What are backlinks in SEO?

Backlinks are links on websites that point to another website. As external links, backlinks act as votes of confidence from one website to another. They show Google – and other search engines – that you should be trusted.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for search engine optimisation (SEO). By earning high quality backlinks from trusted websites, search engines put more trust in you, thus enabling you to rank more highly for keywords and terms.

Why is it important to rank high on Google?

There are a lot of benefits when it comes to ranking highly on Google and other search engines. However, these can be broken down into:

Less money spent on paid advertising

Companies can spend hundreds of thousands – if not millions – on paid advertising every single year. And a large portion is spent on digital advertising. In fact, it was projected that companies would spend $190.5 billion on search advertising globally in 2024. And while paid advertising will always be key for businesses, they do this to appear at the top of the results page.

But ranking highly on Google for key search terms and keywords means you don’t have to spend as much money on paid advertising, such as pay per click. This is because you will already appear in these positions organically.

More sales and revenue

There are 8.5 million Google searches every day, so this is a major source of information for people all over the world – whether they are looking for a removal company, a solicitor or a new dining room table. Therefore, every business needs an online presence. However, it’s not enough to just have a website; research has found that the number 1 result gets 27.6% of all clicks, while just 0.63% of Google searchers clicked on a link from the second page. Being present on page 1 for your key search terms drives more organic search engine traffic, which, in turn, increases sales and revenue.

Search engines are a core part of our lives, with billons of searches on them every single day. While Google is the biggest, improving your search engine rankings on Google will also help you rank on other search engines, too.

How do I get SEO backlinks?

Backlinks have to be earned. In simple terms, the best way to get backlinks is to create quality, informative, useful, and interesting content.

The most common way to earn backlinks is through digital PR. Digital PR was born out of traditional PR and traditional link building. Digital PR combines both principles around brand awareness and public relations and the SEO-first strategy to complement wider SEO work, in order to tell stories.

By creating newsworthy stories that resonate with your audience, you pique journalists’ interests and earn coverage – and links – on high authority websites and press sites.

There are three main tactics when it comes to digital PR:

Newsjacking and reactive PR

Newsjacking and reactive PR reacts to breaking news, trends, consumer behaviour, industry changes, and anything else related to your brand, placing your brand as an expert and authority source.

Proactive PR

Proactive PR is always-on, creating a constant stream of relevant and newsworthy stories that play into a brand’s strengths. It keeps brands at the forefront of relevant news by adding value for journalists and readers.

Hero campaigns

Hero campaigns are usually evergreen and often use data to tell a story related to the brand. They have large landing pages which host the dataset, allowing them to not only earn links when launched, but also in the future.

You can read more about digital PR here.

Content marketing

Content marketing can also be used to earn backlinks. While digital PR on its own is a great way to earn regular backlinks, when combined with a content marketing strategy that focuses on target keywords, your content works harder. Just how hero campaigns can continue to earn backlinks naturally, creating helpful, useful and interesting content for your website as part of a wider content marketing strategy helps to earn backlinks naturally, too.

For instance, an accounting firm may see an opportunity to create helpful content for small business owners around what government help there is available for them. By pulling in external data and statistics, their own data, and providing actionable information that small business owners will find useful, and creating a dedicated webpage for this, it will gain naturally rankings, and can then be cited as sources of information – resulting in backlinks. This kind of page could be a standalone pages or a blog post.

Broken link building

Broken link building is another tactic for earning backlinks for authoritative websites.

Broken link building involves finding broken (or dead) links on external websites that point to your website. There may be lots of reasons why the link is broken, but usually it’s because the page has been deleted or has been moved, meaning it now has a different URL.

If the page has simply been moved, or there is a new page with the same/updated information on, you can reach out to that website and ask them to update the URL.

To rebuild the broken link/s, just send a polite email explaining that you saw their link was broken and it may be useful for their audience to have access to the new page. You may not always get a reply, but it’s always worth doing. And don’t forget to say thank you if they do update it.

How many backlinks do you need for SEO?

It is not the case that more backlinks are better. Before the Google’s penguin update in 2012, it was very much about quantity and the websites that had the most links won. The Penguin update was designed to designed to tackle low-quality content. As a result, many websites fell down Google’s search results almost overnight. While it was a shock to the system for many SEOs, it did pave the way for link building as we know it today.

Over the last 12 years, link building, outreach and digital PR has evolved to understand what Google wants more than ever. That, combined with conversations and articles written by Google’s team, shows that quality backlinks are more important than the quantity of backlinks.

While websites will generally have hundreds, thousands, and even millions of links pointing to them from a range of referring domains, search engines rely more heavily on where these links are coming from and the information included on the original page than ever before.

Therefore, it’s not about how many backlinks you have; it’s about the quality of the backlinks you have.

