Looking to rank a website without backlinks?  It's no secret that in order to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPS), you need a strong backlink profile. However, many people believe that you can't rank a website without backlinks. This is simply not true. There are a number of factors that contribute to how your site ranks, and while backlinks are certainly one of those factors, they're not the only one. In this article, we'll discuss some of the other ways you can improve your site's ranking without relying solely on backlinks.

What are backlinks all about?  The best way to view backlinks

First, always remember google's #1 job is to take the search you are typing in and find you the best possible match to answer your search query. If google has 2 million possible sites to serve up, what might influence google to select the top 5 search results for a specific search phrase?  It would include scanning through all site content that exists in your page title/ H1 tag, finding related phrases in your content, images with alt tags that are similar, length of content (words, paragraphs, headings), and a big part is how many other sites are referencing a select page. 

To make it easier, imagine there are 5 choices that exist - 4 have around 500-1000 words of content and no site online is linking to them and the 5th choice has 250 sites referencing or linking to that page and it has over 4,000 words, 20 headings, 15 images and 1,000's of social shares.  Just from a logical standpoint, you would guess that the 5th site would be the best site to recommend as the top search result right?  That's how you need to think of ranking on google and how backlinks are 1 area of importance, and backlinks are usually earned by quality content that deserves to be shared. 



Rank Website without backlinks?  Yes it's possible

How to get your website ranked without relying solely on backlinks?

Think about the paragraph above, search engines recommend the best content to help answer a search term.  So this is similar to the "if you build it, they will come" concept.  You can't expect to get backlinks without having the best content - so if you create the best content possible for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, the odds are in your favor that it will begin to show up in the search results and gain attention over time.  For those SEO's out there who are going crazy reading this - yes, there are multiple ways to go about gaining backlink - but for the sake of this article - creating the best content as a reverse engineering way to start the process to gain backlinks can rank and can lead to backlinks over time (even without the 100's of other ways you could speed up the process to earn more backlinks).

With this concept of creating the best content and resources possible without focusing on backlinks, here are the steps to create the best piece of content.

Step #1. Keyword Research

This is always one of the most important steps in generating search engine traffic and the foundation of your SEO strategy.  You want to search for phrases you want to rank for based on the topics that reflect your company, your industry, your specialty, your services, location, etc....  From there, you want to look at the details and ranking factors of the target keyword or keyword phrases you want to rank for.

3 things you want to consider the following before selecting your keyword phrases to target:

• Intent.   How are people searching for this term? There are 4 types of intents.  These include Informational (answer to specific question), Navigational (looking for a specific location, page, or a specific page on a users website), Commercial (searcher is looking for a brand or services offered), and Transactional (user is ready to buy). 

• Volume.  How many monthly searches are related to a specific search phrase?  Focus on extremely high volume and you'll be in a large pool of highly competitive sites all striving to outrank each other.  Target a keyword phrase with low or no search volume and you'll find yourself spending time to create content for an auditorium with no audience.  If you're new to content creation, on page optimization, google rankings, and the world of SEO in general, we recommend you start with a search volume that's lower in the range of 30-100 monthly searches.  This is not an exact science recommendation, but we feel that with the right content, you can gain traction and start to see positive rankings on search engines with modest effort.  Small victories in your journey will help validate your efforts and allow to start to go after larger volume search phrases.

• Keyword Difficulty.  How difficult is it to rank for the search term or long tail keywords?  If you target phrases with a difficultly of 80% out of a 100 - you will find yourself struggling to rank.  Focus at the beginning on search phrases that have low competition around 30% or under. 

Take the time to narrow down your targets to include low competition keywords and phrases, approx 30-100 (approx) low volume keywords to start keywords that fit the intent for the user.

Quick Tip - Should I only pick on keyword phrase for each targeted search term?  No!  Google has evolved since the 90's where that used to be the case.  Now, think of it as a main search phrase or long tail keyword that then can have numerous relevant keywords that can be covered in your article or website page.  This allows you to not only have a single search term target, but allows your page/site to rank for numerous search terms.

Step #2 - Research Top 5 SERP Rankings

Now that you've identified the phrases you are looking to rank for, take some time to investigate the search results of the top 5 organic listings for your target keywords.  What you want to pay attention to are the SERP results page which include the Page Title and meta description w/ URL link.  Also research the main page headings (H1, H2, H3), links on page for external and internal, number of paragraphs and word count, images etc...  Remember what we mentioned at the beginning of this article - if you're looking to rank, you need to create content that is better than what is currently ranking.  Get an idea for the content you want to create, the size of the content needed and any graphics you may want to include in your content.

Step #3 - Build Framework out and start creating content!

This might be overly simplified, but yes, it's time to start creating the outline of your article and start to build out your content.  You can overly complicate this process by adding 15 more steps of research and thinking of the other 200 google factors that you need to think about in your ranking efforts but honestly, focusing on quality content, with the right keyword targets, with the right content length / topics / etc... will go far - and if you focus more on creating this content and publishing it - odds are you will see your rankings increase moreso than if you spend 9 months researching all possibilities and finally producing that 1 perfect piece of content. 

Framework Concept:

Based on your search results, we start our content for articles (same can apply with web page copy) with our Main H1 title, Additional Sub titles or H2, H3, H4 headings, number of images I want to include, word count length, external links and internal links etc...  I'm also looking to mention the keyword phrases I'm looking for that page / article to rank for.  Typically we mention it in the H1 / Title and in first paragraph, but in addition, we look to see how many times the top 5 search results may have mentioned these phrases so we can get an idea of how many mentions we should include (make sure you never overuse or keyword stuff! - search engines don't like that!). You may also want to include an article outline or table of contents or think of ways to make the user experience a positive one.

