How many backlinks do I need to rank #1 on Google? This is one of the most frequently asked questions about SEO and website ranking.
Many webmasters fear penalties from Google or losing their audience for building too many links, while others fill their sites with any link they can find.
Mark Twain said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” It’s the same for backlinking, especially regarding quality.
Low-quality backlinks are likely to hurt your rankings, especially if you have a lot of them, but you can never have too many high-quality links. Keep reading to learn how many backlinks you need to rank well on Google.
How Many Links Do I Need To Rank, Before It’s Too Many?
It doesn’t matter how many backlinks you have, as long as they’re high quality. This is one of the most crucial things to remember about backlinking. Think of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Social platforms like these have a vast amount of backlinks to their websites. Google will never turn that down, and the main reason for that is that these are organic backlinks that lead to good quality content that is incredibly popular.
Google will not promote unrelated or bad content. So, when you’re building backlinks, you’ll have to make sure the link is something of value to the reader. Something that’s relevant to what they’re searching for.
Quality Over Quantity
The main thing you should be looking at is the quality of your backlinks, not how many you need to rank. You want to make sure that the links are organic, and that the site your link is on is related to the content.
If you’re building backlinks to your site, and they’re well-written organic links, then there’s no problem. The problem occurs when you’re building low-quality backlinks from low-quality sites, then it will not rank well at all.
Your competitor can have 100 backlinks, but if 80 of them are low quality, then you may not need as many backlinks. You can build 30 backlinks, and if they’re good backlinks, you will still rank better than your competitors who have all low-quality backlinks.
What Is An Organic Backlink?
An organic backlink looks natural and points back to relevant, high-quality content. It’s where the website owner actually wants to link back to your site, instead of being paid to do it.
Paid backlinking services found on Fiverr are not high quality. When you buy links on sites like that, Google picks up on it right away.
Buying backlinks goes against Google’s policy for webmasters. The penalty is that your website’s ranking will significantly drop and traffic will decrease.
How Many Backlinks Do I Need To Rank On Google?
The number of backlinks you need depends on your competitors, the industry, and of course, the keywords. For this, using something like the Ahrefs tool is a very big help. There, you can type in your keyword and see all of your competitors.
From there, you can see the keyword ranking, how many backlinks they’ve built, as well as the quality of the backlinks. After all, if most of the backlinks of your competitors are low-quality, you can easily excel by only using a few high-quality backlinks.
This isn’t the only way you can find out how many backlinks you need to rank. My agency can help you build a strong backlinking strategy that will help you with competitor research, building high-quality backlinks, and driving traffic.
Book your call today to learn how many backlinks you need to rank #1 and how you can get there!
