How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank ($2k Case Study)?

How many times have you asked an SEO specialist/agency this question and received the same answer: "It depends"? Well, it does depend, but even if you provide your website's URL, your competitors' URLs and everything else needed for a detailed analysis/audit (and even pay for one, which can be $1-3k or even more), you still get some vague answer like "You need more backlinks than your competitors" or "You need more high-quality backlinks". I mean sure, I understand that SEO is not an exact science and that there are many factors that influence rankings, but I need at least some kind of ballpark figure to work with, right? If it takes $1M to rank for a keyword, I'd rather know that beforehand and maybe abandon this idea, not just pay the monthly bill of $10k for a year and see no results whatsoever. In the next three articles, starting with this one, I will show you my granular case studies and some research, which should help you to get as close to the answer as possible.

My case study

In this article, I want to share with you one more case study that I did. The website is once again my eCommerce SaaS, which already has some backlinks and ranks for some keywords. I picked 2 perfect pages for this case study: page #1: ranked around position 25-30 for its main keyword, page #2: ranked around position 17-20 for its main keyword (those were different from the one from the previous post, all of my case studies are as granular as possible); both had 0 backlinks and most importantly, all the competitors in the top-10 for those 2 keywords had 0-1 meaningful backlinks as well (for those specific pages that appear on the SERP for those keywords), so those keywords were not too competitive in my niche (but still were medium difficulty), since they are not as high-traffic as some other ones. I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to see how many backlinks I need to rank in the top-10, since those are such easy keywords, right?

Backlink quality

I decided to go heavy. I acquired 4 guest posts from 4 different websites, which were also reputable SaaS websites (not just another link farms), had DRs in the range of 65-75, and had decent organic traffic from Google. The anchors were an exact match, the content was written by me, and the links were placed in the body of the article. I also made sure that the articles were not just some generic stuff but were actually useful and informative for the readers. And I didn't even pay for it (that's another story), but the market value of such guest posts would be around $300-$500 each (hence the title of this article). So this is basically "creme de la creme", the highest quality backlinks that you can get. Page #1 received 3 of them and page #2 received 1 of them. I wanted to see how the needle moves in each case.

The results, some analysis and conclusions

So, I set up the position tracking for those 2 keywords (in addition to monitoring Ahrefs, just to make sure that I don't miss anything), and waited for several months. The results? Absolutely none. What?

Yeah, the positions haven't moved at all, neither up, nor down. Pretty disappointing, but let's analyze it a bit. My SaaS has hundreds of distinct keywords, i.e. those which require a separate page, so we can say it has hundreds of keyword clusters. So, even if 3 very high-quality backlinks per page are not enough to move the needle, we may presume that we would need even more for each page/cluster of keywords, which would mean that we're looking at thousands of backlinks to rank for all those keywords, and the budget would be tipping 7 figures. At the same time my competitors are not even close to those numbers (as I've mentioned already, they're ranking for some keywords with 0 direct backlinks for the respective pages). Something's not right here.

There's the only logical conclusion that we can make here:

And if the majority of your pages are ranking at positions 25-30, then you're not there yet, and building just several backlinks to one or two of such pages won't help you much.

This thesis is also supported by the mere existence of the term "parasite SEO". If you're not familiar with the term, it's a technique that some online marketers use to grab some traffic from Google by creating a page on a high-DA website (like Forbes, for example, or another one that was recently popular in some circles - Outlook India). So basically, if you have a high-DA website, you can rank for almost anything, even if you have 0 backlinks to the page that you want to rank, and it will outrank the websites that are entirely dedicated to the topic (and which are supposed to have "topical authority" - another buzzword that you might have heard) but have a weaker overall link profile.

Hold up!

But wait, we haven't even answered the question from the post's heading yet. How many backlinks do I need to rank? From this article, we see that if we mean one specific keyword/page - this is not the right question to ask. This case study shows that even if a certain page has some very high-quality backlinks, it still might not rank well if the overall domain authority is not high enough. So, the right question to ask is: how many backlinks do I need to reach a certain domain authority in my niche?

While there's still no "one-size-fits-all" answer to this question, it points us in the right direction, and the whole thing becomes much more manageable. We can analyze our competition's overall backlink profile and get more or less precise numbers for the amount of backlinks that we need to reach the needed domain authority, which the majority of SEOs/agencies that I spoke to fail to do for some reason.

In the next post - How to conduct a competitor backlink analysis and predict the budget - I'm showing an example of such research and most importantly the exact numbers I came up with in terms of budget and time needed, check it out!