After doing my own SEO for the past couple years, it’s abundantly clear that backlinks far outweigh “fresh, unique content” for ranking well. : SEO

I run my own web design business on the side. The goal was to rank on the first page, top 3 for ‘my city + web design’.

I soaked in as much as I could, learned along the way and applied everything I’d learned:

• Did the keyword research and competitor research.

• Built a website that is extremely fast (reflects on Page Speed Insights) and has crazy good Lighthouse scores.

• On page SEO is on point.

• Mobile-friendly of course.

• Lastly created unique content weekly that my audience would care to read about.

When I started (submitted my new site to Google), page 18.

After a couple months of not getting any backlinks at all and had about 10-12 articles, I was on page 15 or 16.

It wasn’t until I started getting backlinks from bigger (from social media profiles, local citation building like Yelp, etc), where I started to notice a HUGE difference.

After getting those easy backlinks, and about a year and a half later – here I am now, page 1 – fluctuating between spot 5 and 8. I’ve maybe added 3 more articles during that time, that’s it.

Here’s the kicker though – the websites that rank between spot 1 and spot 4 on the first page of Google and have since I started this, have thousands of backlinks from the footer on websites they’ve built for their clients.

That’s it. The put “designed by X”, where X is the link to their sites on client website footers. Each of their client websites could have hundreds of pages each, so that’s tens of thousands of backlinks.

And guess what? That’s all they have. That’s literally how they’re ranking.

• They don’t have a blog. Literally none of them have a blog. So none of them are producing ‘fresh, unique content’ at all.

• Each has 10-15 pages on their site all together. One site has like 80 city pages, where they took literally the exact content, switched out the cities for each page and that was that.

• And each website’s performance on Page Speed and Lighthouse is absolute garbage.

Yet, they’re all ranking only because they have footer backlinks from client sites.

I kind of feel like I was lied to. “Just make unique, great content”. Yeah – that got me nowhere. Backlinks instead pushed me up, and quite evidently pushed my competition up as well, cause they have shit for content.

So.. since it takes years to get a ton of new clients and subsequently tons of footer links pointing back to my site, I’m just going through web design directories and local directories, filling out my profile and putting a link back to my site.

If anyone has any other suggestions how I can get backlinks for my web design biz, that’d be amazing.