How Many Backlinks Do I Need for SEO: Answered

To be competitive for SEO, a website should have 40 to 50 backlinks to the homepage and 0 to 100 backlinks to each individual web page. 

The number of backlinks you need depends on your goals. The more you want to accomplish (in terms of keyword targets, rankings, and visitor numbers), the more backlinks you will need. 

You could potentially rank your company's website with just a few backlinks, but only for low competition keywords with low search volumes, resulting in few visitors to your site. 

There is no magic formula that can tell us how many backlinks your website should have in order to rank first. Instead, there are a variety of adjustable factors that can help businesses figure out what it takes.

Keep reading below to find out how many backlinks your website needs to rank on page one.

The PageRank scores of those backlinks, on the other hand, are important because the higher their value, the fewer links you need to boost your overall rankings.

Getting backlinks with the highest PageRank possible should be your aim if you want to maintain long-term keyword competitiveness and improve your rankings. When it comes to building backlinks, quality always beats quantity.

These factors help us estimate how many backlinks we need to build at first to see results, but it does not stop there. Google is constantly re-crawling web pages, causing search rankings to change. To maintain high rankings, you need to continue to build backlinks to pages on a regular basis, even after your initial objectives are achieved.

Homepages are the center of your site, and doing proper homepage SEO is essential for laying a solid foundation that could land you on page one.

The rest of your SEO efforts will be difficult and very disappointing if you don't establish proper brand trust on your homepage.

Building brand trust is actually quite simple. Create consistent backlinks to your homepage using branded anchors. When you look at big brands or websites that dominate the SERPs, you will notice a common theme.

They all have a lot of links pointing to their homepage, and the anchor text for the majority of those links is one of the following: their brand name, their URL, or their URL written like "Website.com."

Additionally, they receive or build these links on a regular basis. This allows them to remain relevant. These are the indicators that a website is a legitimate brand to Google.

So, what does this have to do with figuring out the number of backlinks needed to rank?

Pages in the top ten of Google set themselves apart from the competition by excelling at one or more of the following: homepage brand trust, content, and backlinks.

Some niches are more competitive compared to others. 

If a company truly understands its niche and how competitive it is in terms of SEO, it should have a good idea of how many backlinks are needed to rank. And, when it comes to improving your website ranking, niche-relevant backlinks can be your ticket to success.

More backlinks are needed for more competitive niches. Building a website that is extremely niche-specific is one way to achieve rankings with fewer links than competitors. 

This website only provides in-depth information on one specific topic. 

Google favors niche-specific sites that cover every aspect of a single topic. Remember that the more specific your niche, the broader your audience will be.

A power page is a page on your website that is (mostly) non-promotional, content-heavy (2,000+ words), and goes in-depth to solve a problem for your target audience. 

It's your best work. It is important to differentiate between a regular sub-page on your website and a power page. A power page has enough content that building a lot of backlinks to it will not appear unnatural. 

Remember that not every page falls into this category, so be honest with yourself. Having 100 backlinks pointing to your service page would not appear natural. Google will immediately recognize that it is manufactured. Remember that they are looking for authentic and authoritative content. 

A 3,000-word blog teaching you a specific topic in-depth, on the other hand, may naturally have 100 backlinks.

In this situation, you can still try to rank your sub-pages by first building backlinks to the homepage and power pages. Then internally linking to services pages from the power pages. That is a natural way to spread the SEO juice.

Almost all of your homepage links need to use branded anchors, and all of your links have to come from trusted websites. 

In many cases some businesses make the mistake of trying to rank for a specific key phrase and they will build a large number of exact match anchor backlinks. But, this is a big mistake. 

Google expects less than 10% of backlinks in a top-ranked backlink profile to be exact match anchors. So, what should the backlinks look like?

Your backlinks should be a mix of natural anchors, blended anchors, and exact match anchors.

• Natural anchors are anchor texts that do not include any key phrases. It would include your brand name, the full URL of the page to which you are linking, and random phrases such as "click here" or "this article."
  
• Blended anchors are anchor texts that include all or part of your key phrase as well as other words. If your key phrase is "socks," for example, a blended anchor could be "a good selection of cotton socks."
  
• Exact match anchors are when you use your key phrase by itself.
  

You'll need about 60% natural anchors, 35% blended anchors, and 5% exact match anchors to make your profile look natural. As Google's algorithm changes, so do these numbers.

