Thirty links a month sounds impressive sitting in a spreadsheet column, next to a nice upward arrow. We've seen clients arrive genuinely proud of exactly that number, built up by a previous agency over a year, waving the report at us almost as proof there was nothing left for us to fix, and still wondering why none of it had moved the needle at all. The answer was almost always the same: nearly every link came from a site with nothing to do with their business or their area.
One client, a locksmith trading out of Grays, had a spreadsheet listing 180 backlinks built over fourteen months. We checked every single domain. Fewer than twenty were even loosely relevant to locksmithing, home security, or Essex at all. The rest were a scattershot mix of unrelated niches, built, as far as we could tell, purely to hit a monthly quota.
A Number Isn't a Strategy
Link building reports love a big total. "47 new backlinks this quarter" looks like progress to a business owner who isn't checking where those links actually came from. But ten links from genuinely relevant, regionally recognised sites will usually outperform fifty scattered across unrelated blogs with no connection to your industry or your part of Essex.
We've tested this directly, more than once, by pausing a volume-heavy link campaign entirely and replacing it with a much smaller number of carefully chosen placements. Traffic from search didn't dip during the transition. If anything, it climbed slightly within a couple of months, which tells you most of those extra forty links weren't contributing anything measurable in the first place.
Google's own systems have got noticeably better at weighing relevance over raw volume, and have been for years now, going right back to the original Penguin rollout and the various refinements that followed it since. A locksmith in Grays getting linked from a gardening blog in Scotland, however active or well-read that blog happens to be, contributes almost nothing useful, no matter how authoritative that gardening blog happens to be on its own terms. The topical mismatch just doesn't carry weight the way a relevant link does, and in some cases it can even look odd enough to raise questions rather than confidence.
Why Agencies Still Sell on Volume
Volume is easy to report and easy to sell, which matters more to some agencies' retention numbers than most clients ever realise. "We'll build you ten links a month" is a tidy promise that fits neatly into a sales deck. "We'll build you two or three genuinely relevant links a month, and some months might be quiet" is a harder sentence to say in a pitch meeting, even though it's often the more honest and more effective approach. Honesty rarely wins a competitive pitch against a bigger, flashier promise, which is partly why the quantity-first approach keeps surviving despite the evidence stacked against it.
Clients, understandably, often respond better to the bigger number too, at least initially. It feels like more is happening for the money. Explaining why fewer, better links represent more real work, not less, is a conversation we have more often than we'd like, usually accompanied by actual examples rather than just our word for it.
We've had this exact conversation with prospective clients who came in expecting a monthly link quota and were visibly unsettled when we explained we don't work that way, as though we'd just told them their builder refuses to lay more than a handful of bricks a day on principle. A few walked away to find an agency that would promise the bigger number instead, and we genuinely wish them well with it. We don't love losing that business, but we'd rather be upfront about it than sell something we know underperforms.
In fairness, it's not always a cynical sales tactic on the agency's side. Some genuinely believe volume works because it used to, years ago, before search engines got better at reading the surrounding content rather than just counting links. Old habits persist longer in this industry than the strategies that originally justified them.
What Relevance Actually Looks Like
Relevance isn't just "same industry." It's topical and geographic closeness combined. A link from a Braintree community news site to a local plumber is relevant on both counts. A link from a national plumbing supplies trade publication is relevant on industry grounds even without the local angle, which is a perfectly reasonable link to want even though it won't carry the same local weight as a regional mention would. A link from a generic "business directory" with listings for every trade in every country is relevant on neither, whatever its domain authority score claims. A good test is simply asking whether a real customer, browsing that site for an unrelated reason, would ever plausibly stumble across your listing and care.
- Local relevance: genuinely connected to the business's town or region
- Industry relevance: connected to the actual trade or sector
- Audience relevance: read by people who could plausibly become customers
A Harlow Case That Illustrates the Point
A heating engineer in Harlow came to us with over 200 backlinks built by a previous provider, almost all from generic, low-relevance directories and link exchange networks. Rankings had flatlined for over a year despite the growing link count. We didn't touch most of those links directly, since a mass disavow would have been overkill, but we stopped building any more like them and focused entirely on trade press, local news, and genuinely relevant partner sites instead. Within five months, with barely a tenth of the new link volume, rankings for his core service pages had moved more than they had in the previous eighteen.
He was, understandably, a bit stunned by that. He'd been told for over a year that more links meant more progress, and the eventual proof that the opposite could be true took some convincing even once the numbers were sitting right in front of him.
How to Audit Your Own Link Profile for This
Pull your backlink list from a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and ask a simple question of each domain: would someone actually find this useful if they clicked through looking for information related to your business? If the honest answer is no, that link probably isn't doing much for you, regardless of what the domain's overall authority metric says about it.
This kind of review sits at the centre of the link building audits we run for Essex clients, and it's usually the single most revealing exercise in an entire SEO review, because it shows exactly where previous spend went and whether it was spent well.
We also look at how many of those links are even still live. A surprising number of "link packages" sold a few years ago have simply disappeared since — the host blog shut down, the content was removed, or the link was quietly deleted once the one-off payment cleared. Paying for a link that vanishes within eighteen months is, in practice, paying for nothing at all, just on a delay.
The Bottom Line
A big link count feels like progress, but it isn't the same thing as progress. Relevance — to your industry, to your area, to the actual people who might become customers — matters more than raw volume, and it always has, even when outdated advice suggested otherwise. If your current link building strategy is measured purely in numbers rather than fit, it's worth a proper conversation with someone offering genuine SEO support across Essex before another year of quantity-first link building goes by. Pull last year's link report, check it against the relevance test above, and don't be surprised if the number that mattered all along turns out to be much smaller than the headline total suggested.
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