When one website is linked to your website, this phenomenon is called a backlink. It is also known as an inbound link or external backlink. Backlinks are considered as ‘votes’ for your webpage by search engines. The number of backlinks is related to higher organic rankings from search engines.

Why Do Backlinks Still Matter for SEO?

Many studies have been done on the value of backlinks, but they support what is available already for the public. Backlinks can make or break SEO performance. What matters is where they come from. If they arrive from a quality source, they can boost up your SEO performance.

What works and what doesn’t matters in the world of SEO. The key here is testing and analyzing the search results daily.

A lot of SEO companies understand the importance of backlinks based on their own experience. Here are some of the evidence which proves the value of backlinks –

High Authority Sites means better SEO results.

You will find one thing for sure at any Google SERP – search engines prefer high-quality sites. In this case, high authority refers to how many backlinks you are getting from quality sources. According to a survey on 11.8 million search results by Backlinko, The overall link authority of a site strongly relates well with higher rankings on search engines. It would be best if you aimed to improve these metrics. You can get a better ranking with a robust website.

You can have better SEO performance with sturdy pages.

A page can rank well without having a lot of backlinks hitting it. This is what you can expect when building authority on your site. A lot of sites need backlinks directly to high-ranking pages.

According to marketer, a page can get more organic traffic from Google with a high amount of backlinks. Only one page in 20 or more pages get traffic without backlinks, and they mostly get only around 300 organic visits per month or less.

But there are also a lot of pages with a considerable amount of backlinks but are terrible in SEO performance. It would help if you focused not only on backlinks but QUALITY backlinks.

SEO Performance Counts

You can acquire more backlinks with better SEO performance. It is also termed as the “Snowball Effect.” According to Backlinko, in Google search, the first result has around 3.8x more backlinks on average than #2 to #10 pages in search engines.

But top-ranking pages also need to work hard and gain more backlinks faster than lower-ranking ones, according to Ahrefs. After achieving higher rankings, you can gain more organic links. Hence, your page will automatically become more potent and make your positions concrete.

To keep up with your rankings, you also have to keep pages fresh and updated. Even if the page is more substantial, it cannot maintain rankings for longer with boring content.