There are numerous reasons why websites rank or do not rank. However, if you master the right combination of Domain Authority, Keyword Difficulty, and Internal Linking, you can be successful with SEO. 

There are numerous SEO tools that provide domain authority information for a website. Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush are the most popular.

Domain authority is rated on a 100-point scale, with higher numbers indicating a stronger domain with a higher likelihood of achieving better SERP results.

When all other factors such as content quality, matching user search intent, on-page SEO, and technical SEO are equal, a website with a higher domain authority should rank higher in Google for a target keyword. 

That is because Google's algorithm considers off-page SEO factors such as backlinks when deciding where a website should rank in the index. 

And a site with a higher domain authority has more proof of trust on the Internet because there are high quality sites voting for the homepage, or a single web page, by linking to it.

Another metric that SEO tools use to figure out how difficult it may be to rank a web page for a target keyword is keyword difficulty. And, like domain authority, it's based on a 100-point scale, with higher numbers indicating more difficult competition.

The factors that influence keyword difficulty score are: 

• Domain Authority: The overall domain strength.
  
• Page Authority: The strength of a single web page.
  
• Citation Flow: The number of backlinks to a specific web page.
  
• Trust Flow: The number and quality of backlinks to a specific web page.
  

As you can see, domain authority is only one factor that impacts how difficult it will be to rank a web page in the SERPs for a particular keyword phrase. 

Metrics such as citation flow and trust flow are also important because it is not only the quantity of backlinks that matters, but also the quality of those incoming links. 

A high DA site can often be outranked by a lower DA site simply because it has more high-quality backlinks to the individual web page.  

The number of internal links a page receives is another factor that influences how many backlinks it should have. According to SEO testing, three internal links are equivalent to one external backlink on average.

Google even claims that the more internal links a page has, the more important it is to the search engine crawler. As a result, the page should be given a higher ranking in the SERPs.

When linking internally to the target page, you should use keyword-rich anchor text as an SEO technique. You should also link from other relevant content on the site, not just at random, because the commentary text surrounding the internal link is taken into account by Google's indexing algorithm.

It is not always necessary to have a large number of backlinks to rank a page in the top ten positions on Google. Here are some SEO practices to help you achieve better ranking results with less backlinks:

• Select at least 3-5 keywords to optimize the page for, with low keyword difficulty scores.
  
• Put your keywords in the right HTML locations for Google to crawl for the best on-page SEO.
  
• Make sure that your content meets the user's search intent.
  
• Create at least 5 contextual internal links to the page with keyword-rich anchor text after publishing the article.
  
• If possible, include a link to the web page on your homepage. The homepage usually has the highest internal PageRank value.
  
• Focus on increasing the overall domain authority rather than individual pages by building more high-quality backlinks to the homepage. 
  

Follow these practices to give your web pages the best chance of ranking high in the SERPs for your target keywords. In many cases, you can achieve top ten rankings without building one backlink to the web page.

However, there may be some keywords with higher competition that need more backlinks to rank high in the SERPs. 

After you've done everything you can to maximize the value of the SEO factors you can control on your site, and only then, should you consider increasing the number of backlinks to a specific web page.

After you've properly optimized the web page and internal SEO signals, you might realize that you need fewer backlinks than you thought to rank for your keywords.

One of the most common link-building myths is that Google will penalize businesses for getting too many backlinks in a single day. This is simply not the case. 

You can build as many links as you want each day, as long as they are from high-quality sites and your anchor text profile appears natural.

Another thing to consider is what we've already mentioned: you can't build a lot of backlinks to pages that shouldn't get a lot of backlinks. It is not the same as building backlinks to a homepage or power page. You can be more aggressive as long as the anchor profile is good.

The number of backlinks a website needs for SEO depends on a number of variables, including the goals of the website, the PageRank scores of the backlinks, the niche, the type of page, and the natural backlink profile. 

To improve website ranking, it is crucial to build quality backlinks that maintain long-term keyword competitiveness and improve rankings. 

Building brand trust on the homepage is essential to building a solid SEO foundation. In addition, a power page is essential in providing in-depth content that can attract natural backlinks. A mix of natural, blended, and exact match anchors is recommended for creating a natural backlink profile. As you build links, keep in mind that quality always wins over quantity.