How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank?

Backlinks are one of the most important SEO factors when it comes to online visibility.

The number of backlinks pointing to your site often correlates with how high it ranks in the search engine results pages.

But the heavily debated question among website owners and SEO experts is, “How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank?”

The short answer is: it depends.

While backlinks were once considered the main factor for ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs), Google has additional considerations these days.

To know how many backlinks you need to dominate the search results, you must understand the intricacies of backlink quality.

In this article, we discuss:

➡️ Whether backlinks are still a ranking factor.

➡️ The importance of high-quality backlinks.

➡️ Whether getting more high-quality links will help you rank in search results.

➡️ How domain authority impacts your link-building strategy.

➡️ How many links you need to rank highly in the SERPs.

We also included a list of expert-approved tips and tricks to help you improve your on-page SEO and begin generating high-quality links to your own website.

🔗 What Is a Backlink?

Backlinks are incoming links from another website to your own website.

The person writing the content links to your website because it contains information that's of value to their users.

The backlink can be included in a blog post, anchor text, or anywhere else you might find links on a website.

Some of the reasons for linking to another website include:

• It features relevant research.

• It’s a source of facts.

• It’s a place where you can get more information.

• It enables the reader to take further action—for example, buying a product.

As opposed to on-page SEO (which focuses on optimizing your web pages), building backlinks is a type of off-page SEO. When you build backlinks, you are essentially gaining votes of confidence from other websites.

Google considers backlinks when ranking a website in its SERPs. That’s because backlinks indicate that a website is creating valuable, relevant, and trustworthy content.

🤔 Are Backlinks a Ranking Factor in 2024?

Ranking highly in the SERPs is essential for building a solid online presence and increasing sales.

This is because when your website ranks well, it becomes more visible.

Backlinks have always been an important part of search engine optimization (SEO).

Although algorithm updates have seen the importance of backlinks decrease, they are still relevant today.

If we have a look at the graph below that depicts the number of referring domains and organic traffic a website generated, an interesting correlation becomes clear:

In early 2021, there was a sharp increase in the number of referring domains to the site. Referring domains are the unique websites that contain backlinks pointing to the site.

Following this spike in backlinks, there is a noticeable rise in average organic traffic. As the website has continued to build links, its traffic has also increased.

This indicates that obtaining more links can boost a website’s visibility on Google’s results pages.

So, does this mean that building more backlinks is better?

According to Google, the role of backlinks has evolved and the way you should use them has changed, too. It now places greater emphasis on the quality of backlinks rather than the quantity of links.

It’s not just about how many backlinks you have. It’s about how relevant and authoritative they are.

Link-building strategies have had to evolve alongside these algorithm updates.

Today, the best way to push your website up the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to build relevant links from reputable websites with high domain authority—even if it means that you obtain fewer backlinks in total.

🔍 How do backlinks affect search rankings?

In the past, building backlinks was all about quantity.

The more backlinks a website had, the better its chances were of ranking high.

However, this approach didn’t always deliver credible results for users and spammy websites began emerging.

These websites provided no real value to users, but managed to manipulate search rankings through the sheer number of backlinks they had.

Google has since evolved, and the quantity of backlinks is no longer the only ranking factor.

Now, its algorithms apply an extra layer of requirements to assess backlinks when ranking websites. The aim is to ensure that the websites that rank highly are the ones with real authority and value.

Google’s 2022 Link Spam Update stresses the importance of having high-quality backlinks and a natural backlink profile if you want your site to rank in the SERPs.

So, having fewer links from high-quality websites may be more beneficial to your SEO strategy than having multiple links from low-quality sites.

What does this mean for websites trying to improve their rankings in 2024? Simply put, you should prioritize quality over quantity when building links.

👀 How Many Backlinks Do I Need?

One of the most common questions website owners ask is, “How many backlinks should a website have to rank well in the SERPs?”

As mentioned earlier, the answer is: it depends.

Building backlinks from websites with higher domain authority is more beneficial than building more backlinks from low-quality websites.

While there is no one-size-fits-all number, there are some methods you can use to determine how many backlinks you will need to rank well.

These methods largely revolve around identifying the level of SEO competition for similar keywords in your industry or niche and analyzing competitor authority.

Once you have determined this, you can start developing SEO campaigns to help you target opportunities and boost your website’s ranking in the SERPs.

