In this video we will show you precisely how to figure out how many backlinks you need to build in order to rank for your target keyword.
It’s a pretty simple process that will also let you calculate roughly how much it will cost to attack a keyword which is essential when it comes to choosing which opportunities are going to offer you the best ROI.
Please watch the short video below to learn how to do it step by step:
Calculating the link gap will tell you roughly how many links you need to build in order to break the top three rankings for a given keyword.
Knowing this is important because once you know how many links you need, then you can figure out how much it will cost to attack any keyword. The process is pretty simple.
First, use Ahrefs or Semrush to look at your target keyword and see if you can find sites of a similar authority to yours ranking in the top 10. If you do, then you can look at the backlink profiles of each of the top three results to try and figure out exactly what types of links are currently powering the top three rankings on average.
Here we can see the number one position is a DR 18 with links from 41 domains. But when we click into it and filter by do follow links, you’ll see there’s only 17 do follow links and only one, two, three, four of those have any weight behind them.
Clicking back to the results, the number two position is a DR 60 with links from 20 domains. Again, we need to filter for do follow links only, and sort by DR. Here you’ll see that there’s only links from one, two, three domains that have any me meaningful authority. And the number three spot is a DR 21 that looks like it has three domains but when we click into it, really only one do follow DR 56 is powering that.
So, based on that, we can assume it would take just four good links to compete with the current search results if our own page had zero links at the moment. That is how you calculate the backlink gap. Ultimately, what you want to arrive to is a list of currently ranking keywords that are commercially relevant to your business. Along with an idea of how much it’ll cost to attack each of those opportunities.
With a bit of practice, you can eyeball this pretty well. For example, with this keyword, while the number one position is occupied by a DR 66 and 23 domains, when you click into it, there really are only one, two, meaningful domains which is pretty easy to win the page level link battle. This is also evident by the fact that you have lots of different DR sites ranking with zero, one, or two links.
So that means that you could estimate that if you were to build just three or four solid links, you would get good results on this keyword. If you look at this keyword, you will see that the number one is a high DR 72 supported by 20 links, but only 11 of these are do follow. And only one of them is particularly strong. You can also see many relatively low authority sites ranking with one or zero links.
So depending on your site’s DR, you could easily take the number one spot with two or three good links here. That is how you decide which pages to build links to, whilst also knowing how many links you need to build at what cost with ROI in mind.
