The short version: backlinks are important for SEO rankings because they’re the closest thing Google has to a vote of confidence from someone else, and no amount of on-page tinkering replaces that. A site with fewer but more relevant links will almost always beat a site with more content and no links. I’ve watched this play out on client sites over and over, including one that jumped from position 34 to position 6 with just 12 new links.
What a backlink does inside Google’s ranking system
A backlink is a link from another website pointing to yours. That’s the whole definition, and I’ve written a longer explainer with a walk-through example if you want the fundamentals covered on what backlinks mean in SEO. But here’s why it matters beyond the definition: Google’s original PageRank algorithm, the one Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google on back in 1998, treated every link as a vote. A link from a site that itself has lots of votes counts for more than a link from a brand new blog nobody reads. That basic maths still sits underneath modern rankings, even after two decades of updates layered on top.
Think of it like a reference on a job application. Your CV can say you’re brilliant. But when someone whose opinion the hiring manager already trusts vouches for you, that carries weight your own claims never will. Google treats your website the same way. You can say you’re the best accountant in Leeds on every page of your site. It means far less than a local business directory, a trade body, or a Yorkshire newspaper linking to you and saying so.
The client jump from position 34 to position 6
A few years back I worked with a small invoicing software company outside Manchester. Solid product, decent content, terrible visibility. Their main commercial term sat at position 34 in Google, buried on page four, and had been stuck there for the best part of a year despite them publishing two blog posts a week.
We ran a backlink audit first. They had 40 referring domains total, and most of those were low-quality directory listings from years earlier, the kind that used to work in 2012 and now do nothing. Their direct competitor sitting at position 3 had 210 referring domains, but crucially, around 30 of those were from relevant places: accounting software review sites, a mention in a small business finance podcast’s show notes, a guest post on a well-read bookkeeping blog.
Over four months we secured 12 new backlinks. Not 200. Twelve. They came from a Forbes contributor piece I helped place, two guest posts on accounting blogs with real traffic, a resource page listing on a university’s small business hub, a mention in a fintech newsletter, and a handful of digital PR wins around a small piece of original research they’d run on late payment habits among UK freelancers. That research angle alone pulled in five links on its own because journalists like a number they can quote.
Result: position 6 within four months, and the traffic to that page went from around 90 visits a month to just over 1,400. Nothing else changed on the page in that window. Same content, same meta description, same site structure. The only variable was the links. That’s the bit people don’t want to hear when they’ve spent a year writing content and getting nowhere: the writing wasn’t the problem.
The uncomfortable bit almost nobody says out loud
Here’s the thing that most SEO content dances around. Google’s own guidelines tell you not to build links for the purpose of manipulating rankings. Read that sentence again, then look at page one of Google for almost any competitive commercial term. Every single site sitting there got some, most, or all of its links through deliberate effort: guest posting, digital PR, HARO-style pitching, paid placements dressed up as editorial, reciprocal arrangements, agency link-building retainers. “earned” links, the kind that arrive because someone stumbled on your content and linked to it unprompted with zero outreach involved, are rare enough that I could count the ones I’ve seen happen to clients on one hand across fifteen years of doing this.
So when someone tells you “just write great content and the links will come,” they’re either selling you something or they haven’t built a business on this. Great content is necessary. It is not sufficient. You still have to go and get the links, and pretending that’s dishonest or beneath you just means your competitors who aren’t precious about it will keep beating you. I’d rather tell a client that plainly than let them waste eight months waiting for links that were never going to show up on their own.
Why some backlinks do almost nothing
Not every link carries equal weight, and this is where a lot of small businesses waste money. A £50 backlink from a spun content farm site with no real traffic and no topical relevance to your business does close to nothing, and in bulk can actively hurt you if Google flags the pattern. I’ve covered the full risk breakdown separately if you’re weighing this up, in can you pay for backlinks safely, because the honest answer is more nuanced than a flat yes or no.
What makes a link worth having:
- The linking site is topically relevant to your business, or at least the specific page is
- The site gets real organic traffic, not just a domain rating score with nobody visiting it
- The link sits within actual editorial content, not a footer or sidebar stuffed with 40 other outbound links
- The anchor text reads naturally, not stuffed with your exact target keyword every time
- You would be a little pleased if a real customer clicked it and landed on that other site, meaning it’s a source you’d stand behind
A single link matching that list from a respected trade publication is worth more to your rankings than fifty links bought in a bundle from a marketplace. I know that’s a harder sell when the bundle looks cheaper on a spreadsheet, but rankings don’t care about your spreadsheet.