🤔 Methods to Determine the Right Number of Links for Your Website

Determining the number of backlinks you need can be tricky and time-consuming if you don’t know where to start.

Below, we outline two simple ways to determine the number of backlinks you’ll need for your website.

✅ Identify the number of backlinks for similar pages in your industry

Depending on your industry or niche, you may need more or fewer backlinks than other websites.

Some industries are more competitive than others, so you’ll need a large volume of high-quality backlinks to rank well.

For example, ranking in the SEO niche is difficult because it’s full of industry experts who know exactly what needs to be done to grab Google’s attention.

If you want your business to stand out, you’ll have to spend a lot of time creating valuable content before seeing results.

To view and analyze the backlink profile of similar websites, you can use SEO tools like the Ahrefs’ ‘Site Explorer’ feature.

Start by typing in the URL of your website and clicking on the search button:

On the Overview page, scroll down to the ‘Top organic competitors’ graph. Then, click on ‘View top 20’:

Here, you will be able to see your top 20 competitors in your niche:

Now that you know who your top competitors are, you can type their URL into the Ahrefs search bar, then click on ‘Backlinks’ to see their backlink profile:

In the example above, the competitor has 2,503 backlinks. You may need to match or exceed that number to rank higher than your competitors. You’d also need to ensure the links you built were with domains of similar relevance and quality.

✅ Determine the number of backlinks for your target keyword

Targeting the right keywords helps both users and Google understand the relevance and value of your content.

Here’s how to use Ahrefs to identify which keywords your competitors are ranking for, and how you can outperform them in the SERPs:

First, click on Ahrefs’ ‘Keyword Explorer’ tab and type in one or more keywords you want to target:

Once you’ve done that, you will be able to see various statistics relating to your chosen keywords, including their difficulty, search volume, and cost per click.

To explore which websites are ranking for your target keyword, simply click on the keyword:

You’ll be directed to the keyword ‘Overview’ page, which provides more in-depth information about the keyword, including:

• Keyword difficulty.

• Search volume.

• Traffic potential.

• Global search volume.

• Keyword ideas.

Then, scroll down to the ‘SERP overview’ section. Here, you’ll see a list of the top-ranking pages for the keyword and how many backlinks they have:

So, if you run an accounting firm, you would need to analyze your competitors’ content and how many backlinks they have pointing to their content.

To rank higher than them in the SERPs, you would need to create better, more up-to-date content and obtain a higher volume of high-quality backlinks than they have.

💡 What Does a High-Quality Backlink Look Like?

High-quality backlinks are key to a ranking website, so it’s important to know how to recognize them.

Thanks to new insights gleaned from the recent Google documentation leaks, we have a clearer understanding of what makes a backlink truly valuable.

Here’s what you should look out for:

👉 Relevance: According to the Google data leak, the search engine completely ignores irrelevant links. Links from locally relevant websites (those from the same country) are also considered more valuable than links from websites in different countries.

👉 Freshness: Links from newer pages are more valuable than old links. This underscores why it’s so important to treat link building as an ongoing activity in order to continually earn new backlinks.

👉 Authority: Backlinks from pages that already have high authority are considered more valuable than lower-ranking sites. These backlinks also have a bigger impact on your rankings.

👉 Velocity: Google monitors link velocity to assess the authenticity of link growth. A slow but steady rate of link acquisition is generally viewed more favorably than erratic spikes, which may be flagged as spam.

👉 Editorial merit: These backlinks are naturally earned from another individual web page, based on the quality and value of your content. The best ones are not bought or manipulated, which indicates true quality.

👉 Diversity: Backlinks from a variety of authoritative domains signal that your content is valuable to users. It also indicates that your content will be useful to a broader audience, which helps to improve rankings.

👉 Link placement: The placement of backlinks matters more than you might realize. Links appearing within content in the main body of the web page are more influential than those in a footer or sidebar. Google assigns higher value to contextual backlinks embedded in relevant and informative content.

📊 Factors That Affect How Highly Your Website Will Rank

In addition to building links, there are a number of other factors that will influence how highly your website will rank in the SERPs.

Understanding the following SEO factors can help you develop a comprehensive strategy geared toward improving your ranking:

💪 Domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR)

Domain authority (DA) is an SEO metric developed by Moz to evaluate the strength and authority of your overall website. Domain rating (DR) is a similar metric developed by Ahrefs. It measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile.

