Here’s How Many Websites You Need Linking To Your Website To Rank at the Top of Google in 2019

How can you get your website to rank number one in Google search results? You can pay for ads, sure. But there’s another way: You can improve your rank by focusing on link building. This means you need other websites to link to yours. There’s one catch: These other websites should be authoritative and of quality (we’ll talk about this later). So, how many do you actually need? Joe Youngblood posted a comprehensive study on this matter. Let’s see what he found!

Ranking Your Industry

What’s your industry? Auto, retail, legal services, something else? When it comes to ranking highly in local Google Maps results and local organic search results, your industry matters. Joe Youngblood used tools like Keyword Guru and Google’s Keyword Planner to compile the data. Here’s what he found for 2019:

And there you have it! Clearly, marketing a new auto, hospitality, or retail website is more difficult; however, it’s not impossible. Joe gives some advice for these local companies: “If you want to start your own independent car rental company, you’ll have a steep hill to climb in terms of rankings as the map and local organic results were dominated by these companies who continue to invest in their link building, content marketing, and SEO. By seeing this you should take a more diversified approach including paid advertising and referrals while investing in your own SEO.”

It makes sense, then, to use a dual-pronged approach in industries that are more difficult to rank. The number of links is important. But even more important are the quality of websites that link to yours. In technical speak, the higher the domain authority of the website, the better. Google calculates this score by adding numerous factors such as the length of time a website has existed, the quality (and keywords) of content, mobile readiness, and load speed.

Having hundreds or thousands of bad quality websites linking to yours will not help you, at least in the long run. The domain authority of a website is ranked up to 100. So, if you have 50,000 websites linking to yours, but their average domain authority is “1”, this is a sign of a spammy practice and Google will find ways to fight against it. You can’t fool Google in the long term. If you try, Google will catch on and likely award you a manual penalty.

Honest methods are preferred and that’s something we can help with. Check out our Local SEO page for more information. All of our plans include link building outreach, which is exactly how you find other websites in your industry to link to your way. This way, you’re website will rank higher in local Google Maps as well as local organic search.

Featured photo by 3dman_eu on Pixabay

Link chart photos are screenshots of Joe Youngblood by Gain Local