How Many Backlinks Do You Need To Rank on Search Engines?

Absolutely. If you work in a competitive environment and want your brand to show up in search results, backlinks are invaluable. 

Search engines like Google rely on backlinks as porous sources of information. With backlinks, search engines can determine how much a page is trusted by its peers thanks to its topical relevance, credibility and overall quality. In turn, these pages with a high number of backlinks pointing their way are more likely to get thrust up the results page than those that don’t have them.

Since search engines operate by prioritizing links from trusted and relevant websites, it’s preferable to have a few high-quality backlinks from such authority sites, rather than plenty of links from websites that are easy to get links from but ultimately irrelevant. 

Looking at backlink profiles from other websites can quickly become disheartening, especially if your own site is relatively new. However, the temptation of relying on an abundance of lower-quality backlinks should be kept at bay. The big number on the screen can be deceptive, as in the scenario where those links are considered as lower-quality, they become useless for a page’s growth regardless of their sum. 

Search engines consider the following three facets of an external backlink as signs of quality:

• Trust and Authority: Links that come from distinguished and prominent websites act as a major mark of quality. 
• Topical Relevance: Your backlinks should come from sites within your industry or sites that share a topic with your own. 
• Correct Placement: Links should be naturally weaved into place. Those links that fit the context of the surrounding content carry more value than those which stick out. 

In order to realize how many backlinks you need for a ranking, you’ll have to take a look at some competitor websites, and use a backlink tool like Ahrefs to find your competitors’ backlinks. The following steps will help guide you through the process. 

• 1: Find your competitor: Find a website in your niche similar to your own site. You can do this by writing your brand’s services in a given search engine query box, and using a tool of your choice, measure the website’s strength by putting its URL in your chosen tool’s site explorer. For this article, we’ll be using Ahrefs and their metric DR.
  For example, we’ll use the email marketing platform EmailOctopus as our website. We write “Email marketing platform” in the search query box, and find other organizations with the same services. For this article, we’ll use sender.net as our target competitor.

• 2: Check your competitor’s backlink profile: Enter your competitor’s URL in the’ site explorer. Afterwards, there should be a section detailing the website’s backlink profile.

• 3: Set the correct filters: At the page which displays the URL’s received backlinks, set the following filters:
  • Dofollow
  • In content backlink type
  • DR of 30-90
  • Domain traffic to preferred amount. Recommended: 500-1000

Now, the amount of backlinks that the website receives should be the benchmark for your monthly backlink count. 

Alternatively, if you want to research how many ref domains you need for a given keyword, it’s possible to use Ahrefs’ Keyword explorer. If you simply enter your target keyword into the tool, it’ll give you an estimated amount of referring domains necessary for you to rank on the first page of search results. 

You want to be precise with which of your pages receive a backlink, as some should take priority over others. The following pages should be on the top of your list for URLs deserving of backlinks:

• Homepage: Your homepage is the nucleus of your website, and raises every other part of your site through internal linking. Additionally, increasing your homepage’s authority with backlinks makes it more visible for AI engines, as AI models receive their information on organizations primarily through brand mentions. 
• Service page: Your service page is your moneymaker, it’s where you present your product to a client and get the cash flowing your way. 
• Blog: Your blog is where you provide informational content, making it more likely to receive links naturally. Furthermore, your blog makes your site stronger through internal linking, so the growth of your blog can coincide with your website in its entirety.

If the links pointing to your website are of high quality and were obtained through non-manipulative tactics, then you can never have too many of them.

Perhaps you’ve heard of terms such as link velocity, which can paint the picture that no matter what, a spike in backlink count will be met with timely punishment. However, the underlying issue doesn’t arise from bursts of backlinks by themselves, but rather that manipulative practices often come in the forms of unnatural spikes. 

Links from automated directories, link farms, Private Blog Networks (PBNs) or other sites with unnatural placement and unrelated topics all fall under the umbrella of what search engines define as “manipulative,” they just so happen to often disperse links in fast and short-term surges. 

According to John Mueller, If you’ve received a natural influx of high-quality backlinks because of your own efforts, then you’ve posed no problems for Google. 

You never stop needing backlinks, but you no longer need to actively hunt for them when you achieve mass brand dominance and unrivaled topical authority.

Backlinks don’t cease being votes of confidence for search engines, so a website’s backlink supply suddenly being cut off for an extended period of time can and likely will be detrimental. However, there can come a point where your backlink profile fills itself naturally, and you no longer need to be actively putting in the effort to get backlinks.

One way your site can achieve this mark is by establishing dominance in your particular niche. This applies to websites like Wikipedia, Forbes, Nike etc. which are all among the very top of their respective fields. As such, they naturally accumulate citations from authoritative sites. 

Alternatively, if your website has become a deep repository of quality content, it is possible that it can amass a collection of natural backlinks, since other websites will naturally cite your content.

However, expecting your own site to naturally reach any of these two points without other methods such as backlinks will likely only set you up for disappointment. The top websites dominate search results, and are immensely trusted by search engines, meaning other newer or smaller sites get sidelined. In competitive ecosystems, it’s nearly impossible to rank without backlinks 

Using tools like Ahrefs can give you an estimated number of backlinks which function as an objective predicated on legitimate metrics for you to reach. However, what’s more important is that you recognize how these backlink benchmarks can be useful for you. It’s key to recognize every factor that goes into backlink building, and just settling on a number to reach won’t do you any good.