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How Many Backlinks Does A Website Need to Rank on Google?

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How Many Backlinks Tn

Our SEO team recently performed a study wherein we surveyed 170+ client websites to see how many backlinks it took, on average, for their pages to start generally ranking on Page 1 of the Google Search Listings. We then broke down the results by industry. Below are our findings.

NOTE: For the purposes of this study, a backlink is defined as an inbound link with an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 30 – perfectly average on the scale. We start with a table containing the Domain Rating of every link pointing to a given website and weight each link based on the average. If a link comes from a website with half a DR30 website’s trust (noting that the DR scale is logarithmic), it counts as ½ backlink; if a link comes from a website with double a DR30 website’s trust, it counts as 2 backlinks.

Industry # of Links Required for Page 1 Rankings on Majority of Targeted Keywords # of Links Required for Top 3 Rankings on Majority of Targeted Keywords
Aerospace & Defense 110 191
Addiction Treatment 269 710
Automotive 216 521
Aviation 64 176
B2B SaaS 309 824
Biotech 124 298
Chemical & Pharmaceutical 257 614
Construction 80 206
Cybersecurity 311 796
eCommerce 387 780
Energy Management 116 345
Engineering 89 206
Entertainment 406 1,083
Environment & Sustainability  254 590
Food & Beverage 186 411
Financial Services 306 940
Fintech 248 719
Healthcare 286 806
Higher Education 410 1,126
Hotels & Hospitality 293 671
HVAC 216 569
Insurance 389 770
Investment Banking 106 355
IoT 125 273
Legal 278 610
Managed Services 109 426
Manufacturing 98 401
Marketing Agency 416 968
Medical 104 267
Oil & Gas 76 184
Real Estate 181 656
Recycling 170 599
Security 71 153
Software Development 206 672
Staffing & HR 147 389
Telecommunications 68 203
Transportation & Logistics 90 268

Key Findings

The key takeaways from our study were as follows:

  • The average number of backlinks a website needed to rank on the first page of the Google search results was 203
  • The average number of backlinks a website needed to rank in the top 3 positions of the Google search results was 521
  • The average time frame for building 100 organic links was 13 months; building 200 organic links took 19 months; and building 300 organic links took 25 months
    [Related study]

Building Your Backlinks Organically

Nowadays, Google will only count organically created links towards your Trust Score, and the ways to acquire those links are limited to only two methods: Hire a Digital PR firm or (2) Publish good content that bloggers and journalists naturally link to.

Our agency specializes in the latter: writing the best content on the Internet for each keyword that is commercially valuable to your business. We utilize a 4 person team consisting of a subject matter expert, a writer, an editor, and a graphic designer to ghostwrite content on your behalf. An SEO strategist oversees this team to ensure your content is ranking, converting, and attracting links.

If you’re interested in learning more about working with our firm, you can contact us here.

Evan Bailyn

Evan Bailyn is a best-selling author and award-winning speaker on the subjects of SEO and thought leadership. Contact Evan here.