Hey - What's up, guys? SEO is basically a popularity contest
in terms of backlinks, and the more backlinks you get, the more popular you are
and the higher you're going to rank, but just how important are backlinks? Can
you rank without them? Do you need to focus only on building backlinks? So very
short answer is that backlinks are still the most important ranking factor, and
if you're hustling and grinding it out and publishing alots of content, but
you're not building backlinks, then the chances are you're wasting your time because the thing is you
need more backlinks than your competitors if you genuinely want to rank, and if
you look at almost any search term or any sort of keyword, you'll see that the
top-ranking results are usually the ones with the most backlinks. So if you
genuinely want to compete and you want to rank first on Google, then backlinks
are still the most important ranking factor.
I mean, Ahrefs even did a study on
this and they looked at a lot of websites and actually found that 91% of
websites don't rank or don't get any traffic to their site simply because they've
not got backlinks to their content, and even Google have announced that this is
one of the most important ranking factors. They've said it's atleast in the top
three of the ranking factors, but genuinely from my own experience, I would say
backlinks are still number one, and it's the biggest priority for your site if
you want to grow your site with SEO.
In fact, I've seen a lot of websites that
pretty much started at zero in terms of organic traffic, and when they started
building backlinks to their site, they grew and pretty much exploded from there
in terms of the traffic they got If you build links that's 20% of the work, but
at the same time, it's gonna get you 80% of the results. So if you really want
to understand what's the most productive thing to focus on, I would say, first
of all, it's backlinks, then it's content, and from there, you can start
expanding into other SEO fields, but if you don't get your link building right,
chances are, you're not gonna be able to compete with your top-ranking competitors,
but why is that? Well, I would say it comes down to externally validating that
your content is good.
It's kind of like getting a certification from other
websites that say that you have high quality, credible, authoritative content,
and therefore, backlinks are a big indicator of that, okay? Because if you just
have a website and you publish content,
but you don't have anyone else linking to you, then that's kind of a network
saying that they don't trust your content enough to link to it, and therefore,
if you don't have any backlinks, your content isn't authoritative, it's not
credible, it's probably not trustworthy, and therefore, it shouldn't rank
highly on Google because when Google's trying to improve its results, really,
it's focusing on the user experience because Google wants their users to have
the best experience possible when it comes to the search results, and if they
end up clicking on low quality content, chances are, they're not gonna like
Google, and therefore, its experience is gonna drop in terms of quality.
So
that's why backlinks have always been one of the most important ranking factors
when it comes to SEO, but do you need backlinks to rank, okay? Is it 100% necessary?
What I would say is that if you can find very low competition keywords, then
chances are, you may be able to rank for them, but that's the outlier. That's
the exception, and it's not the rule, okay? So sure, you can find some low
competition keywords, potentially you can rank for them, but at the same time,
these are outliers, these are exceptions, they're very hard to find, and that's
why I recommend always building backlinks to your site, whatever industry
you're in. This applies to pretty much every single niche and industry that
you're working in.
I mean, like I said, most of the time, if you look at the
top-ranking results, they're gonna have backlinks to their content unless it's
av ery low competition keyword. So if you want to rank for a keyword that's worthwhile,
then you need backlinks to your site, and most of the time if you don't have
backlinks, you're not gonna rank, but does that mean you should only focus on
building backlinks and nothing else when it comes to SEO? Maybe you just want
to focus on the 80/20 rule. What I would say is that backlinks get you a seat
at the table, but content will help you secure that seat, right? So if you get
backlinks, are you gonna rank higher?
Sure, and that's gonna have a big impact
on your site, but at the same time, if your content is low quality, you're
gonna get poor on-page metrics, so Google's gonna see that users are not interacting
with your content, that it's probably low quality, that people are kind of pogo
sticking and getting onto your content and then jumping back off to find
something more relevant, then that indicates your content is low quality, and
then Google's eventually gonna rank your site lower simply because your content
isn't good enough.
So yeah, you need backlinks to your site, but you also need
high quality content that's gonna engage users, that's gonna solve their
problem, and that's gonna be extremely relevant to the search term they're
looking for. So backlinks are the mosti mportant ranking factor when it comes
to SEO,but at the same time, you shouldn't ignore on-page metrics. You still
need to optimize your keywords, you still need to optimize your content, and
you still need to provide a good user experience when people land on your site.
However, what I would say is that backlinks are still number one, then content
quality matters, and then after that, you can look at other SEO metrics that
you can improve too, and the thing is SEO works in combination, okay? So it's
not just about isolating one factor. It's not just about isolating backlinks,
for example. You need to create a good combination, a good system for SEO so
that you're optimizing your content, so you're optimizing your backlinks, so
you've got a good keyword strategy, and all these other metrics that are gonna
work in tandem
I hope you found this
Information useful.