An email can land offering you 500 backlinks for €49. Somewhere, a competitor with a worse website ranks above you, and everyone tells you it is because of their links.
Both things can be true at once. Links do matter. The ones in that email don’t.
Here is what most link building advice leaves out.
The best links a small Irish business can get aren’t clever, and they aren’t bought. They are the ones you are already owed: by your suppliers, your trade body, your local chamber, the club you sponsor, the paper that wrote about you last year.
Get those first. Then earn the rest. Most of it costs time, not money, and for a local business a handful of the right links can help you move up.
If you would rather have it done for you, that is what our link building service is for.
What is link building, and does it still work?
Link building is getting other websites to link to yours. Each of those links is a backlink.
Google is plain about why they matter: it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages, and to find new pages to crawl. A link from a respected site in your field is that site vouching for you. Enough of the right ones, and Google starts to believe it too.
So yes, it still works. Google has used links from the very beginning, through PageRank, and it still does. What has stopped working is faking it. The links that move rankings now are the ones a real business earns by being worth linking to, and making sure the right people know it exists.
What makes a good backlink
Not all links are equal. One good one can do the work of a hundred bad ones, so it pays to know the difference before you spend an hour chasing anything.
A good backlink comes from a real site that people actually read. It is relevant to what you do, or to where you do it. It sits in a sentence in the body of a page, where a reader might click it.
And someone chose to put it there. Nobody paid them.
A link from your county’s biggest local news site to your shop beats a link from a blog in another country that links to anyone. A link from your trade association’s member list is worth far more than one mention buried in a footer across a thousand sites.
White hat link building, and the links Google says not to build
“White hat” just means building links Google’s rules allow. And Google has written those rules down.
Its spam policies list what counts as link spam. Buying or selling links for ranking purposes is the first, and that includes swapping goods or services for a link, or sending someone a product so they will write about you with a link. The rest of the list:
- Excessive link exchanges, “link to me and I’ll link to you”, or partner pages that exist only to swap links.
- Using automated programs or services to create links.
- Advertorials and guest posts that carry links with keyword-stuffed anchor text.
- Low-quality directory and bookmark sites.
- Links hidden in widgets, or spread across the footers and templates of lots of sites.
- Forum comments with optimised links in the post or signature.
That email offering 500 links for €49 ticks at least two of those boxes. At best, the links do nothing. At worst, they become a clean-up job, which is what our guide to finding and removing toxic backlinks is for.
Paying for something isn’t banned outright, though. Google says a paid link is fine as long as it is marked with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". That matters for sponsorship.
How to build backlinks for a small business
Start with the links nearest to hand. They are the easiest to get, and they tend to be the most relevant. Then work outwards.
Collect the links you are already owed
Make a list of everyone you do business with. Suppliers, manufacturers whose products you stock or fit, software you use, your accountant, the trade body you belong to, your local chamber of commerce.
Plenty of them have a stockists page, a list of members, a directory of approved installers, or a page of customer stories. Ask to be on it, with a link.
Ask a supplier you rate whether you can be listed on its customer page. Don’t offer a testimonial for the link.
Turn mentions of your name into links
People write about you without linking to you more often than you would think.
Search Google for your business name in quotation marks, and add -site: followed by your own domain to leave your own pages out. Where a page mentions you without a link, send a polite email asking for one. The writer has already decided you are worth mentioning.
Be a source for journalists
Journalists need expert quotes, fast. Services like Qwoted and Featured list requests from reporters looking for sources. Answer quickly, answer specifically, and say who you are and why you know.
Closer to home, Irish local papers and radio stations are often looking for local voices. A quote in a regional paper is the kind of local, relevant link that helps.
This is the heart of digital PR, and it scales from one quote to a full campaign.
Make something worth citing
People link to things that are useful to link to. A clear guide to a question your customers keep asking. A calculator or checklist. A small piece of original research.
Irish businesses have a gift here. The Central Statistics Office publishes a huge amount of open data. Pair a CSO figure with what you see every day in your trade, and you have a local story a journalist can use.
A tool helps too, if it answers a question your customers ask, the way our Google Ads budget calculator answers what an ad budget should be. People bookmark useful tools. Then they link to them.
Get onto resource pages and “best of” lists
Search for pages that already list businesses like yours: “best coffee in Galway”, “wedding suppliers Meath”, “useful links for new homeowners”. If yours belongs there, ask. Keep the email short and say why a reader of that page would want to know about you.
Write guest posts that are worth publishing
A guest post on a site your customers read, written because you have something useful to say, is fine. A guest post written to smuggle in a keyword-rich link is the thing Google’s policy names. Write the first kind, for sites that matter in your field, and let the link be your name.