The DA or DR of your website is represented on a scale of 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority and potential to rank in the SERPs.

This metric is calculated by considering factors like:

• The total number of backlinks pointing to your domain.

• The number and quality of linking domains.

If you have a high DA, the quicker and higher your new content will rank in the SERPs. As your DA increases, fewer backlinks are needed to retain its ranking.

This is because Google already sees your website as trustworthy.

Lower DA or DR scores typically indicate that your site may need to gain more authority before it can start ranking, which means you may require more high-quality backlinks.

It’s important to know that Google doesn’t directly consider DA or DR when it determines the ranking position of a website. Google’s 2024 data leak, however, does reveal that it uses an internal page rank score, which may be similar to how Moz and Ahrefs determine a website’s credibility.

This implies that your DA or DR shouldn’t be taken as an absolute data point.

Instead, SEO professionals can use the DA or DR of a website as a reference point from which they can develop a backlink strategy.

🔑 Keyword difficulty (KD)

Keyword difficulty (KD) is a 100-point metric that indicates how competitive a word or phrase is in the SERPs.

It was created by Moz to help SEO specialists develop keyword strategies.

This metric provides an overview of how difficult it would be to rank for a specific keyword compared to websites of a similar kind.

When analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword, many SEO tools will take the backlink profiles of top-ranking websites into account.

If a number of authoritative websites are ranking for a specific keyword, there’s a good chance that the KD will be high.

If your website has a low DA or DR, you may want to focus your search on those with low keyword difficulty scores.

For example, the image below shows the SERP overview for the keyword “link building.” The KD, calculated using Ahrefs, is 85.

The top 10 results will typically have an extremely high domain rating, meaning the websites are considered highly authoritative.

If you want to rank for that specific keyword (“link building”), you would need to have more than 400 high-quality backlinks to compete for one of these spots.

🔑 Target keywords

Keywords are the terms and phrases that potential customers use when searching for information, products, or services.

By targeting the right keywords, you can show up in the SERPs and increase your search traffic from users who are interested in what you offer.

However, it's not as easy as simply choosing your target keywords and using them in your content.

All of the competitors in your niche are likely targeting the same words.

This means that you need to take a strategic approach when selecting keywords to target.

🔗 Internal linking

Internal linking is an SEO strategy that involves linking an individual page on your website to another page on that site.

Like external backlinks, internal links are created using anchor text.

Anchor text is the clickable text that site visitors can use to navigate to other pages.

Here’s an example of anchor text:

In the example above, the anchor text is “important for SEO.”

When a user clicks on this, they are directed to a blog that delves deeper into why backlinks are important for SEO.

Using more internal links can impact the overall number of backlinks you’ll need to rank in the SERPs.

Here's how that works:

👉Distribute link equity: When you link one of your web pages to another, the linking page passes on some of its authority to the target page. This is called link equity or link juice. Having strong internal links pointing to authoritative pages on your site can help improve your rankings. This means that you might need fewer external backlinks to support the page.

👉Support lower authority pages: Internal links can support web pages with lower authority or fewer external backlinks. By including links to your lower authority pages in a higher authority page, you indicate they are valuable and trustworthy. Over time, this can help with visibility and rankings.

👉Enhancing content relevance: Internal linking can help you create connections between related content on your website. By linking internal pages, you create a network of information that improves Google’s understanding of your website. It also helps it index new pages quicker, which may help increase authority.

🎨 High-quality content

Creating great content should be a key component of your on-page SEO strategy.

This helps to increase natural links to it, which prove that your website is valuable and worth ranking highly in the SERPs.

This means you should create content that is:

• Valuable to the reader or solves a problem they have.

• Contains a minimum of 700 words. Google often considers content of under roughly 1,000 words to be too sparse to be helpful.

• Well researched and supported by credible sources.

• Filled with actionable tips and solutions.

• Original and engaging.

• Authoritative.

• Optimized with target keywords and proper formatting.

By creating appealing content, you can improve your chances of building backlinks to the individual web page you want to rank well in the SERPs.

🔧Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website's infrastructure to help Google crawl and index your site.

It's the foundation upon which all other SEO performance strategies are built. It ensures that your site is easily accessible, fast, and understood by Google.

