Backlinks are a powerful tool for improving your website’s position in search engine results. Before you begin to build them, you should draft an efficient strategy. In this article, we’ll try to answer the question “How many backlinks do you need for your website?” and talk about the factors that define the optimal number of links.
Enhance Your Homepage Brand Trust
How many backlinks does your website already have? How many of them lead to the homepage?
Let’s analyze the backlinks of those sites from your niche that are ranked on the first page of Google. They have a lot of homepage backlinks and 85%-95% of these links have the following anchors:
- Brand name
- URL
- URL written like “Website.com”
Such an approach enables these websites to boost their brand awareness and convince Google of their legitimacy.
Branded anchors accentuate the relevance of your site’s content and your product offering. You should systematically create new links of this type to let your web resource stay always relevant.
Analyze Your Website Niche
Some niches are more competitive than others. For instance, SEO is a sector with extremely fierce competition. Thousands of professionals work in it who understand very well how to promote their web resources. To outperform your competitors in this sector, you should be ready to build a large portfolio of backlinks.
Pet products or floristry are two examples of niches that are not so competitive. If your website belongs to one of them, you won’t need to build as many backlinks as in the case with SEO.
Understand How Niche-Specific Your Website Is
A website can be characterized as “niche-specific” if it covers one particular topic in-depth. Let’s imagine that you run a local online food store. You sell products and meals, run a blog about healthy nutrition and cross-sell cosmetics from a partner online store. In this case, your website won’t be niche-specific. Alternatively, your shop might be focused on one particular category of goods, such as vegan meals or food supplements that help people lose weight and/or gain muscle mass. Such a store will be niche-specific. You’ll be able to focus most of your backlinks on keywords related to the vegan diet or that type of food supplement.
The narrower the area that you specialize in, the fewer backlinks you’ll need. It might be enough for you to have only 30% of the number of backlinks that your competitors have to stand out from them. Google appreciates niche-specific websites that cover 100% of a single topic.
However, it would be unreasonable to narrow down your product range only to improve your SEO results. Your offering should enable you to stay profitable and keep scaling.
Assess the Number of Power Pages on Your Website
A website page can be characterized as a power page if it meets the following criteria:
- Is non-promotional
- Features high-quality content
- Contains at least 2,000 words
- Helps visitors to solve an important problem
It’s your best content and some of the most frequently visited pages of your site.
Pages that don’t match the above-listed criteria can be called “regular sub-pages”. It can be, for instance, a page where a plumbing company advertises its faucet repair services. Another example is a page where you announce a new collection of clothing items that have just arrived at your shop.
If you build dozens of backlinks to regular sub-pages, that would look unnatural. Only a small segment of your audience will be interested in that particular clothing collection or faucet repair services in your area.
Instead, it would be smart to provide backlinks to authentic and authoritative content, such as:
- 3,000-word blog teaching consumers how to fix their faucets without third-party help
- Text that explains the essence and benefits of the innovative technology that enables designers to create top-notch clothes from recycled materials
- Tips on educating pets with the help of toys from your shop
We don’t mean to say that regular sub-pages should have no backlinks at all. Feel free to create a few backlinks for them just to add some SEO juice to your portfolio.
Think of How Natural Your Backlink Profile Is
An ideal backlink portfolio is a mixture of:
- Natural anchors
- Blended anchors
- Exact match anchors
An exact match anchor is a key phrase without additional words — for example, “vegan meals” or “pet toys”. To perform well in Google rankings, make sure links of this type account for less than 10% of your website’s backlinks portfolio.
A blended anchor includes a key phrase and a few more words — for example, “purchase safe and Instagrammable pet toys” or “vegan meals subscription as a birthday gift”.
A natural anchor is an anchor text that doesn’t include a key phrase. It might be as simple as “this article”, “click here” or the full URL of your website page.
A perfect backlink profile contains:
- 60% natural anchors
- 35% blended anchors
- 5% exact match anchors
Google frequently modifies its algorithms, so this proportion can change over time.
It’s important that you place backlinks on real websites with high-quality content. If you get links from random garbage sites, your backlinks portfolio can’t be classified as natural.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand how many backlinks you should build for your website. The less niche-specific your web resource is and the more competitive the sector that it belongs to, the larger its backlinks portfolio needs to be. The majority of your backlinks should lead to your homepage and power pages. A power page is a non-promotional page that features timeless content, created to help your customers solve their problems. Most backlinks to your homepage need to have your brand name or URL as anchors to boost your brand authority. Make sure your backlinks portfolio looks natural — that means, no more than 10% of all links have exact match anchors (such as your brand name or product names). If you follow these recommendations, you should be able to make the most of your backlink-building strategy!
