A backlink is a link from an external website pointing to your site. Search engines treat backlinks as votes of confidence, especially from authoritative, topically-relevant domains, making backlink quality one of the most influential off-page SEO ranking factors.
Example
An industry newsletter links to your report on B2B website benchmarks. That link counts as a vote of trust for the report and for your domain.
Related resources
Glossary
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO covers ranking factors that happen away from your own website, like backlinks.
The biggest factors are content relevance, page speed, mobile usability, backlink quality, and technical SEO — like clean site structure and proper metadata. Google now also weighs experience and trust signals (E-E-A-T) — real expertise behind the content, not just keyword-stuffed pages. A technically solid site with genuinely useful content will consistently outrank a flashier site with thin, generic pages.
Your website likely isn't ranking due to a combination of thin or irrelevant content, weak technical SEO, slow load speed, or a lack of quality backlinks pointing to your site. Run a technical audit first — broken links, missing metadata, and slow pages are common and fixable quickly. If technical health is solid, the issue is usually content: not enough pages targeting real search intent, or content too generic to compete with more specific pages.