Do you need backlinks to rank at all
For extremely low-competition, hyper-local, or long-tail searches, sometimes you can rank with almost none. If you’re the only plumber in a village of 800 people writing a page about emergency boiler repairs in that village, you might rank fine on content and basic on-page setup alone. I’ve walked through exactly where that line sits, and where it stops being true, in do you need backlinks to rank in SEO. But the moment you’re competing for a term with any real search volume or any real commercial value, backlinks stop being optional. Every study Ahrefs and Moz have published on this over the past decade shows the same pattern: the number of referring domains correlates more strongly with ranking position than almost any other single factor they measure.
Backlinks don’t work in isolation
I want to be straight about something else too. Backlinks pointing at a site with broken technical foundations are a bit like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house with a cracked foundation. If your site is slow, has duplicate content issues, or Googlebot can’t crawl half your pages because of a messy sitemap, those hard-won links won’t do what you’re hoping. I’ve seen sites with good backlink profiles stall out at position 15 for months because of technical issues nobody had looked at. If that sounds familiar, it’s worth reading why technical SEO matters before you spend another penny on outreach, because fixing a canonical tag problem can sometimes move the needle faster than another six links.
The same logic applies if you run an online shop. Backlinks to your homepage are nice, but they rarely help the product pages that make you money. Ecommerce sites need a different weighting of effort between category pages, product pages, and content, which I’ve broken down in SEO strategies for ecommerce stores.
A simple step-by-step for getting your first meaningful backlinks
If you’re starting from close to nothing, here’s roughly the order I’d work through with a new client, based on what moved the invoicing software client from position 34:
- Step 1: Run a backlink audit on your own site and your top three competitors using a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, so you can see the gap in referring domains, not just total link count
- Step 2: Identify 15 to 20 sites your competitors are getting links from that are relevant, industry publications, trade bodies, local press, review sites
- Step 3: Create one piece of link-worthy content, ideally something with an original number in it, a small survey, a data pull from your own customer base, something a journalist or blogger can quote without doing their own research
- Step 4: Pitch that content directly to 30 to 50 relevant contacts, personalised, not a mail-merge blast, expect a response rate around 5 to 10 percent if the pitch and the data are good
- Step 5: Guest post on two or three sites in your niche that accept contributions, aiming for sites with real traffic rather than the highest domain rating number you can find
- Step 6: Track referring domains monthly, not weekly, because link-building is slow and checking daily will just make you anxious
Twelve solid links over four months is a realistic target for a small business doing this with no budget for an agency. It won’t feel like much while you’re doing it. It moved that client from page four to page one.
The bottom line on why backlinks matter
Backlinks matter because Google still needs some external signal to tell it your site is worth trusting more than the next one, and content quality alone doesn’t provide that signal in a way the algorithm can measure. You can write the best guide on the internet about a topic and sit on page six because nobody else has told Google it’s the best guide. Get even a handful of the right sites to vouch for you, and that changes. I’ve seen it happen slowly on my own site over the years and quickly on client sites when the right piece of digital PR lands. The mechanism hasn’t changed since 1998. The tactics for earning those votes have, and that’s the part worth spending your time on.
If you want to check a domain before you pitch or buy from it, my free backlink checker pulls the live backlink profile for you.
The website mapping tool on this site shows a whole site structure from one URL, which makes this audit much faster.
Related reading: How to Identify the Best Websites for SEO Outreach.
Frequently asked questions
How many backlinks do I need to rank on page one of Google?
There’s no fixed number because it depends entirely on how competitive your search term is, but as a rough guide, competitive commercial terms in the UK often need somewhere between 20 and 50 relevant referring domains, while low-competition local or long-tail terms can sometimes rank with fewer than 10. Quality and relevance matter more than hitting any specific count.
Can too many backlinks hurt my rankings?
A large volume of low-quality, irrelevant, or clearly bought links can trigger Google’s spam systems and lead to a manual action or algorithmic devaluation, so yes, quantity without quality is a real risk. A slow, steady build of relevant links is far safer than a sudden spike of hundreds from unrelated sites.
How long does it take for backlinks to affect rankings?
Most sites see movement within 4 to 12 weeks of new relevant backlinks going live, though it varies based on how often Google crawls the linking page and how competitive the term is. In the client example above, meaningful movement started around week 8 and kept improving through month four.
Are backlinks still important in 2026 with AI search tools around?
Yes, and arguably more so, because AI-driven search tools like Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity still rely heavily on which sources have established authority signals, and backlinks remain one of the clearest ways a site demonstrates that authority to both traditional and AI-powered ranking systems.
