Find Out EXACTLY How Many Backlinks You Need To Rank #1 (EASY!)

- Speaker A shows a video about how many links you need to build a rank. But be sure to watch to the end because there are some important caveats. - Chris Jesus, from the link building agency Solinksalot Co, is doing a competition with [email protected]. Chris wants to apply a very low bar to beat out the competitor. - Speaker A tells Haro that only 46 of the 152 links are actually quality links. They decide to raise the bar to 100 for links that are above Dr. 10 and above traffic 250. - Speaker A tells people to see how relevant their links are and filter out any kind of like social profiles. They are looking at 50 links that are just 50 links. - Speaker A tells people to sort by doctor and try to catch the number of quality links that are not UGC by building high authority links. The next thing is to take the total number of links and multiply that by the cost of an authority link. - Speaker A and Speaker B use a calculator to calculate the cost of building high authority links. Speaker B divides the total number of links needed by 6 months or 12 months.

Having run a seven figure link building agency for the past six years or so, one of the most common questions we get asked is how many links do I need to rank? Or how many links do I need to beat my competitors? So in this video I'm going to show you exactly how many links you need to build a rank, how much that might cost you, how to build them, what types of links to build, and anything else you might need to know. But definitely be sure to watch to the end because there are some very important caveats that we need to cover that might really change your calculations here. And we've just got a ton of stuff to cover. All right, let's get into it. So I'm Chris Jesus and you might know me from my link building agency over at Solinksalot Co or our other YouTube channel or Facebook group. Or maybe you've seen me around on some SEO podcasts or at some SEO conferences. But you can go to my website for more information on me. And if you're interested in working together, go ahead and click this Work with me button at the top and fill out the form here. So today we're going to be [email protected] I don't have any affiliation with this website, but let's just go ahead and pretend that this is our number one competitor that we're trying to beat out. What most people do is they'll come in and they'll say, oh, I need a doctor of 48 or I need about 1.9k referring domains or links from unique domains to try to beat them as far as backlink authority. But this is completely wrong. So first of all, just come over and click Backlinks over here on the left side. And what we're going to do is we're going to apply some filters because yes, they have about 2,000 referring domains here. However, not all of these links are quality links and you don't need to build all these non quality links. You want to know how many quality links they have and you want to try to beat that number. So the first thing I like to do is to apply a very low bar. So we're going to go ahead and put a Dr. Minimum of 10 and we'll do domain traffic minimum of 250. Again, I said this is a very low bar. So these are sites with really any kind of domain authority at all and very little traffic. So let's go ahead and show the results for that. You can see just applying this extremely low bar. We're already down to only 152 links. So this is already drastically lower. But we're really going to drill into this a lot deeper. First of all, what you can do is a lot of people like to say dofollow links only, but I don't think that's a good thing to do because some nofollow links can actually be really powerful. And we'll talk about this a little bit more later. But digital PR Haro, you can get really good links from these and a lot of them end up being dofollow and they can help your rankings quite a bit. But what you can do is come over here and click this UGC tag. So just remember we had 152 links before. Now we're going to show results for only ugc, which ends up being blog comments a lot of the time or just really spammy low quality sites. So now we have 46 of those 152 are UGC links. So now we know about 100 of those 152 links are actually actually quality links. We're going to go ahead and put it back on all for now. But just remember this number is actually 100 now for links that are above Dr. 10, above traffic 250 and are not blog comments or some kind of really low quality site. So this number of 100 is actually a pretty decent number to use. However, you could actually raise the bar quite a bit more because these links, a lot of them are really not going to be very powerful at all. So let's go ahead and raise the bar and we'll say above Dr. Third, we'll say domain traffic a thousand or more. So now we're down to 78 links that pass this a little bit higher bar. And of those 78 links, 26 are UGC links or links that we just don't really want to count at all. So that leaves us with about 50 links, 50 quality links that we're going to want to build to try to beat this site. However, if you really want to get more detailed, you can look into things quite a bit further than that. The first thing I like to do is to come down and just look on the left hand side here and see are these links that they're getting actually relevant? Are they talking about homes or roofing or shingles or anything like that? And it's not because non relevant links can help. Non relevant links can absolutely help. I'm not telling you to build links that are not relevant. It's always better to build relevant links. But it's also a good idea to just see how relevant their links are. So looking on the left hand side here you can see their links are quite relevant. Solar shingles, how to build a roof, how to bid a roofing job. How long does a metal roof last? Stone coated steel roof cost? Fiberglass shingles, Pretty much everything here has to do with roofing. So their links are quite relevant. Another thing you're going to want to do is make sure that no kind of like social profiles got through here. Scrolling down here on this one I'm not really seeing any