You need to figure out the realistic number of backlinks by analyzing how many links your competitors have that are ranking on page 1.

We use for competitor research on this.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Say you want to rank for “ketogenic coffee” – a keyword that gets about 500 searches a month with a CPC of ~$0.80.

Looking at ahrefs, the top ranking results for this keyword have between 76 – 182 backlinks.

Since Google is ranking content with this range of links, you’ll most likely need to fall somewhere around this range as well when trying to rank for this keyword.