Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 24/05/2025

 

Since the inception of Google, they have wanted to rank websites based on their trustworthiness and authority. That’s why, even right at the start, when Google launched PageRank as one the first algorithms they used, they used backlinks to decipher and work out how important a company website was. In 2025, backlinks are still important, if not the most critical ranking factor.

There are many ways to improve the authority and trustworthiness of your website. For example, just mentioning your brand name or unique product name on a trustworthy website like the Financial Times is often enough for Google to pick this up and crawl and index it.

Therefore, even mentions of your company name can help to improve your companies search engine optimisation.

This stands to reason, if your company name “ABC Gizmo’s” gets mentioned on leading websites, such The Guardian newspaper, then this will be crawled and indexed by Google.

Because Googlebot notices that you are being mentioned in the “semantic web”, this can help improve your company’s optimisation for search engines.

But backlinks for some businesses are just hard to build. For example, take a plumbing business for example, there are loads and loads of plumbers in any one area. So why would a business want to link to business that does not offer a unique service?

The reason why another business would want to link to you, is due to the quality of a company’s blog posts, articles, which marketing companies all content marketing; you have to give a reason for other businesses to want to link to you. Not just that, if you win awards or have suppliers that exclusively supply you, they also have an invested interest in promoting your business to offer you a link.

Basically, backlinks are what can make or break the success of a businesses SEO. To get onto page of Google often you need quality backlinks.

 

What are backlinks?

When customers want to buy something, they naturally trust the businesses ranked at the top of Google.

Often, there is more confidence placed in these businesses because they have been ranked at the top of Google.

So, there is instantly a sense of trust in those businesses that rank at the top of Google.

But how do businesses get there?

How do businesses get ranked at the top of Google?

Well, the simple answer is that there are 200 different and various factors that all need to improve if you are to take the top spot.

It’s not easy to do that’s for sure. Building links take up a lot of time and effort. However, some of these factors, which are called ranking factors, are worth more than others; backlinks are considered top of the tree.

A link is when one website links to another website. For example, a hotel may link to a restaurant that is within the same business’s premises.

The reason for that is, someone staying at the hotel may want to book a table at the restaurant.

A link is, therefore, when you click one website, such as a hotel, then you click a click and are taken to another website. This is called following a link.

It makes it easier for the customer, as they can find what they want to purchase much more quickly.

It’s also good from a search engine optimisation perspective, simply because what can happen is that if you accumulate links from trusted businesses and well-known brands, this can elevate your business’s rankings.

 

It helps improve your company’s SEO in the following ways:

– Bring in more visitors
– Help make more sales
– Send link equity through to your website

 

SEO tools

Various SEO tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush, are excellent. You can use these backlink tools to check your competitors’ backlink profiles. Then you select the links your business wants to build for your business, in order to improve your business’s backlinks.

 

Vote of confidence

Again and again, you will see this comment that backlinks are a vote of confidence in your business.

This means that if well-known companies, respected businesses, and well-known brands, for example, link to you, they are endorsing your company. They can then visitors to your website, and link equity which is all good for helping to improve a business’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

Research

Research has been carried out to show the importance of backlinks. For example, important research by Search Logistics has found that on average, the businesses that rank in the number 1 position on Google have 3.8x more backlinks than the pages ranking between positions 2 and 10 on Google.

This clearly shows that if any business wants to be in the top spot on Google, it will need many quality links.

 

Creating high-quality content

What do you think is the best way of obtaining backlinks?

In our opinion, there’s only one main way of building backlinks.

The business has to write high-quality content marketing that offers customers valuable advice.

Then, if the work is so good, other companies will want to link to it.

Let’s give you an example: your business has carried out consumer research. As a business, this costs a lot to do, it takes time, costs a lot in terms of staff costs to carry the market research out, and then all the time that’s needed to obtain a conclusion from the data gathered.

Then, when you publish this, the work is likely to be interesting for all the other businesses in same business sector.

For example, a marketing company might publish statistics on how often the average shopper asks AI, such as Google Gemini, to find them a

product to buy each day.

It may be found that, for example, after asking a thousand people, on average, they use either Google Gemini or ChatGPT four times a day.

This statistic may get cited on many other marketing websites, helping you build links.

Being a guest author

What you could do is lend your expertise and write an article that’s published on another website. For example, let’s say you’re an architect and you run your architectural practice. You might be write about how planning legislation for new build homes is changing, this work might be published on a construction website. Now, from that, at the bottom of the article, you may write about who you are and the business that you work for and gain a backlink.

Therefore, that backlink becomes valuable. The reason it’s useful is that you can gain a link from a website related to construction, which helps improve your company’s SEO if the linking website is of good quality.

 

Helping journalists

Journalists often have to write about a wide range of businesses. For example, you may run an aerospace business that makes parts for the aerospace industry. A recent rocket launch might mean that the journalists need to talk to experts in the aerospace industry. By offering your expertise and contributing to the article they are writing, you may be able to obtain a link.

Again, this is similar to writing a guest post. However, the main difference here is that instead of writing the article, you have some input and offer advice. The main thing to remember is that you can gain a backlink, which is do-follow or no-follow, but the main thing is that the backlink is good quality.

 

PR

If your business has won an award or done something to help the community, you can often contact a local newspaper that may wish to cover the story.

For example, you may plant trees in fields you have bought to rewild an area and offset your business’s carbon footprint. This is good for the environment, but it also allows you to reach out to Wales Online and see if they would be interested in running a story for you.

The story itself could contain the backlink; you will get brand mentions, which suit your business’s SEO.

 

Take-away advice

Our best advice for building links is two-fold.

That is why content marketing is beneficial and valuable to customers, as the SEO is strong over time, you will start to build many organic visitors. Some of these visitors could be other businesses that link to your company. For example, you may state statistics from your company’s market research.

From that market research, other companies may cite your market research and link to your website, for example.

The other primary method of link building is outreach. For example, ask your link builder to find a list of high-quality businesses from which you think you can gain a backlink. These could be suppliers, other businesses, or companies connected to the company but don’t sell the same products. For example, you may sell car products for sports cars, and the other company may specialise in engine oils. You could write a blog post for each other’s websites and gain a do-follow backlink.

 

FAQ

Why are backlinks so important?

For a business to rank on page one of Google, that company often needs a lot of quality links.

If the links are quality, built in a white hat, and the backlinks are relevant,, these can help push your company up Google’s first page.

 

How many backlinks do we need?

This depends on which business sector who company is in.

Some businesses may not need that many links.

Other companies operating in massively competitive business sectors, such as car insurance, will need many links.

 

Are some backlinks worth more than others?

Yes, most definitely.

Good quality backlinks are hard to build because they can help improve your company’s SEO.

Low-quality links won’t help your SEO; they can damage it.

Can your marketing agency help us build backlinks?

Most definitely.

As part of our SEO packages, we can help improve your business marketing. To do this, we will build links. We only use the best white hat methods to build backlinks.