"How many backlinks do I need to rank?" gets the same answer almost everywhere: 0 to 25 for easy keywords, 50 to 100 for hard ones. I couldn't find where those numbers came from, so we measured them.
What we did
We fixed a list of 60 keywords across six niches before pulling anything. Two had no stored results, which left 58. For each one we took the newest US Google snapshot in DataForSEO's data and the top 10 organic results, then read the referring domains for each exact URL and for its site.
The page counts come from DataForSEO rather than our own product. CrawlGraph is built on the Common Crawl web graph, and that graph is domain-level, so it can't count links to a single page.
What we found
| Keyword difficulty | Pages | Median page | Median site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low (under 15) | 270 | 2 | 6,921 |
| Medium (15 to 29) | 190 | 9 | 40,851 |
| High (30 and up) | 120 | 48 | 53,899 |
| All | 580 | 5 | 25,372 |
- The low end of the rule holds. 87% of pages on low-difficulty keywords had 25 referring domains or fewer.
- The high end doesn't. Only 9 of 120 pages on hard keywords fell between 50 and 100. 53 had 25 or fewer and 49 had 100 or more.
- The first result had the most links on its page, or tied for it, in only 8 of 58 keywords.
The catch
300 of the 580 results had 5 or fewer referring domains, which sounds encouraging until you look at the sites. 154 of those pages were on sites with at least 10,000 referring domains, and Reddit alone accounted for 49.
Only 17 of the 580 results came from sites with 100 or fewer referring domains, and 11 of those were on low-difficulty keywords. If your site is new, keyword choice probably matters before link count does.
The limits
We chose the keywords by hand, so this describes them, not all of Google. A zero means none found in one index, and exact-URL lookups can miss links to redirects. Snapshots and link counts weren't read on the same day. And none of this shows that links cause rankings.
The full write-up, including how to work out a number for your own keyword and a CSV of the per-keyword summary, is here: how many backlinks do you need to rank?
Top comments (0)