Backlinks: what to get right first

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you only fix one thing about backlinks this quarter, make it the first item below.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Start here

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Then this

Bought links are a risk that eventually gets priced in. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Eventually

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.