Backlinks for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about backlinks assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to keep

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How we handle it

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.