Have?

There is no general consensus to answer how many high quality backlinks do I need to rank. But most industry experts would agree that a homepage of a website should have at least 40 to 50 links from diverse sources.

Additionally, each important page on your website should have at least 10 to 100 or more backlinks depending on the competitiveness and keyword difficulty to rank. In order to outrank your competitors for the same keywords, you need to outnumber them by building more quality backlinks for each page.

In the case where you belong to a low competitive niche, you need to build 0 to 25 backlinks for each important page that you want to rank for. But in general, 40 to 50 number of backlinks from high-quality, relevant, and high-authority pages should be the ideal scenario.

5 Easy Ways to Build More Links to Rank Higher

Now that you have got answer to how many backlink do I need, you want to start building as many links as possible. The first thing you need to do is analyse your competitors to see how they’ve achieved success in link-building.

Scrutinise their backlink profile to find methods your competitors have adopted to acquire quality links. For the same, you can use any backlink checker tools to find their most linked and visited pages. Following are some of the free and paid tools you can use to carry out this task:

• Free Ahrefs Backlink Checker
• OpenLinkProfile
• Seobility
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Moz

Now that you are equipped with these SEO tools, let’s glance over how to acquire backlinks:

Develop Quality Content Assets

High-quality content assets are underutilised yet the most effective way to get backlinks without putting in much effort. Also, known as linkable content assets, these include in-depth tutorials, guides, infographics, lead magnets, whitepapers, surveys, studies, statistics, etc.

Once created, you only need to do minimal content distribution to get traction initially to show the value your content offers. This will compel publishers to naturally link your resource within their content, earning you backlinks.

Identify Relevant Blogging Sites

Guest blogging is another effective way to produce quality backlinks. Find the relevant bloggers and publishers in your niche using tools or simply by searching for “Topic+intitle: “Write for us or guest post” on Google.

This will give you a list of publishers who accept guest articles and return the favour with a quality backlink. But make sure to provide them with a high-quality guest article that adds value to their blogging site.

Broken Link Building

Another effective method to improve your backlink profile is to find broken links present on relevant and high-authority websites. Once you do, notify the site owner about the same while also pitching them a way to get rid of it by replacing it with a similar resource of yours.

Doing so creates a win-win situation for both as website owners get to remove broken links from their sites while you get to earn a link from them. Since no website wants to lead their user to broken pages, offering a solution would mutually benefit both.

Use HARO for Link Building

Help A Report Out (HARO) is a platform that connects journalists or writers with experts in the field. Here, the journalists seek answers, opinions, or expert quotes and in return give a link back to the professionals.

To build links through this platform, sign up as a source and start receiving queries from journalists and well-known media houses. You can filter queries to find relevant ones and respond to those with as much information as possible to impress the journalists and get links from them.

Link Reclamation and Unlinked Mentions

You’ve put your best foot forward to build as many quality links as possible, however, you may find that your link profile is going down instead of growing. The common reason for something like this is that publishers might have updated or removed your link.

What you can do is reclaim your previously built links from the publishers that removed them. Additionally, there may have been unlinked mentions of your brand or products, and you can request site owners to provide proper attributes and links to your resource.

Final Words

It’s always a burning question: how many backlinks do I need to rank when you start your link-building campaign. But understand that the number of backlinks your website needs to rank high on Google depends on a number of factors.

You need to factor in the competition, content quality, relevancy of the links, keyword difficulty, and more. While building a strong and qualitative backlink profile is vital, building one takes time and effort and is not something you can achieve overnight.

Since building a high-quality backlink profile is essential for SEO and ranking well on SERP, it’s important that you hire an adept SEO agency like Supple. We have a proven track record of helping small to large enterprises with SEO and link-building.

Contact us to consult with our SEO and link-building specialists to form a tailored strategy for your brand and help you grow leaps and bounds.