Do you always need backlinks to rank?
This is a tricky question to answer. So let's just start off with a few facts.
Backlink factors correlate with Google position a lot better than any other factor. Even the usage of an exact match keyword in title, headline or even actual content of that page have a weaker correlation.
For your page to rank in Google without backlinks, three requirements should be met:
It almost never happens that a popular search query with good business potential would meet all three of these requirements. So in the absolute majority of cases you will need backlinks pointing directly at your page, in order for it to rank high in Google. And in case you decide to target some "unpopular" topic where the top-ranking pages don't have any backlinks pointing at them, you still need a decent Domain Rating. This indicates that your website has accumulated enough of the so-called "link juice" that can be transferred to other pages via internal links.
How do I grow the Domain Rating or Domain Authority of my website, so that the pages that don't have backlinks would still rank well in Google and generate search traffic? Well, all you need to do is create content that will attract a lot of backlinks so that you could then funnel the "link juice" from these pages to the pages that you struggle to get links to via internal links. In SEO we call this kind of content "linkable content" or "linkbait" or "link-worthy pages" or "linkable assets".
How to create content that attracts backlinks
Great content doesn't always attract backlinks. There are a few more requirements that need to be met. At its core, Linking is just a form of sharing. But just because a piece of content is "great", this doesn't necessarily mean you will share it with others, right? Let's say you were struggling to tie your tie and found a great video that solved this problem for you. Would you then go ahead and tweet it? I don't think so. Linking to that video is even more unlikely as it requires a lot more effort than a simple tweet. And besides, in order to link to a piece of content, you have to own some kind of web property where you can link from. Which the vast majority of people don't have. This is why link acquisition is a hard nut to crack.
If you want your article to attract backlinks, you need to make your readers want to share it with others. Generally, the things that people enjoy sharing will fall into one of the four categories:
So these are the four general types of content that people like to share and some basic psychology behind them. How do you know which type will work best in your specific industry? You may decide to test everything and see what sticks. But usually, you don't need to do this. Why? Because chances are your competitors have already done the hard work for you. All you need to do is analyze their content and find out what brought them the most backlinks.
The article is called "Deconstructing Linkbait" for some additional insights.
The rarely mentioned "secret" to acquiring backlinks
A backlink can be called "natural" if you didn't make any effort to connect with the linking website or any person associated with it. You can acquire tons of natural backlinks by broadcasting your content to a big audience of your fans.
Ahrefs built around 20% of its backlinks manually. While 80% came naturally as a result of broadcasting content to a large audience of people.
These three channels alone allow them to reach a rather substantial number of people without spending a single dollar. And then there's also paid reach.
For every article published they have a decent advertising budget that they can use to reach relevant people on different platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The more money they pour into their ads, the more people they're going to reach.
So with every article they can easily reach a relatively large amount of people. And if the article is link-worthy, some of these people will naturally link to it. That is how almost every article that they publish ends up in Google top 10 without any manual link building done by their marketing team.
That is the "unsexy" secret to acquiring backlinks.
Most people don't have a big audience of fans or any budget for content promotion. If you're only starting out with your blog, I have some bad news for you. Up until you grow a large audience to broadcast your newly published content to, or allocate some money to pour into ads, you'll have to build most of your backlinks manually.
The takeaway: start building your audience as soon as possible. The sooner you build a large audience of people who you can easily reach with your newly published content - the sooner you can let go of all of those tedious link building tactics.