How many backlinks will my business need to build?

Author: Ryan Walsh

Date: 22/04/2025

Table of contents:

– What are backlinks?
– How many links will we need to rank higher than the competition?
– What does domain authority (DA) mean?
– Why does Google only reward quality links?
– Why should any business have a mixture of do-follow and no-follow backlinks?
– Why is writing the anchor in a white hat way so important?
– How backlinks can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation

Introduction

Building backlinks can be a time-consuming process, that’s for sure. They can take a very long time to build a good backlink profile.
Yet your business can start moving up Google’s ranks with the right link-building expertise, time, and patience. This happens slowly but surely if you build the right links.

When building links, you might feel like you’re wading through treacle!

That’s because it can be arduous work, picking through line after line on spreadsheets to find that one needle in a haystack where you can build a link. Yet one quality link, say a like from the BBC, can sometimes be enough to nudge your business up Google’s organic ranks.

 

Is link building worth all that effort?

The truth is that building links, if you are committed to building them the right way (white hat), takes time.

Yet the effort is all worth it when you see your website jump up the ranks on Google. And as any good digital marketing agency can tell you, in some business sectors, there’s a massive difference in the organic traffic you can receive, depending on whether you rank 1st, 2nd or 3rd on

Google.

If you rank any lower than that, your business will often receive substantially lower volumes of organic traffic.

However, the factor that often differentiates between ranking 1st, 2nd or 3rd is the quality of the backlinks.

Therefore, these businesses often compete on content marketing quality and backlinks.

 

It does take time

Often, there’s a lag between when you build links and when you see the benefit of this.

This is normal, you could build a link now, yet you may not see the benefits for quite a while.

 

Why should we be monitoring our competitors’ backlinks?

Sometimes, you won’t see results from your backlink building because your direct competitors sometimes have hundreds, if not thousands, of links built.

Because backlinks are the leading and most important ranking factor Google considers when deciding where to place your website in the SERP, it also comes down to the company’s number of backlinks.

So, let’s give you an example: we were working for a large e-commerce website. One of the business’s main competitors has 30k backlinks and is ranked at the top of Google.

This means that often, there’s a colossal amount of work to do if a business wants to close the gap on one of its main competitors. Also, you must be conscious and realistic about what your link-building efforts will achieve.

For example, if a main competitor has thousands of links, could you realistically expect to close the gap and overtake them if you only start building links? The answer is no, but it often takes time and effort.

Therefore, when Google compares the backlink profiles, ten new quality links might sometimes be considered a drop in the ocean.

 

Okay, but are backlinks still important in 2025?

We would say most definitely yes.

What often separates a company ranked 1st from a business ranked 10th on Google is the quality of the backlinks. Therefore, usually marketing agencies spend a considerable amount of time building links.

If you imagine your SEO budget being divided into a pie chart diagram for a second, well, often a lot of that pie chart will be taken up by building backlinks.

There’s a good reason for that: good quality links can move the needle.

 

What’s the best link to build?

So the best links have the following characteristics

Your backlink profile needs to have a mixture of do-follow and no-follow links

So, you will want a good mixture of no-follow and do-follow backlinks. You will therefore not want 100% of all your backlinks to be do-follow, as this looks unnatural.

 

What does do-follow and no-follow mean?

Well, some backlinks pass link equity and some do not.

We at this marketing agency always describe backlinks as electrical wires or cables.

Some will therefore pass power, some will not.

So, you do want a mixture of do-follow and no-follow.

That said, only do-follow links have the fundamental SEO value, which helps move your company up Google’s ranks. Yet without having some no-follow links mixed in, this is called “unnatural”; it could even make your backlinks look spammy, as if they have all been purchased, which is not something your business will want.

 

Relevant

You will want your business’s backlinks to be relevant to your business.

