"How many backlinks do I need?" is the question every link vendor loves, because the honest answer is unsellable and the dishonest answer is unlimited.
Here is the honest one: you need roughly as many as the pages currently outranking you have, pointed at the equivalent page, and rarely more. For most UK small businesses that number is small enough to be uncomfortable for anyone whose business model is monthly volume.
The twenty-minute method
You can work this out yourself, today, without buying anything.
- Pick one keyword that matters. Not a vanity term — one where the searcher is clearly ready to buy. "Emergency electrician Nottingham", not "electrical safety".
- Search it in an incognito window and list the top five organic results. Ignore the map pack and the directories for now.
- Check the referring domains for each specific URL that ranks — not the whole site. Any backlink checker will do this; free tiers are sufficient for a handful of lookups.
- Take the median, not the average. One outlier with 400 links will skew the mean and panic you unnecessarily.
- Compare it to your equivalent page. The gap is your target.
Do this for three or four commercial keywords and you will have a genuine budget, grounded in your actual market rather than in a case study about an American SaaS company.
What people get wrong doing this
Measuring the domain instead of the page. A competitor site with 900 referring domains might have four pointing at the page beating you. That page is beatable. Site-level metrics tell you almost nothing about a single ranking.
Counting total backlinks rather than referring domains. Two hundred links from one site is one relationship, not two hundred votes. Referring domains is the number that behaves like a signal.
Ignoring content quality entirely. If the pages beating you are 2,000 words of genuinely useful information and yours is a 300-word service description, links will not close that gap. Fix the page first — it is free, and it makes every subsequent link work harder.
If your page is worse than the page beating you, you are not buying links. You are buying a slower way to find out.
Typical numbers for UK local businesses
From what we see auditing local markets, referring-domain targets for a competitive local commercial term tend to fall out roughly like this:
| Sector | Typical target | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Trades & home services | 6–12 referring domains | 3–4 months |
| Motor trade & garages | 10–18 | 4–6 months |
| Health, dental & clinics | 12–25 | 4–6 months |
| Legal & financial | 15–35 | 6 months+ |
| Competitive eCommerce | 25–60 per category page | 6–12 months |
Smaller towns sit at the lower end of each range. A Mansfield trades business often competes at half the link volume the same business would need in Nottingham — which is the entire argument for sizing a north Notts campaign differently.
Spread them across pages, not onto one
Twenty links pointed at your homepage is a worse investment than four links each pointed at five different service pages.
Search engines rank pages, not businesses. Your homepage almost certainly is not the page you want ranking for "commercial roofing Nottingham" — your commercial roofing page is, and it probably has one internal link and nothing external.
Internal linking multiplies this for free. A link to your strongest page passes value onwards through the site, so tidying up internal links before a campaign genuinely increases the return on every external link you then buy.
Velocity: slower than you have been sold
A handful of links a month, arriving irregularly, is what a business earning coverage looks like. Twenty in a fortnight is what a purchase looks like.
There is also a practical argument beyond pattern-matching: if you buy twenty links in one go and rankings move, you have learned nothing about which ones worked. Drip them, and you can see what responds and buy more of that.
When to stop
This is the part nobody selling links will tell you. Once you are consistently in the top three for your target terms and holding, additional links produce very little. Drop to a maintenance pace and spend the difference on conversion, service pages for towns you have not covered, or reviews.
We tell clients this and it costs us revenue in the short term. It also means they are still here five years later, which is the only business model that works in a market as small as the East Midlands.
If you want the numbers run properly for your own site, send us the URL and the keywords — we will audit it and tell you the number, including if the number is zero.
Frequently asked
How many backlinks do I need to rank on page one?
It depends entirely on what the pages currently ranking have, not on any universal number. The workable method is to check the referring domains pointing at the top five results for your specific keyword and target the median. For most UK local service terms that median lands somewhere between five and twenty-five.
Is it better to have a few strong links or many weak ones?
A few strong, relevant links, and it is not close. Fifty links from unrelated sites move a page less than five from publications your customers would actually read, and the fifty carry footprint risk the five do not.
How fast should I build links?
Slower than most packages deliver. A handful a month, spread irregularly, looks like a business earning coverage. Twenty landing in a fortnight looks like exactly what it is, and gives you nothing to attribute results to.
Want this done rather than explained? We own 38 UK publications and place editorial articles and links on them from £65. Send the target page and we'll come back within one working day with a plan.