That being said, it is advisable to do competitor analysis when creating a link building strategy. This allows you to see where your competitors are getting links from, and how many they have. From there, you will be able to see what is working for them and close gaps by building quality backlinks from reputable sources.

How do I know what websites are high quality?

Not all backlinks are made equal. There are a number of ways you can gauge whether a website is authoritative. The easiest way is to look at domain authority and domain rating.

These two terms were coined by Moz and Ahrefs, respectively. Domain authority (DA) is designed to give a guide as to which site will rank higher on SERPs. Domain rating (DR) on the other hand reflects the strength of a website’s backlink profile. Both of these ‘rank’ websites from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the highest). Very few websites rank 90+, and while there is no rule per se, a good guide is focussing on websites that have a DA or DR of 40+.

However, it is important to mention that some more niche websites that may provide relevant and quality backlinks to your website will fall under this. These should not be discounted and it’s important to take each website on its own merit and use your judgement on what is considered an authoritative website.

A couple of ways you can judge a website’s authority, aside from DA and DR, are:

• The website’s organic traffic numbers
• The number of backlinks to the site
• Where the backlinks are coming from (backlink quality)

What are the different types of backlinks?

Not all backlinks are the same. There are lots of different types of backlinks, but when building backlinks, we’ll generally see one of two main types of backlink; follow links and nofollow links.

Follow backlinks are often seen as the holy grail. Follow links, also known as dofollow links, are links without any special attributes (such as nofollow, sponsored or UGC).

While follow links look the same to the reader to no follow links, but in the back end of the website, they will differ. In HTML code, the standard markup language for creating web pages, a follow link will look like this:

<a href=”https://smartmonkeymarketing.com/”</a>

Nofollow backlinks are more common. While similar to follow links, no follow links have rel=”nofollow” attributed to them. Nofollow links look like this in the back end of a website:

<a href=”https://smartmonkeymarketing.com/” rel=”nofollow”></a>

You can see what kind of link it is by using the tools mentioned above, or by right clicking on a website with your mouse and selecting ‘View page Source’. Then simply find the anchor text and the link will be next to it.

What is the difference between a follow link and a nofollow link?

The main difference between follow and nofollow links is in how the power they hold when it comes to influencing the search rankings of the linked page.

When linking from a high authority or relevant website, follow links tell Google that you are a trusted source. This directly boosts the search ranking of the page they link to. Nofollow links hint to Google that you are a trusted source. This helps to boost the search ranking of the page they link to.

It is down to the website in question which link they use, and it is rarely ever in the control of the journalist writing the story whether they include a follow or a no follow link.

What are UGC and sponsored links?

A UGC (user generated content) link is an attribution that signals to Google that the link is placed in user-generated content. Similar to no follow links, you will see a UGC link with a ‘rel=’ prefix. So it will look like this:

<a href=”https://smartmonkeymarketing.com/” rel=”UGC”></a>

These attributes help Google better understand how people are linking and signal that the content was generated by website users. Some examples of these include forum posts, comments, and any other place on a website where a user can add content. 

A sponsored link is an attribution that signals to Google that the link has been paid for. Similar to UGC and no follow links, these also have the ‘rel=” prefix. A sponsored link looks like this:

<a href=”https://smartmonkeymarketing.com/” rel=”sponsored”></a>

The link can be from any paid-for campaign, such as sponsored articles and affiliate links.

These links will not pass link equity to the website as they are not ‘earned’.

How do I find SEO backlinks?

You can use a number of different SEO tools to find backlinks. Tools, such as Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush and Majestic are all popular tools used by the SEO industry and will show you the backlinks pointing to your website.

You can also use search engines to find backlinks. Simply search your brand and keywords you’ve created content around, and you will be able to see where you have been featured. Be aware that these aren’t exclusively backlinks and may also be citations.

When will I see benefits to earning backlinks?

You may see traffic, sales and revenue benefits from building backlinks overnight. However, SEO benefits will take longer to be seen.

Google crawls websites daily, but external links take time to be indexed. Before Google can include new backlinks into your search rankings, it needs to discover the linking page and add it to the search index. According to Google, this can take anywhere from 1-2 weeks.

Once your backlinks have been crawled and indexed, you can start to see uplifts in keywords any time from then, to three months after the backlinks have gone live. The impact individual links will have depends on a number of factors, but that’s why it’s important to continually invest in a digital PR and link building process. After all, link building is an imperative part of the SEO puzzle, but your competitors are likely investing in it, too. So getting to the top of search engines isn’t the only goal; you also need to stay there.

Can I buy backlinks?

Yes, you can buy backlinks. However, all paid-for links will be marked as ‘sponsored’. Therefore, while you may see benefits around brand awareness, you will not see direct SEO benefits to web pages as a result of buying individual links.

Backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors for websites. While it can seem like a minefield, understanding what Google is looking for and following this best-practice will put you in good stead when it comes to ranking highly on Google – and other search engines.