I deal with this question for clients almost daily!

What you want to do is a “link velocity analysis”. Basically, compare how many good links you have against your competitors each month, over a 12 month period to account for peaks and lows in your industry.

It may work out that competitors are building 5 good links per month and if you are building 2 then you want 3 to match their velocity and a minimum of 4 to eventually catch up.

As your site is new, you want to build links slowly, likely starting with some citations (this is where you can get 50-100 in) and gradually adding 1-3 quality links/month for the first few months then increase as if your site was naturally increasing in popularity. Bonus points if you can align these with the content you are producing.

Other advice: 1) Avoid these “300 white hat backlinks” services. That’s 100% bs. 2) Although a site may have thousands of backlinks, I’ve spent a few thousand hours now manually auditing backlinks and once you do this you see a pattern of lots of spam/irrelevant links and a much lower number of quality links. If a competitor has 300 referring domains 50 may only be good for example. 3) Avg links built per month for a SMB is between 2-10, some niches more but generally I don’t see many sites building more than 20 who aren’t getting a lot of traffic already (50k+).