social profiles, but if you saw something that you know it's basically just a directory, you're not really going to want to count those as quality links, even if they are dofollow and just filter out anything else that you think is basically a foundational link where we're just looking for stuff that are basically outreach based links, Haro digital pr, stuff like that. But for the sake of this example, let's go ahead and say that it's just 50 links that we're looking at because we are subtracting the UGC links from this. So yeah, 50 quality links that we're going to want to build. Another thing you can do here is go ahead and sort by doctor and you can see how many of their links would be considered very high authority, which I would say is anything over like Dr. 50 or so. So you can see here that they've got about 50 links that are over Dr. 50 which is quite a good number. However, some of these are just stuff like web 2.0 and we're definitely not going to be counting that stuff. We would want to filter that out or stuff like this top global websites directory. This is just kind of spam that everybody gets. So on its face it looks like a good link like Dr.90, you know, 500k traffic. You're like oh my God, yeah, I need that link. You don't need this link, you're going to get it automatically. Going to page two here they have this many links that are under Dr. 50 or so. Of course lower authority links are going to end up costing a lot less to build than higher authority links. So kind of something good to keep in mind. But in general I don't really do this very much. I just say okay, you know, they've got 50 links that are quality links that are not UGC and we're going to try to catch that number by building high authority links. The next thing you want to do is take the total number of links you need so in our case it's 50 and multiply that by the cost of an authority link. So the cost of an authority link is going to vary for everybody. If you're getting them from a provider like us over at Sir Links a lot, you come check out our guest post pricing over here and just choose what tier of link you want to build. Of course, if you build on it yourself, it's going to be quite a bit cheaper. But not everyone knows how to build quality links, especially at scale. So let's just say we need about 50 high authority links and we'll say the average cost is between 250 or 300 per high authority link. We'll just go ahead and say 250 for now. So according to our calculator here, we'd need to invest about $12.5k on backlinks. Now that number might see high initially, but then we need to remember that you're going to not want to build them all at once. You're going to kind of spread this out over time. Which brings us to the next line here. Total number of links needed divided by 6 months or 12 months or whatever kind of timeframe you're trying to catch your competitor in. So let's just say we want to catch someone about a year so. So $12,500 divided by 12 months would be a little bit over $1,000 per month. And if we take the total link number here of 15 divided by 12, that'd be a little bit over four links per month, which seems a lot more doable when you divide it out like that. It's really not hard to catch these guys. So now that we've talked about exactly how many links we want to build to be able to beat a specific competitor, now let's talk about exactly what types of links we want to build. So pretty much the types of links you're going to build are outreach based backlinks, which are usually called guest post or niche edits, AKA link ins. Or you might want to do some digital pr which is a lot pricier. But you can get some really high authority, really quality links doing this. And then Haro, here is the third thing I have listed. And these three things are really kind of the holy grail of link building. These are quality links. They'll come from sites with traffic. You want them to be relevant. Of course they're editorially added. They're not just UGC user generated content links that anybody can go and build. It takes some work to build these things. And of Course, Google knows that, and that's why they make them a lot more effective and increase your rankings a lot more. Exactly how to build these types of links, I can't really cover in the scope of this video or else we'd just be here all day. However, definitely go check out my YouTube channel. I've got a ton of videos on this stuff where I really go into it a lot more in depth. While you're over there, go ahead and give the video a like and give my channel a sub if you're enjoying the content. Now, let's talk about the links that you do not want to build to try to catch your competitors. Because I see people doing this all the time. They're like, okay, yeah, I need to build 50 quality backlinks. I'll just go do a press release or I'll just go do like a bunch of foundational links or blog comments. So, hey, I built 50 links. Why am I not catching my competitor? It's because you didn't build quality links. So foundational links is not going to count in this number. Things like blog comments or forum comments are not going to count in this number. Things like social profiles are not going to count in this number. Like I had mentioned before, press releases are not going to count in this number. I really love press releases, but they are a foundational type of backlink and we're not counting them towards a quality backlink here. They're usually no follow. It's pretty much duplicate content because press releases just syndicate to, you know, hundreds or thousands of websites at the same time. So yeah, we're not counting these things, but of course they do have their own use case. It's just something different than what we're talking about right now. So again, focus on outreach, digital PR and haro. Focus on quality here, guys. And again, a lot more info in my channel on how to build these things. And also, exactly what is quality? Like, what is backlink quality? What are some other things you can check to make sure that the site is powerful and not just a guest post farm and you're just getting basically your money stolen from you. Some videos to