Why Backlinks Are Not a Guarantee of Traffic
Backlinks are definitely still a critical part of any SEO effort. However, when taken in isolation, they are neither a good way to measure authority, trust or credibility for search engines. Nor, by themselves, do they make much of a difference to your traffic. It’s important to look beyond clicks. The answer, as to why backlinks do not equal clicks is in three parts.
First, not all backlinks result in referral traffic. A link from a high-domain page, may make a difference in SERPs, but if it’s from an obscure, dated blog article or has no real contextual anchor text to ‘sell’ the user on why they should click on your backlink, they probably won’t.
Keep in mind, backlinks are meant for the search crawlers, not people. Clicks or direct visits are an indirect and somewhat lesser by-product of links, not their primary goal.
Second, the value of backlinks can be highly contextual, depending on the quality of your linking page. Is it a low-traffic site? An unrelated industry? Could be seen as spammy? In that case, it may cause SERP penalties, rather than any benefit.
Modern SEO is not only about the number of links, but their relative purpose and user intent.
Without human-recognisable content, what is the benefit of ranking higher for an arbitrary keyword? Also, since SEO best practices have evolved so much, modern crawlers and search result algorithms are much more sophisticated.
They can assess the intent of a backlink before deciding how (and if) it affects your rankings.
Third, because user experience and your on-page content quality matter much more than the number of backlinks a page has, it is very likely a visitor, even if brought there through an organic search result will bounce and leave.
They may never return. So without quality information, even great backlinks and SEO will be unable to drive long term organic growth.
In conclusion, backlinks are great. But if your strategy depends on them alone, you’re making the wrong connection.
Quality content, user intent and on-page SEO, with a dose of promotion, is far more likely to bring long term returns.
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