The backlinks need to be relevant because, let’s say, you operate in the legal sector, all your backlinks should be from websites that offer legal advice. For example, if you run a solicitor’s, try to get most of your backlinks from relevant websites, such as websites that provide news and updates for lawyers, such as Solicitors Journal.

Therefore, Google’s algorithms are not just looking at the quality or the links; they also want to understand the relevance of those links.

The ideal backlink profile would be a lot of quality links, do-follow, no-follow, with well-written anchor text. Also, those links would come from websites with a high DA, which is domain authority. Lastly, those links will come from websites related to your business sector. For example, if you’re a builder, you will want links from a construction-related website.

 

The U.K

The backlinks should also come from the country where you offer your business’s services or products. For example, if your business is based in the United Kingdom, you should build quality links from businesses with .co.uk domain names. It’s okay to build links from quality websites with a .com domain name.

Link velocity

We will discuss this point later in the article; however, you want quality links built slowly over a long time frame.
When we say long timeframe, we don’t mean one backlink built a year, as this would be too slow. However, we suggest not making many links in a short timeframe. As spam filters are built into Google’s algorithm, creating too many links simultaneously could look spammy.
By spammy, we mean it could look like you bought the links.

Therefore, you don’t want to make a ton of links quickly.

Google does not want to see a massive spike in backlinks being built all at once, as this looks like spam, or you’re using black hat methods. This could trigger a Google penalty if you create too many links simultaneously. It’s far better to take your time and make them slowly.

 

Quality is the name of the game.

Just because you can build a backlink doesn’t automatically mean you should.

This is why if a manager or client says something like “we want 10 links built every month”, you should push back on this request.

That’s because low-quality links can dilute the effectiveness of quality links, so building low-quality links wastes time. Plus, if the backlink profile has too many spam or low-quality links, it can trigger an algorithmic penalty (Google Penguin).

Ideally, you want a backlink profile where every link comes from a quality business with a high DA, that’s domain authority.

 

Anchor text

When building links, let’s say you have written an article for publishing on another website, make sure that the anchor text follows white hat best practices. So you want varied anchor text that is not over-optimised. You also want to place the anchor text within the paragraph, but use the anchor text to describe where the link points.

What you don’t want is “over-optimised” anchor text.

So, for example, if we had, say, 1,000 backlinks pointing to our homepage, and all of the anchor text says “SEO agency,” this could again trigger a link penalty. Our business, or any business that uses this link-building method, could obtain a link penalty because the anchor text is over-optimised.

 

Will all businesses need to build backlinks?

If a business wants to have a lot of organic traffic and get on page one of Google, then the company will often need to build quality backlinks. Today, in 2025, we would say that most businesses need to build quality links to improve their search engine optimisation.

So many online articles advise how to get your business on page one of Google through improving just the on-page optimisation.

Sure, sometimes this is true, yet in our experience, these are the businesses that operate in ultra-low competition business sectors. And how many companies now face such low amounts of competition?

Well, we think the answer is very few.

From heating engineers through to solicitors, most businesses now face fierce amounts of competition out there. Therefore, you will need backlinks to rise to the top of Google’s organic results.

How many backlinks will we need to build?

This varies depending on where you are based in the UK.

For example, getting a business on page one in Cardiff might be much harder than in Swansea.

What it boils down to is how strong your competitors’ SEO is right now at this very moment in time?

As we will come to a little later, there are backlink checking tools you can use; we would recommend Moz. However, there are many others, such as Majestic and Ahrefs. So, in a nutshell, if you want your business on page one of Google for competitive keywords, you will need backlinks.

So, in our opinion, even since the days of Google’s PageRank and fast-forwarding now to 2025, backlinks have always been an essential part of search engine optimisation.

What Are Backlinks?

Getting back to basics, what are backlinks?

So, backlinks, or “inbound backlinks, ” are when another website links to your website. They could link to any page or blog post, and the link is either do-follow or no-follow.

 

Authoritativeness

Those who regularly follow our posts will know we periodically talk about Google EEAT.

