Backlink Quality vs. Quantity: What’s More Important in 2021?
[This article was written by Joseph Dyson.]
It’s no secret that link-building is one of, if not the most, powerful SEO practices you can incorporate to boost your website’s rankings on Google’s SERP.
When you’re building high-quality backlinks for your website, you should pay attention to both quality and quantity.
Often, website owners and even beginner link-builders ask themselves whether the quality is more important or quantity in terms of backlinks.
To understand the answer to this question, we first need to explore what backlinks are.
What Are Backlinks?
A backlink is essentially hyperlinked text that transports a website visitor from a third-party blog to yours.
If it’s a relevant link that users want to click on, this hyperlinked text can become a reliable source of referral traffic from the third-party website to yours.
Secondly, backlinks are essential because they can significantly boost your rankings. If you find a high domain authority website that you can create or negotiate a backlink on, this link communicates to Google that your website is of an equally high rank as the referring website.
Finding the right website for your business to build links is second nature for high-quality link-building services.
Now that you understand how essential backlinks are, let’s discuss how to get them.
How To Build Backlinks
You can gain backlinks organically or actively, or both ways.
If you write good content on your website that’s worth linking to, then website owners will naturally link to your blogs and web pages to cite your website as a source of valuable knowledge or information.
When you provide your target audience with answers to their pressing questions and solutions to their problems and concerns, they’ll take note of your website as a reputable source to consult.
The more they visit your website, the further they’ll reach down your sales funnel, thereby boosting your sales and revenue.
For example, if you have a business that sells hot glue guns, it might be helpful for your target customer if you created a blog entitled “How Not To Burn Yourself While Using a Hot Glue Gun,” since that’s a huge pain point for many who use products like yours.
Not only will this effort on your part attract traffic, but it will also win you high-quality backlinks when website owners refer to your blog and hyperlink their mentions.
The second primary way to obtain backlinks is to communicate and engage with website owners and platforms actively.
You can create links by being active in community discussions within your niche, providing valuable information to those seeking answers in your industry. When you make these comments, you can link back to your website when relevant.
Try to avoid spamming forums with irrelevant links when you do this because Google doesn’t appreciate spammy backlinks.
Sometimes, spammy websites will even link to your website. An essential hack to keep in mind here is that you can remove these links because they’ll ultimately drag down your rankings in Google. By disavowing these spammy links, you’re communicating to Google’s robots that your website is not affiliated with this spammy website or link.
Ensuring Backlink Quality
Now that we’ve started discussing backlink quality, the question arises: what is a high-quality backlink?
A high-quality backlink comes from a website that’s relevant to yours and has a high Domain Authority. To understand whether a website has a high DA or not, it’s important to have research done on your competitors and what the highest DA’s in your particular niche are.
By these standards, you can have websites of a specific caliber targeted for backlinks.
Suppose you snag a backlink from gargantuan websites like Forbes or Entrepreneur. In that case, your website will receive a sizable chunk of traffic, and your rankings on Google will increase for your target keywords accordingly.
Experienced link building services can certainly get you to high DA platforms like the ones mentioned above.
Secondly, the link needs to be relevantly placed. For example, if the blog’s context is that it’s discussing cookie recipes and, seemingly out of nowhere, the blog links to your hot glue gun company’s web page, that’s a horrible backlink.
The reason it’s horrible is that it’s incredibly irrelevant. Not only does irrelevance of this variety put a bad taste in Google’s mouth regarding both websites concerned, but it also doesn’t really make sense for people reading the blog to click through to your website.
If they’re reading about cookies, why would they suddenly click away to read about hot glue guns instead of continuing to read about cookies?
This backlink could be made more contextually relevant if the cookie blogger mentioned that if your cookie utensils break, you can hot glue them back together using a high-quality hot glue gun.
In the “hot glue gun” text, they can then insert your backlink as displayed above.
Ensuring Backlink Quantity
Now that you understand maintaining high-quality backlinks, let’s discuss how backlink quantity squares up.
While many wrongfully believe that backlink quality is more important than quantity, backlink quantity is equally important to quality.
You can gain a small number of high-quality links per month, but if they don’t increase numerically, your traffic can reach a plateau.
Link building in itself brings the biggest payoffs when you invest in both high quality and high quantity backlinks, making link-building a relatively time-consuming task.
If you’re a business owner, you likely have other things to handle in your business that are more pressing than continuously building backlinks, so it might be in your best interests to hire a high-quality backlink building service to meet these needs.
Author Bio:
Joseph Dyson is an acclaimed Senior Account Manager at Search Berg—an award-winning digital marketing company in the US. His specialties are in offering SEO services and backlink building services. Over his career, he’s helped many businesses significantly boost their conversions, rankings, and sales by implementing goal-driven SEO strategies. He also contributes regularly to the Search Berg blog.
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