Replace broken and dead links
Sites link to pages that no longer exist all the time: a closed competitor, a guide that was taken down, a resource that moved. If you have something that does the same job, tell the site owner. You are fixing a broken page for them, which is a much easier ask than a favour.
Local link building for Irish businesses
For a business that serves a town or a county, local links do double duty. They build authority, and they tell Google where you are, which helps Google connect your business with your area. Our guide to local SEO in Ireland covers the wider picture.
The best sources are the ones every community has. Your local chamber of commerce and its member directory. The GAA club, the Tidy Towns committee, the festival and the charity events you already support. Local news sites and the websites of local radio. Business awards in your county or your trade.
A word on sponsorship, because this is where people slip up. If you pay to sponsor something and get a link on the sponsors’ page, that link is paid. Google’s position is that it should be marked rel="sponsored" or nofollow, which tells Google not to count it as an endorsement.
Sponsor anyway, if it is a cause you believe in. The link still sends local people to your site, the club’s members still see your name, and local papers sometimes cover the event itself. Just don’t pay for a sponsorship because you think the link will lift your rankings.
Your listings count too. A consistent name, address and phone number on the handful of Irish directories where customers really look, and on your Google Business Profile, supports the rest. Skip the directories nobody visits. Google’s own spam policy names low-quality directories.
How to find your competitors’ backlinks
The quickest way to find links you could get is to look at who links to the businesses that outrank you.
Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush show a site’s backlinks, and Ahrefs has a free checker that shows the top ones. Put in the two or three competitors ranking above you.
You are looking for patterns. The trade body that lists them but not you. The local paper that quoted them. The supplier page they are on. Many of those doors are open to you as well.
Ignore the links you couldn’t get honestly, and ignore the ones that look paid. You are copying their best habits, not their shortcuts.
How to get backlinks without spending money
Almost all of it is free. It costs time, not money: a testimonial, an email about an unlinked mention, a quote for a journalist, a place on a supplier’s list. If you want to increase backlinks without a budget, that is where to start.
What doesn’t work are the sites and tools that promise free backlinks in bulk. They tend to produce the automated, low-quality links Google’s policies describe. Free, in the sense that matters, means earned.
How many backlinks do you need?
Fewer than you have been told. And never a fixed number.
Look at the pages ranking where you want to be, and count how many different websites link to them. That is your bar. A local plumber competing in one town might need a handful of good local links. A national online shop in a crowded market needs far more.
Count websites, not links. Twenty links from one site is one vote cast twenty times. Twenty links from twenty relevant sites is twenty votes.
How to check your backlinks for free
Google tells you, for nothing. In Google Search Console, the Links report shows the sites linking to you, the pages they link to most, and the words they use in those links.
Check it every month or two. You will see new links you didn’t know about, which are often mentions worth thanking someone for. And you will spot anything strange early, before it becomes a problem.
Anchor text, and why you mostly shouldn’t control it
Anchor text is the clickable wording of a link. Google’s guidance is that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both pages.
On your own site, write it that way. On other people’s sites, mostly leave it to them. Your business name, or the page’s topic in plain words, is what a real link looks like. Asking every site for the same keyword-rich phrase produces exactly the pattern Google’s spam policy describes.
How long link building takes, and what it costs
Usually months, not weeks.
A new link only counts once Google has crawled the page it sits on. And links earned steadily read as a real business being noticed. A sudden pile of them reads as something else.
Done yourself, the cost is your time. Done for you, it depends on your market and how hard your competitors have pushed. We set out the honest ranges in our guide to how much SEO costs in Ireland, link building included.
Some businesses have natural link sources most do not. A law firm has the Law Society, the chamber, the local paper and the clubs it sponsors, and our guide to SEO for solicitors shows how to use them.
Questions people ask about link building
Are backlinks still a ranking factor?
Yes. Google says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages. What has changed is how well it spots links that were bought or faked.
Do nofollow links help?
A link marked nofollow or sponsored tells Google not to treat it as an endorsement. It can still send you visitors and customers, and a mention on a respected site is worth having for its own sake.
Is buying backlinks against Google’s rules?
Google’s spam policy treats paid links as a breach unless they are marked sponsored or nofollow. So buying links for rankings is paying for something Google has told you it will discount or act against.
Is link building different for online shops and startups?
The principles are the same, but the best sources differ. We have separate guides to link building strategies for ecommerce and link building for startups.
What if I already have bad backlinks?
Most sites pick up some spammy links without doing anything, and Google mostly ignores them. If you or a past agency built links that break the rules, our guide to toxic backlinks covers when to remove them and when to disavow.
If you’d rather someone else built them
Link building done properly is slow, patient work: finding the right sites, writing to real people, making things worth linking to. Most business owners haven’t the hours.
If that is you, our link building team does it the slow way, with no bought links and no shortcuts. Send us your web address and we will tell you what we find. No obligation.
