Importance of external links in 2018

[seoanalytics]

How important are external links in 2018. How much of a percentage do they represent when deciding to rank a page.

I imagine it depends on the query but I was wondering it if 10 % of of 60 % ?

My feeling is that with good content you can get on almost any query on the 1 st page without links because that would be too penalising to small business if they had no possibility to rank with just content.

Looking forward to getting some feedback.

[seoanalytics]

Thank you Chris for your input and information.

[Chris.Menke]

Basically, Google learned long ago that it couldn't exactly trust the (small, medium or large) business owner /marketer to be 100% truthful (or anything close) with the content they put on their own websites.  More often then not, the marketer would include content that didn't match their products/service just to try to outdo their competitors or game google. (I know--it's hard to believe isn't it?)

Measuring backlinks became a way Google could get some third-party input on what a website might really be about as well as how much more important one site might be than another. In that measurement scheme, unfortunately, there is no handicap for new or small businesses, though I imagine if there was, every multinational in the world would be trying to figure out how they could make themselves look smaller or newer than they actually are.  Of course, the link-measuring scheme was eventually gamed by marketers (we're just a bad lot, aren't we?) and Google began weighing other factors (as Nicholas links to) more heavily as a result.

Small businesses however, may get a foothold or survive in the keyword niches that don't support enough traffic for larger companies. It takes less authority (though usually just as good optimization)  to rank for those niche keywords, so while a new or local company is pulling itself up by the bootstraps to get itself established, they are usually best off targeting those more locally-oriented and long-tail keywords than the more competitive ones.

[seoanalytics]

Thank you for the info, I agree with you low competition it is easy to rank without link more competitive query harder without.

I will check moz link explorer as I know there is a new version and I haven't time to check it out yet.

[LureCreative]

Agreed, we see that all the time for locally competitive searches. We recommend utilizing the Moz Link Explorer to do a link profile comparison between your website & a website that is ranking high for one of the target keywords that you are not. 9 times out of 10, they will have more authoritative, relevant links.

[NickW816]

This depends greatly on the search query and what keywords you are targeting, for example, if you are writing an article on "how to eat chocolate covered bananas in outer space", you can probably rank your page on the 1st spot of Google with 0 links, even with a sub-par written article. However, the higher the competition, the more high-quality links are going to matter in my experience.

According to Google's Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the top 3 Google ranking factors- https://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882. Good content definitely comes before acquiring links, process-wise, but I believe links are just as important when it comes to ranking for competitive searches.

We will never know an exact percentage, but if already have great, in-depth, well-written content, act like links are 40-50% of the ranking equation & your efforts will be closer to being on-target than they are off.