check out on that are this one link building, Blueprint 150 + quality guest post sites for free. Of course, the title is a little misleading here. We end up talking about backlink quality a lot in this video and there's a bunch of other stuff here, of course. All right, now that we know exactly what types of links we need to build and we know how many links we need to Build. Let's talk about some other specifics just to make sure you're doing the right thing here and you're not doing something completely wrong to get yourself into some trouble or do things in a weird way where Google says, hey, you're building links unnaturally, let's give you a penalty. So first of all, your target URLs when you're building links to your website, we are building links to the website overall and not just one specific page you want to rank. So on our website here, let's say we wanted to rank this SEO guest post service page. Yes, we're going to want to build some links to this page. However, we also want to just build links to the homepage and to a bunch of other pages on the website because this is natural. These calculations that we did before is based on overall domain authority, because overall domain authority is insanely important for ranking on Google. We'll talk about page authority as well a little bit later in this video. So instead of just slamming your target page, the one page you want to rank above everything else repeatedly with backlinks, link to your homepage, link to your hub pages or pillar content. These are kind of content on your website that have internal links going to a bunch of other stuff or maybe like a category page, something like that, link bait or other articles that would make sense to get a lot of backlinks. For example, service pages generally don't get a ton of backlinks, but a link bait article which could be something like, you know, 10 SEO tactics that don't work anymore. This stuff can be a lot more natural to get links than you can use internal links to spread that link juice to other target pages on your website. And of course you will want to build some links to the pages you want to rank. Just go a little slowly on this. Don't just keep slamming that page repeatedly. Next up we have anchor text. When you're choosing your anchor text, you want the large majority to be very natural anchor text. That's stuff like branded anchors, URL anchors, generic anchors, topical anchors, long tail anchors. Let's go ahead and give some examples of that real quick. A branded anchor would literally just be your brand name in the anchor. Or you could do variations like hats or links a lot. But by far the most common used anchors are branded anchors. So you should really make these make up a large portion of your backlink profile. Branded anchors would be something like sirlinksalot co. Of course you could do variations with www, without www, with HTTPs, without HTTPs. Miscellaneous anchors could be something like Click here. Learn more. There are literally millions of different miscellaneous anchors you could use. So yep, topical anchors could be something just like links. Of course we are a link building agency, but this page really isn't trying to rank for links at all. So if you use these kind of words, they're topical but it's not something you're trying to rank for. It's not the exact match term for the site or the page. Then you can definitely use these as well. So this could be something like links SEO service as we are a service based company and on and on. So these types of anchors are not exact match, but they definitely give a lot more information than these like miscellaneous anchors right here. So I like using stuff like this too. And then you have long tail anchors, you know an exact match anchor for solinks a lot would be something like leak building agency. So instead of using that exact match anchor, we could use a long tail variation of it which would be something like I like this link agency. So it's a little bit longer, it's got some extra words in it, it's just not exactly matching your keyword. So it's a lot more natural to use than an exact match anchor like this one. So like I was saying before, definitely make sure your anchor text is more natural overall. And yeah, I really love branded anchors especially. But all of these things are good options here. And then the last little detail we're going to talk about before we talk about some of the other stuff you definitely want to keep in mind is link velocity, which is basically how fast you're building backlinks. So if we had 50 backlinks that we wanted to build 50 quality links to try to catch up to our competitor, we definitely not going to want to just build them in one month and just stop link building. Overall, what I would rather do is to build backlinks consistently over time. So just think about from Google's perspective, if a website all of a sudden gets a ton of links and then they don't get any more links for a long time, it kind of looks like they got a bunch of press, people cared about them for a little bit and then now people don't care about them anymore. By building backlinks slowly over time, you're showing Google that people have a sustained interest in your business. But that's not to say that links in short bursts can't work too. However, this is just a best practice to kind of use here. So depending on how fast you wanted to go, just split that up over, you know, three months, six months, 12 months. All right, so now that we've covered how to calculate that number of links you want to build, the types of links we're going to build, and exactly how to build them, and all the little details. Now there are some super important things here that we really need to keep in mind that links aren't the only factor. And we've actually got some other stuff that are related to links in here as well. But really these are just other things that we really need to keep in mind. First off, you need to make sure that your website is built correctly. You're doing things like matching search intent. If you're not matching search intent, you're just not going to rank. So be sure you get this stuff right. If you