How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank On Search Engines?

This is an in-depth article on finding out how many backlinks you need to rank on search engines. Backlinks are the most laborious exercise in ranking a website. It’s very hard to rank a website without backlinks. To know how many backlinks you need to rank on search engines like Google, there are a few things you need to think about:

• The keyword difficulty that is indicated in a keyword research tool (easier keywords need fewer backlinks to competitively rank).
• How much content you have on the page that you are trying to rank.
• The number of backlinks that your competitor has.

There is a rule that “quality is more important than quantity.” In some cases that rule is not true. If you find a keyword that you can easily rank without backlinks, you don’t need any backlinks to that page. If you are trying to rank an entire website and overtake a competitor, you need to have more backlinks than them. Let’s take a look at the number of backlinks that you need to have in order to rank on Google. 

How Many Backlinks Do You Need for Low-Volume, Low Competition Keywords? 

For low-volume low competition keywords, you don’t need to have that many backlinks. A well-optimized page can, in-fact, rank with no backlinks. It’s better to have some backlinks going to your root domain, but the internal page doesn’t need that many, or any, backlinks for that matter. Let’s use the search terms “cars with red interiors.” There are 3,600 searches per month for that keyword and it has a KD in SEMrush of 14. It’s a relatively easy keyword.

Next let's drop the keyword into Moz’s keyword explorer and see the lay of the landscape. We’ve zeroed in on the 5th and 6th positions because there is an interesting thing to note here. AutoNation USA has a smaller DA than Carvana, the page has a lower number of referring domains to the page in question, and a smaller number of backlinks. The AutoNation USA has a better page optimization score and it is beating Carvana. The rule here is that for smaller KD scores, it’s possible to outrank a competitor with a higher DA and more backlinks.

How Many Backlinks Do You Need To Beat Down a Competitor?

When you are trying to overtake a competitor, the law of large numbers comes into play. If you want to outrank a competitor, the truth of the matter is that you need to go out and get the sheer number of backlinks needed to overtake them. Unfortunately, we don’t have an exact number of how many links you need. Once you match their link velocity, you will start noticing that your rankings are pushing theirs down. Do you need 100 more backlinks, 1000 more backlinks? 

We only know that you need more backlinks than what your competitors have. In his article on Buying Backlinks, Nathaniel Gotch makes this argument very clearly. You can use a tool like Ahrefs or Moz. The example shown below are two paint by number kits stores online. They are competing on the first page of Google. If you scroll down and look at the follow linking domains, you will see that the website in column 1 has 1,575 referring domains, while the website in column 2 has 275 referring domains that are follow. On-page is probably helping the website in column 2, but there will come a point when the website in column two needs more authority to outrank the competing website found in column 1.

How Many Backlinks Do I Need Versus How Much Content? 

A website with a large number of backlinks does not need as much content in order to rank. That’s why when you land on an ecommerce store with a large number of backlinks, you don’t see longer product descriptions or a lot of content in the category pages. You will notice that smaller ecommerce stores will compensate by having longer content. For blog posts, you should write to the point that feels natural. Answer the question completely and you will be done with the article. 

 

Generally speaking, you need MORE content if you have a smaller domain authority. If your content is shorter, you can get by with well-optimized content. Here is what you should do for your content if your backlinks and DA is small:

 

• Include the focus keyword as the H1, the title tag, and in the intro copy.
• Use related keywords in your other headlines.
• Use alt attributes with your keyword. 

 

If you are in doubt, use the on-page grader on Moz. This is a great resource to help you check your work.

Don’t Get Crappy Backlinks

If you are looking at Fiverr or some cheap backlinks, you are going to run into trouble very quickly. These Web 2.0 properties won’t hurt you…but they will do NOTHING. Google has gotten good about finding these links and not counting them towards your rankings. Here is a word of warning, if you manipulate the number of backlinks to a website, you will get a manual penalty, but you need to do it at an extremely large scale. 

How Many Backlinks Do You Need To Build On Your Own? 

If you want to do link outreach on your own, it’s really hard. Here are some numbers from Authority Hackers:

 

• They sent out 600,000 emails.
• They reached 150,000 website owners.
• They got 4,500 backlinks.

 

Let’s put those numbers into context. Let’s say your small business has 1 link builder who does outreach. If your link builder can send out 50 emails per day, you will spend 12,000 days doing manual outreach to get 4,500 backlinks. That’s 133 emails sent to get 1 backlink. Then you have to write the content, revise it, etc. A link builder, on average, costs $22 per hour. It takes two days to get one link roughly, so you are paing around $360 to $400 to get one backlink. If you want 4,500 backlinks, your link building efforts will exceed $1.5 million.

Then you have to have the infrastructure to send outreach emails. You need to warm up your inbox, time your emails right, and make sure that your emails don’t go to spam. 

Then there is the option of buying backlinks. You can buy 4500 backlinks (let’s say $150 each) and you will end up paying $675,000. From a sheer numbers perspective, it’s more affordable to buy backlinks.

How Do You Reduce the Number of Backlinks That You Need? 

We talked about content and on-page optimization, but there is another way that you can reduce the number of backlinks that you need to rank…internal linking. You can get a number of high-quality backlinks to your top-level page (such as an ecommerce category or a blog category index page) and then add internal links to deeper articles or products in that section of the website. Internal links can reduce the number of backlinks that you need, but by how much is unknown.