How Many Links Does My Website Need?

Common questions I regularly get asked are: how many links do i need to build? What type of links I need to build? How do I tell the client how many links we need to build?

Everyone talks about link building but people still are confused about how many links they should be building and everything else that goes alongside link building. I'm going to talk about how many links you should be building to your website. Read on.

I'm going to use my own website as an example. If you're in the SEO space and you want to compete with me, you're going to look at this and go "Geez, Craig can't be beaten he's getting outrageous amount of backlinks".

Let me tell you, someone is building spammy links to my website so I really don't have all of the backlinks that Ahrefs suggests. The Ahrefs "Site explorer" is a great place to start. Site explorer gives you the option to see what links the competition have, that you don't have. That is the level of research you need to be doing when it comes to links.

Now, we can see here there's a whole bunch of Google links and image links and whatever else is out there. Now you can sort the results on Domain Rating (DR) and look around. Basically you can go through all of the options in Ahrefs to see the top referring domains and see roughly how many of those that my website have got and where other links come from. So, it's not that hard to analyze how many links you need to get.

Essentially if I was going to use DR as the metric (and i'm not suggesting that DR is the best metric to follow) you can scroll through and see some of the most high profile links that I've got. Whether that's Product Hunt, whether it's SEMrush, APNews.com, SERanking.com, SelfGrowth.com or Brighton.ac.uk.

Anyway, you can see what links have got with Ahrefs. So you can see that you're probably going to need a whole bunch of links from established domain names. To get them, you shoud do a lot of guest posts and i've used podcasts and everything else if you wanted to get the same level of link building as me.

Now you can also see that there's a whole bunch of spam on there as well, so do not think it has to be sheer volume. It doesn't have to be the case. You need to grab some of the good stuff that I've got and start building them and that is essentially the nature of the game.

Regardless of who you look at, they're likely to have thousands of links. The links that are probably passing the most value are the ones near the top of that tree and you want to try and acquire those links. Whether that's only five of them and you have better pages, your five links might be enough to beat me.

You need to build some links to better pages. Optimize on-page elements as best you can. Make sure technically your website is sound and then throw some links at it.

It's not about a specific number of links.

There is no figure anyone can give you. Someone might be able to beat me with five links, someone might be able to beat me with seven links. It all comes down to other factors as well. Whether that's on-page is as best as it can be and whether you're technically ticking all the boxes that Google wants to see.

It's not about a specific number of links. Yes, links do help. Links do pass power. Links are taken into consideration in the algorithm, but you do not have to simply look at someone and go: "he's got thousands links. He's unbeatable.". You know that is not the right answer.

Ten amazing, topically relevant powerful links can carry you a long way and can certainly carry you above a lot of other people in the industry. If you look at anyone, you can use Ahref Site Explorer and go through and see what kind of links they've got. In most cases you'll see people that maybe have only 20, 30, 40 or 50 really good links. That is where you're going to get your figure from when it comes to link building.

Summary

Do not overthink it. Do not take in all those spammy links into the calculation. Get them out of your head. You need a handful of good quality topically relevant links and that is going to carry you way above anyone else who's probably overly relying on sheer link volume and forgetting about the other pieces of the jigsaw when it comes to SEO.

This is a transcribed version of the YouTube video, courtesy of Craig Campbell