don't know what you're doing with basics like this, you're not going to fix your problem with backlinks. So you're either going to need to put some time in to learn it. Of course, my channel is a really good resource for that. Or of course you want to work together. Just head over here and fill out this form. You can click the link in the description. Next up, content quality. If you're not covering the topic correctly, if you're not including related keywords in your content, if your content is thin or not very unique or doesn't add anything new, then you have a really hard time ranking and backlinks probably aren't going to help you. Next up, topical authority. And topical authority is not needed to rank, of course. When we go, just type something in Google like best protein powder. We have New York Magazine ranking number one. Do you think New York Magazine is a topical authority on protein powder? I don't think so. However, topical authority can definitely help. And so if you only have five articles on protein powder, but you have a competitor that has a hundred articles on protein powder, then even if they have less backlinks than you, Google might see them as knowing about the topic more than you and might rank them higher. Next up on page SEO. Again, this kind of falls into the basics. We're back here on our guest post page. You can see we've got guest posts in the URL, we've got guest posting in the title up here, we've got guest post in the H1. And of course we've got guest posts in things like the H2S, and just using related keywords throughout this page. Next up we got technical SEO. You can use Screaming Frog to audit stuff like this. Just make sure you don't got a bunch of 404s or broken links and a bunch of stuff that just causes your website to break. Really bad core web vitals, slow pages, speed, stuff like that. Next up, internal links. And this is probably one of the things that I see people just mess up completely over and over and over again is they really neglect having good internal linking on their website. So if we come over to our blog and just click on one of the blog posts, what you're going to notice is we've got a ton of internal links going to other pages on our website all throughout these articles. This helps Google understand the website better. It helps link juice flow throughout your website. I've actually got a ton more information in this video right here. Fast SEO results because it's one of my favorite things to check immediately when I start working on a website. Super important stuff. Next up, we have off page eat and branded searches. If you have a competitor who a lot of people are searching for the brand name and no one is searching for your brand name or they're being talked about in other places on the Internet and you're not being talked about at all, this stuff can definitely have an impact. And the last three things we have are about backlinks. First, we have letting your links age. So when you first build the backlinks, yes, they're going to pass juice. However, the longer those backlinks are there, I think they kind of have a more increased effect. So sometimes it can really just take time. You just keep building the links, let them sit there, let them age like a fine wine, and eventually they're going to pass more and more juice. Next up, your competitor might be using PBN links and it might be hidden. What they can do is they can block Ahrefs bots from crawling the website. So the PBN will not show up in the list of links here. So even though we said, okay, we need to build 50 links to beat this competitor, they might have a network of a hundred quality PBN sites pointing at them. That could drastically increase their rankings, especially if they're doing it right and they're good quality PBNs that they built privately just to use on this website. And last up, links to the target page. So so far we've been talking about overall domain authority, which I think is probably the most important ranking factor in SEO right now. However, we have to include page authority in our calculations as well. So we come over here and we search for roofing calculator. You can see the top ranking Page has a Dr. Of 83 and they have 177 referring domains pointing to this page, which is an inner page, not their homepage. Next up, roofingcalculator.com, it is an EMD. They have a much lower Dr. However, they actually have more referring domains pointing to their homepage here, the page that's actually ranking. So even though the referring domains pointing to this page that's ranking for the keyword is higher than their competitor, the competitor is beating them because they have this higher doctor here. But like I said before, we definitely have to look at this because links to the exact page and not just the domain overall definitely are a big factor. But it's really hard to tell you like how big of a factor it is and how much of a difference it makes. Or like, oh, if my competitor has a doctor that's higher than mine, but my page has more links, how many links do I need to the page to beat them even though their doctor is higher? It's extremely hard to calculate this stuff, but it's definitely something to keep in mind. So if you catch up to them on Dr. But then you notice that their page still has a lot more links than yours, then yeah, you're probably going to want to beef up that page with links as well. All right, guys, we covered a lot of stuff here. We covered how to calculate how many links you need to build, what types of links to build, how to build them exactly, and some other stuff to take into consideration because, you know, there's of course a lot of things in SEO and it's not always as simple as people like to think. However, I have found that using this method has been a pretty good judge of exactly how many high quality links I need to build. It's really been a great tool for me, helping rank my site and client insights. If you like the video guys, go ahead and give it a, like, give my channel a sub. And if you're interested in working together, go ahead and click the link in the description. That's it for now and I'll see you next time. Bye.