Here’s some scary math: If the average number of backlinks was 100, and you did 1 link/month, you would need 100 months, or over 8 years to rank your content for that keyword.

Even if it was a lower number of links, like 12, that means it would take a full year for you to reach that number at 1 link per month.

You can get a better picture of how many backlinks on average you’d need to rank by looking at how many links the results on page 1 of Google have.

This allows you to set some real goals to follow through on.

If you want to rank in 3 months: divide the average number of links for results on page 1 by 3 to get a more realistic view of how many links it would take and how much it might cost.