When it comes to building a website that gets lots of visitors, is highly ranked in terms of SEO, and appears on the first page of Google results when somebody searches for a related topic, one of the most essential things is backlinks.
Google and other search engines put a lot of weight onto high-quality backlinks, and it would appear that the more you have, the better off you are. If you don’t know how many backlinks your site has or their quality level, performing a backlink analysis is the first thing you should do.
With a good backlink analysis tool, you can find out exactly how many links lead back to your site and how good they are. If you wonder how many backlinks you need to give you a good SEO boost, the answer might be somewhat discouraging or annoying. Let’s explain.
How Many Backlinks Do You Need? It Depends
We realize that no answer could be more frustrating than “it depends,” but the reality is that how many backlinks you need depends on various factors.
There is no set number of backlinks to increase your SEO rankings and attract more site visitors. It just doesn’t work that way.
We will touch on later that quality backlinks are more important than the number of them. You could have 100 bad backlinks, and they won’t do you nearly as much good as 10 quality backlinks.
How many backlinks you need depends on a variety of factors and criteria. The following factors are essential to consider in this regard.
One of the most important factors is how well known and trusted your brand is. If people know who you are and you have a big following, you won’t need as many backlinks. However, if people have no idea who you are, quantity does become necessary.
Another factor to consider is how competitive your niche is. Generally speaking, the more competitive the niche, and the more money it involves, the more backlinks you will need. For instance, a law firm’s website will need many more backlinks than a landscaping website.
The next factor is how many power pages you have. Power pages have lots of amazing content with plenty of writing and a lot of value. When you have power pages, you can backlink to your own site, such as to the sub-pages where you offer the services.
Moreover, other sites and blogs are likelier to link back to them if you have great power pages. It’s kind of interesting to note because the more of these quality power pages you have, technically, the fewer backlinks you need, but the more you will get from other sources who view you as an authority.
Quantity of Backlinks vs. The Leading Competitors
When you perform your backlink analysis, pay attention to how many backlinks your leading competitors have. This is an excellent way to judge your own position.
For instance, if the leading competitors in your field all have 100 backlinks, and you only have 50, then you know that you have some work to do.
However, if you have 100 backlinks, and your competitors all only have around 100, then you know that you might have too many. We simply cannot say that you need to have this many backlinks, as it all depends.
It’s all About Quality
Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that the quantity of backlinks is not nearly as important as your links’ quality. You could have 1,000 backlinks to your site, but if they’re all toxic backlinks, they will do more harm than good.
Remember, backlinks need to come from authority sites, and not only from authority sites. Those coming from high authority sites with well-known domains are much more valuable than 100 links coming from sites that are not well-known or trusted.
Your backlinks need to be high quality, not high in number. That said, of course, if you have lots of backlinks and they are all high quality, you have the best of both worlds, and there’s no arguing the fact that a combination of quality and quantity is best.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there is no point in trying to hammer out a specific number of backlinks you should have. Instead, as long as you focus on building quality backlinks, you will be fine.