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.