What is Backlink?
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat it as a vote of confidence, so links from relevant, trusted sites remain one of the strongest ranking signals.
Also called: inbound link, link building, referring domain.
Quality beats quantity by a wide margin. One link from a regional newspaper, a trade association or a supplier's genuine partner page is worth more than a hundred from directories nobody reads. Bought links and link exchanges are detectable, devalued, and occasionally penalised.
For a small local business the reachable links are mostly unexciting and quite effective: your trade body, your suppliers, the local chamber of commerce, sponsored clubs, a charity you support, local press covering something you did, a genuinely useful resource that other people cite.
The honest version of link building is doing something worth mentioning and then telling the people who might mention it. Everything faster than that tends to be either ineffective or risky.
What to actually do about it
- Claim listings on trade bodies, directories and supplier partner pages.
- Sponsor something local and ask for a link, not just a logo.
- Publish one genuinely useful resource for your area or trade.
- Check which sites link to competitors and pursue the reachable ones.
- Never buy links or join reciprocal link schemes.
Koo doesn't sell links. It tracks which competitors are gaining them and where, so you can see which relationships are actually worth pursuing.
Related terms
Keyword difficulty
Keyword difficulty is an estimated score, usually 0–100, of how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a search phrase, based mainly on the authority and backlink profiles of the pages already ranking there.
Local SEO
Local SEO is the work of getting a business found by people searching nearby — in the Google map pack, in "near me" queries and on maps apps — and depends mostly on a complete Google Business Profile, consistent business details across the web, and location-specific pages.