If your technical SEO is poor, it doesn’t matter how good your content quality is or how many backlinks you build.

If Google can’t crawl and index your site, it may not show up in the SERPs at all.

Optimizing your website creates a solid foundation for your link-building efforts and other SEO strategies to perform well.

Here are the technical factors that affect your overall SEO performance:

👉 Crawlability and indexability: Search engines need to crawl and index your site’s pages to rank them. Improve your site’s crawlability by submitting a sitemap, using a robots.txt file, and applying noindex tags where necessary. Read our article on how to improve your site’s indexibility to find out more.

👉 Site architecture: A well-structured architecture ensures that your website is organized logically. This makes it easier for search engines to understand and index your content. Structure your website's navigation around logical hubs that feature similar information.

👉 URL: Your URLs should be clean, descriptive, and include relevant keywords. Avoid using long strings of numbers or special characters. An example of a good URL is www.yourwebsite.com/category/keyword. This helps both users and search engines understand the content of the page.

👉 Page speed: Slow-loading pages can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. Improve your web page by optimizing images, minifying JavaScript, ensuring accurate HTML locations, and using browser caching. Assess the speed of your website with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

👉 Mobile-friendliness: Google uses mobile-first indexing, so having a responsive design that provides a seamless experience across all devices is critical for ranking in the SERPs. You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test this.

👉 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): Google considers HTTPS a ranking factor, and having an SSL certificate can improve your site’s trustworthiness and security. If you’re still on HTTP, contact your web hosting company and ask whether you can switch to HTTPS.

👍 How to Generate High-Quality Links

Generating quality links is a fundamental aspect of an effective SEO strategy.

In this section, we take a look at a few methods and best practices you can use to build a high-quality backlink profile.

🖥️ Guest blogging

Guest blogging involves creating content for other sites within your industry or niche. It allows you to showcase your expertise, reach a new audience, and build backlinks.

If you’re considering guest blogging, remember to focus on reputable websites that align with your target audience.

You should also look for websites with high domain authority or page authority.

To ensure that you generate high-quality backlinks from your guest blogs, your content should:

• Be well written and thoroughly researched.

• Be original.

• Solve a problem for the readers.

• Be properly formatted.

• Include relevant backlinks to your own website.

When done correctly, guest blogging is a great way to help you reach your backlink goals.

It’s important to stay focused on your target audience to ensure that you generate high-quality, organic traffic.

🕵️ Broken link building

Broken link building involves finding ‘dead’ links on other sites and reaching out to the owners to suggest replacing them with organic backlinks to relevant content on your page.

To make the most out of broken link building, craft personalized outreach messages to send to websites that contain them. Your message should highlight the issue and suggest a suitable link replacement.

Not only does this strategy help you earn quality backlinks, but it also helps build relationships with other site owners in your niche.

🗞️ PR link building

This link-building strategy employs public relations (PR) tactics to earn backlinks from news publications, journalists, and authoritative websites.

It mainly involves creating newsworthy and shareable content that attracts attention from journalists, such as:

• Press releases.

• Industry reports.

• Case studies.

• Data-led studies.

Building relationships with journalists and influencers in your industry gives you the opportunity to position yourself as a valuable resource.

When your content gets picked up, you’ll earn high-quality backlinks that improve your authority and visibility in the SERPs.

🤝 Editorial outreach

Editorial outreach strategies focus on reaching out to editors, bloggers, journalists, and content creators in your industry and pitching opportunities for collaboration.

These collaborations may include guest posts or mentions that typically result in increased traffic and backlinks.

Wrapping Up on How Many Links You Need to Rank

Even though their role has evolved, backlinks still play an important part in SEO strategies and improving your website’s ranking.

There is no straightforward answer to the question, “How many backlinks should a website have?” because a high number of backlinks won’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll rank higher in the SERPs.

As Google’s algorithms have become more sophisticated, it’s not just about how many links you have—it’s about the quality of those links and the referring domains they originate from.

More links aren’t better, but building high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites is key to improving your credibility.

Don’t simply try to build as many links as possible—make sure they actually provide value first.

To learn more about how we use these strategies and our industry expertise to help you build high-quality backlinks, visit the LinkBuilder website and blog.

If you’re ready to obtain links, contact us to find out how we can help.