In one sentence: A backlink is a link on another website that points to a page on yours, and search engines read it as a sign that somebody else thought your page was worth sending people to.
The load-bearing part of that definition is that the page belongs to somebody else. You cannot give yourself a backlink. Another person has to put your web address on a page they control and publish it.
For a local business, most of them come from ordinary places:
They are not worth the same. A link from a page about your trade in your region says more about you than a link from a page about nothing in particular. The visible words the link sits on, the anchor text, give another hint about the subject. Some links are also tagged in the page code as links the site is not vouching for, which tells search engines not to pass ranking credit. That tagging is common on directories, paid placements, and anything a stranger can submit. Those still send real people to your site, which was the original point of a link.
Links can be bought, and that has been true long enough that search engines have spent years learning the pattern. Bought links get discounted, and sometimes they get held against the site that bought them. Packages sold by the hundred are the easiest way to buy a problem you later pay somebody else to clean up.
National brands fight over links by the thousand. A local service business is not in that fight. You are competing with a handful of companies inside one county, and most of them have links from the same chamber page and the same handful of directories you could go get this afternoon.
What matters more at your size is that those links arrive with your details attached. When the association page, the supplier, and the paper all name your business the same way, with the same address and the same phone number, that consistency supports the map results about as much as the link supports the website.
As a worked example, say two roofing companies cover the same suburb and their websites are about equally good. One of them has sponsored the little league, sat on a builders association board, and been quoted in the county paper after every bad storm for eight years. All of those pages point back to its site. The newer company can close that gap, but it closes it one relationship at a time, not with a purchase. That slow, unglamorous work is part of what ongoing SEO is for.
There is a second reason it holds up. The systems that write AI answers read the open web much the way search crawlers do, so a business other sites already reference is easier for them to find and to describe correctly.
A backlink is not the same as internal linking, which is the links between your own pages and something you control completely. Domain authority is a third party score built to estimate link strength, not a number Google publishes or uses. And topical authority is the broader idea that links are only one of the ways a site earns a reputation for a subject.
There is no number, and whoever quotes you one is guessing. A short list of links from real organizations near you, an association you belong to, a supplier you buy from, a charity you actually support, a paper that actually covered you, does more for a local company than a long list of submissions to directories nobody reads. Useful filter: would you be comfortable showing a customer where the link came from.
Buying links carries real downside and no guarantee, which is a poor trade for a business with its name on the truck. Paying somebody to do outreach is a different thing and can be perfectly legitimate, as long as the work is asking real, relevant organizations for a real mention. Ask any vendor to show you the last ten links they earned for someone in your trade. The answer usually settles it.
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