What is a backlink, and do I need them?

A backlink is simply a link to your website from someone else's. It matters because it is the one signal you cannot write yourself — anyone can claim to be the best plumber in Leeds, but only other people can link to you. That is also exactly why an entire industry exists to manufacture them, and why buying them is the one SEO mistake that can actively get you punished rather than merely wasting money.

Why they count

Search engines needed a way to tell a genuinely useful page from a page that merely says it is. Links from other sites work as a rough proxy: if several independent, credible places point at you, you are probably real and probably relevant.

The same logic now applies beyond search. AI assistants assembling an answer lean on corroboration — what other sites say about you — which is why a genuine mention on a local news site or a trade body does more than any amount of writing about yourself. Getting mentioned by AI assistants is largely the same mechanism.

Quality is not a spectrum, it is a threshold

One link from a source that a person would recognise as legitimate is worth more than hundreds from sites that exist to sell links. Those hundreds are not worth a little — they are worth nothing, and sometimes less than nothing.

What makes a link count:

• The site is real and has an audience of actual people.
• It is relevant to your trade or your area.
• Somebody chose to link to you rather than being paid to.
• It sits in real content, not a list of two hundred outbound links in a footer.

The handful a local business actually needs

You do not need a link-building campaign. You need a small number of ordinary, genuine ones, and most of them you can get in an afternoon.

1. Your Google Business Profile and the major listings for your trade.
2. Trade associations and accreditations you already belong to. Most have a member directory and most members never check they are listed correctly.
3. Suppliers and manufacturers. If you are an approved installer of something, there is frequently a "find an installer" page you are entitled to be on. Ask.
4. Local organisations — the chamber of commerce, the town website, a club you sponsor. Small audiences, entirely genuine.
5. Anyone you have worked with. Suppliers, partners, the architect, the letting agent. A line on their site and one on yours is normal and honest.
6. Local press, when you have an actual story. The strongest of the lot because you did not ask for it — how to get it.

That is most of what a small business will ever need. Notice none of it involves outreach emails or a monthly fee.

The way to earn them that actually works

Be worth linking to. That sounds like a platitude and it has a concrete meaning: publish something someone would want to point at.

For a small business that is usually one of two things — a genuinely useful answer to a question in your field, or a piece of local information nobody else has bothered to write down. The second is underrated. A page explaining the parking situation, the conservation-area rules, the thing that always goes wrong with houses on that estate, gets linked by local groups and forums because it is useful and specific.

Nobody links to a page about your company values.

Why buying links is the one to avoid

Most bad SEO advice merely wastes money. This one can cost you rankings you already have.

Paying for links is against search engine guidelines, and the sites selling them are the easiest thing in the world to detect: they exist for that purpose, they link to unrelated businesses in unrelated countries, and their patterns are obvious at scale. Sites caught at it can lose visibility, and undoing it is slow and miserable.

Same for the packages: "500 directory submissions", "guest posts on high-authority sites", private blog networks. If someone is offering a quantity of links for a price, the quantity is the tell.

The honest exception is ordinary commercial listing fees — a trade directory that real customers actually use, charging for a listing, is buying exposure rather than buying a link. Judge those on enquiries, not on the link.

What about "no-follow" links?

Some links carry a tag telling search engines not to pass ranking credit — most social media links, many directories, some news sites.

People treat this as meaning the link is worthless. It is not. A no-follow link still sends real people to your site, still corroborates that you exist, and is still read by systems assembling an answer about you. Chasing only follow links is optimising for a mechanism rather than for the outcome.

How to check what you have

Set up Google Search Console — free — and look at the Links report. It shows what actually points at you.

Two things to look for. First, whether the obvious ones are missing: your trade body, your suppliers, the listings you assumed were there. Second, anything you do not recognise from a site you would not want to be associated with. A handful of odd links is normal and harmless; a sudden flood of them is worth investigating.

What to do, honestly

1. Claim the obvious listings. One afternoon.
2. Ask your suppliers and trade bodies to list you, and check the details are right.
3. Write one genuinely useful local page a quarter.
4. Pitch a real story to local press when you have one.
5. Ignore anyone emailing you about link building. Those emails are the industry, not the solution.

Then stop thinking about it. For a local business, links are a small part of a picture where the map results and reviews matter more.

The bottom line

A backlink is a link from another site, and it counts because you cannot write it yourself. A local business needs a handful of genuine ones — listings, trade bodies, suppliers, local organisations, the occasional piece of press — not a campaign. Earn them by publishing something specific enough to be worth pointing at. Never buy them: it is the one mistake that can cost you what you already have. See also whether SEO is worth it.