407-233-3387A backlink is a link from someone else’s website to yours. Google treats it as a vote of confidence, and it remains one of the strongest ranking signals there is.
The number you need is not a fixed figure. It is however many it takes to match the sites currently outranking you — which is a question you can actually answer.
Thinking of doing SEO?
We can help. Drop your info below and we’ll take a free look at your Google Business Profile and website, then tell you straight what’s holding your rankings back.
Prefer to talk it through? Call (407) 233-3387 or send us a message.
Why they still matter
Content tells Google what your page is about. Links tell Google whether anyone else thinks it is worth reading. Two equally good pages will be separated by which one has more credible sites pointing at it, and for competitive commercial terms that gap is usually decisive.
What makes a good backlink
- Relevance. A link from a Central Florida trade association beats one from an unrelated blog in another country.
- Authority. Established sites pass more weight than brand new ones.
- Local relevance. For local SEO, a link from an Orlando organization is worth several generic national ones.
- Editorial placement. A link inside real content beats one in a footer or sidebar.
- Natural anchor text. Mostly branded and URL anchors, occasionally descriptive. Wall-to-wall exact-match anchors look manipulated.
- A page that gets crawled. A link on a page nobody links to and nothing indexes does very little.
How to work out your number
Stop asking how many links you need in the abstract and go look.
- Search your main money keyword
- Take the three sites ranking above you
- Check their referring domain count in any backlink tool
- That range is your target — not their total links, their unique domains
For a suburban service business that number is often twenty to sixty referring domains. In competitive Orlando verticals like injury law or roofing it can be several hundred. Either way, it is knowable rather than guessable.
Domains matter more than links
Fifty links from one site count roughly as one vote. Fifty links from fifty different sites is fifty votes. Track referring domains, not raw link count — agencies quoting big link numbers are often counting sitewide footer links many times over.
A realistic pace
Five to fifteen quality referring domains a month is a healthy rate for a local business. Faster than that starts to look unnatural unless something newsworthy happened.
It compounds. Thirty months at ten a month is three hundred domains, which puts you past almost any local competitor.
What not to buy
- Packages promising hundreds of links for a low flat fee
- Private blog networks
- Anything described as “high DA” with no examples shown
- Comment and forum spam
- Links from sites with no real traffic
These either do nothing or actively hurt, and cleaning up a bad link profile costs more than building a good one would have.
The one thing to ask an agency
Ask to see live URLs from a recent client, redacted if necessary. Then click three. That single check separates real link building from invoiced link building faster than any other question.
Keep reading
- How to earn them locally: how to get backlinks for a local business.
- On paid links: is buying backlinks safe.
- Browse what we do on our SEO and web design services page.
- See recent builds in our project gallery.
- Ready to talk? Get in touch with Mamba Media.
Thinking of doing SEO?
We can help. Drop your info below and we’ll take a free look at your Google Business Profile and website, then tell you straight what’s holding your rankings back.
Prefer to talk it through? Call (407) 233-3387 or send us a message.