For those who do not know, Google EEAT stands for “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.”

Link origin matters

Why does the link origin matter?

So, the referring domain, the business linking to your website, matters greatly regarding whether it can help improve your company’s SEO.

A common mistake, especially with businesses in Cardiff that are having a go at SEO themselves, is trying to build as many links as fast as possible.

Yet building too many links too fast could lead to a link penalty.

 

Link velocity

So, in our humble opinion, this is often not discussed enough. However, link velocity is critical.

You want to build relevant, quality links slowly; you don’t want to make too many links too fast.

SEO consultants deem this “unnatural” if Google’s algorithms index too many backlinks too fast.

This is called “link velocity”; you want to build the links slowly.

So, how many backlinks exactly does my business need?

It depends on your business sector and which keyword you want your business to appear on page one of Google.

For example, some business sectors are much more competitive than others. For some ultra-low competitive business sectors, 10 links may be enough to get a business on page one of Google.

However, for ultra-competitive industries, you may need thousands of links.

Backlinks are just one aspect of improving a company’s SEO. It’s worth considering that there are over 200 ranking factors. Therefore, you need to work on optimising as many of these as possible.

 

Use a quality backlink checking tool.

There are so many SEO tools on the market.

And what you most definitely need, regardless of the business size, is a quality backlink checking tool.

This is crucial because, as most SEO agencies will also agree with us, backlinks are still considered Google’s most important ranking factor.

This means, when Google calculates the strength of a company’s SEO, they will use backlinks as one of the most important factors they consider.

Why do we recommend using Moz Pro?

Well, we have been in the SEO game for a long time.

Therefore, we have used most of the backlink checking tools available to businesses.

However, in our humble opinion, Moz Pro is the best backlink checking tool on the market.

 

How can you obtain quality backlinks?

So, this is now the hard part: how can a business obtain quality backlinks?

Well, we think there are two main ways you can build links; there are other methods, yet these are the methods that our agency uses.

That is, we produce high-quality, evergreen content marketing that has a high Google EEAT score, that other businesses will want to link to you.

Let’s say that you write guides on how to fix cars.

Well, this content marketing might be so good that other businesses and bloggers want to link to that work.

 

Outreach

Let’s say a website specialises in offering conservation information and helping protect the environment.

Let’s say your business has recently launched a new product that helps to protect the environment.

You could therefore use outreach in this example, usually via a phone call or an email, stating that your product or service could be of interest to that other company’s website.

Let’s say you have a low-cost product that helps clean water.

Therefore, you have offered content marketing, which will be of interest to the other companies’ readers, plus, because of this, you have the opportunity to get a link back to your company website.

These are the two primary methods our SEO agency uses to obtain links. That is through outreach and writing evergreen content marketing, which earns the business backlinks.

 

 

Don’t use black hat methods.

So, good quality SEO takes time, effort, and sometimes a lot of money.

Naturally, businesses will look to cut corners; however, don’t use black hat methods.

Cutting corners in SEO doesn’t work at all now. The reason is simply because Google’s algorithms are now so clever and sophisticated that they can quickly pick up if a business uses black hat methods.
So, what are the black hat methods of SEO?

Well, in a nutshell, because good quality SEO takes up so much time and can be expensive, businesses look for “loopholes” or ways to fool

Google algorithms into thinking that the SEO is better than it is. In short, these methods don’t work now, and haven’t worked for some time.

Therefore, there are now no shortcuts or ways of accelerating the process.

Instead, you have to work hard to consistently implement quality work.

 

How can we help you

Walsh and Partners is one of the longest-established SEO agencies in Cardiff. The business is owned and managed by Ryan Walsh.
Ryan has had his work cited on Search Engine Land, plus throughout our 10 years of helping businesses, we have only ever used the best white hat methods.

Therefore, if your business needs help building links or you need us to improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation, then we are the business to call.