How important are backlinks?

If you have a website and are looking to increase visibility and get more visitors, the chances are you’ve stumbled across the term ‘backlinks’. This term is synonymous with SEO, and is regularly cited as being one of the most crucial aspects to growing a site’s visibility and ranking over any other “method”. The issue you may have faced is understanding the importance that backlinks actually have to the growth of your website. 

In this blog, we strip away the hidden nature of backlinks and explain the importance they have to the success of your site appearing on search engines. 

What are backlinks? 

First of all, we have to understand what a backlink is. Essentially, a backlink is a link on someone else’s website that links back to your site. In essence, they’re small votes of credibility from other websites that can help your page rank higher on search engines.

Quality backlinks that come from high-authority websites can carry a lot of weight in the eyes of Google. This means that if you have a link from a well-respected site in your niche, it theoretically tells search engines that “this site is trustworthy, credible, and you should send visitors there”, which can have a positive impact on your growth.

Why are backlinks important? 

As I’ve alluded to already, backlinks are the cornerstone of every great SEO strategy and are incredibly important to the growth and ranking success of your website. The reason backlinks are so important is that search engines use them as ranking signals, which is how Google and other search engines determine how well your site aligns with a person’s search. 

This is why every important page on your site should have quality backlinks pointing to your site. This doesn’t include contact pages, privacy pages, or terms; you purely want backlinks to point to all your service and product pages, so that they rank better than your competitors. 

The better quality, and to a lesser extent, the volume of backlinks your site attracts can help you appear on the first page of Google.

Should I have lots of backlinks? 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of the “lots means best” mentality and fall for the many traps of backlink building. Whilst having lots of backlinks can be great for your website, the focus should be on quality. 

Although there is no definitive number of backlinks your site can have, if you have a lot of backlinks that point to your site from “spammy” or low authority sites, it can have a negative impact on your ranking.

So, whilst yes, it’s great to have a lot of backlinks, if your site only has a few but they’re from excellent websites, they will benefit you more than if you were to have a 1000. 

How do I get backlinks for my website? 

This is a common question many people ask us, and there’s the easy way or the hard way. 

The easy way is to use an agency, like Website Design Ltd, to conduct your SEO marketing and backlink building. Our team has grown visibility for our clients’ websites, and improved their ranking due to our tailored SEO strategies, which include backlinking. 

The hard way is to do it yourself, by sending outreach emails, searching for websites that would be happy to include a link on their site, and writing content for others that aligns with their target audience. 

There is a third way, patience. Good quality websites that have been made to be responsive and designed to help users will naturally generate backlinks. However, this is an extremely slow process, and can’t be guaranteed or relied upon. If you were to take this route, you are more likely to generate links that don’t improve your ranking. 

Having a dedicated team that will monitor and generate backlinks for your site is the easiest and robust way to grow your backlink profile. 

Contact our team today to start your SEO marketing

How do I find backlinks on my site?

Quite simply, Google has made it incredibly easy to find backlinks on your site. Head over to your Google Search Console, find at the bottom of the list on the left-hand side: links, click, and that will show you how many internal and external links are on and pointing to your site. 

SEO tools are also a great way to find links on your site, and quite often will show you where they are, so that you can review them. Tools, such as SE ranking, SEMrush, and Ahrefs, all show the current state of your backlink profile. It’s important to note, however, that the backlink feature on these tools is often in the paid versions. Whilst Google Search Console is free.