Once the framework is finished - it's time to settle down with some coffee or start to create! 

Step #4 - Optimize your title tags, descriptions and on-page SEO

Now that you have your content created, make sure you don't forget to create the best Title Tag, Meta Description, Social Media Image and your on page SEO. 

Title Tag recommendations:

How long should a Title Tag Be?  Our recommended length is no more than 65 characters.  With that being said, google does not have a formal answer for the length in terms of a ranking factor - but keep in mind that SERPs show a limited amount of characters which will impact a user.  Our answer and what we practice is between 50-70 characters long.  We recommend including the main phrase in your page title.

Meta Description recommendations:

google generally limits snippets to around 155-160 characters.  Ideally, you should stick around 50-160 characters.  We recommend including the main phrase in your description.

On Page SEO recommendations:

Be sure to include your keyword phrases throughout your content.  We recommend including the main phrase in your H1 and inside your first sentence of your page/article. 

In addition, be sure to add alt tags to your images to describe them for the search engines.  Be sure to include your title tags, internal links, external links and graphics.  We also recommend mentioning your keyword phrases on other site pages/articles you may have that are related to your content and creating links to that new page.  Be sure to use the right keywords in the anchor text for that link.  This will give you some link juice to tell the search engines what this page is all about. 

Additional tips for improving your site's ranking

Tip #1 Improve your websites technical SEO

Maintaining a site that can easily be crawled and is error-free one of many important ranking factors.  Again, googles job is to deliver the best content and experience for the search engine results pages.  If your site structure is fragmented, has broken links, has slow page speed, is not mobile friendly etc, then it can harm your SEO performance.  You can run a free website audit to discover some of the issues you have and work towards fixing any major site issues.

Tip #2 Improve your internal linking

Identify keyword phrases that exist on your current site pages and blog posts and use those as anchor text to build up your internal linking strategy.  When you link keyword phrases to specific site pages or articles, this signals to google what that particular page is all about.

Tip #3 Leverage social media

Posting the content of your website throughout different social media channels can help expose your content to more people and help create build backlinks.  If the content is seen by the write people, it can help your content reach a larger audience and build awareness to your brand and services.

How can I track and monitor my SEO?

Having a few SEO tools is definitely recommended.  It's hard to monitor your SEO efforts without some type of support.  Some important key factors you want to monitor include link building, organic traffic, keyword ranking positions, site audit reports, top queries, top pages, and more. 

There are tons of tools on the market such as SEM Rush, Moz, Ahrefs to name a few.  Each have pros and cons and each have subscriptions associated with them.  Also, most of these tools have a steep learning curve and really are beneficial to those whos skills can utilize the tools.  As a agency owner, we work primarily with SEM Rush and have that integrated into all of our client dashboards with all our additional tools in one spot. 

Free SEO Tools to Leverage

Take advantage of googles free tools which include google search console and google analytics.  You can set these up for free and they are extremely helpful to help grow your site.

What is Google Search Console?

Google search console that helps you monitor your web sites presence in the google search results.  This includes Performance, Index including sitemaps, removals, coverage, Experience which includes googles new core web vitals, mobile usability, and page experience reports and more.

What is Google Analytics?

While GSC is related to how the search engines interact with your website, GA measures data on how a user interacts with your website.  Between these two tools, you'll get a very clear steam of data that will help you see not only all aspects of your website performance and current digital marketing efforts, but you'll also be able to measure all progress and optimize your efforts to consistently grow your site.

Google My Business listings

Another important part of growing your site is setting up and optimizing your google business profile.  This again is another free google tool that is extremely useful for local seo.  Your can leverage the google maps section to show up for various keyword phrases in your local market.  Unlike ranking organically and focusing on quality content, content marketing and creating backlink worthy copy, the google maps or google my business section of search works differently.  You can show up in the maps area of search quickly and modify the content allowed on your profile to show up in more local search areas.  This will help drive local targeted traffic, help you reach your local target audience faster and build out your local SEO reach. 

{You can also leverage full dashboards that allow you to pull in your tools into one main dashboard.  This includes site audit monitoring, domain authority, google analytics, google search console, social media accounts, directory lists, site speed, keyword rankings and more.  You can research tools that may be available online or feel free to message our team to request information on our SEO dashboard.}

Keywords Everywhere

This is a chrome plug-in that offers some basic keyword research functions for free and more details for paid credits.  This will help you find the traffic volume, keyword difficulty and many of the other areas we mentioned in the research part of this article.  Check them out.

FAQs

Q. Can I rank my website without content? 

A. It's extremely hard to rank your site without valuable content. Almost all highly ranking websites have high authority and an in-depth amount of quality information.  Think about it, as google indexes your site's content, how could it suggest your site if there is no content to index? 

Q.  Can I rank a website without backlinks?

A. This is the question we're addressing in this article, and yes you can rank a site without backlinks. You might not rank near as well as sites with backlinks, but it's possible to rank your site organically without backlinks.  Following the advice above, focusing on specific SEO tips and focusing on content quality, it will lead to backlinks naturally over time.   

Q. Can backlinks hurt my site?

A. Yes they can! Negative backlinks such as negative reviews and spammy backlinks can cause your site to drop in rankings if not addressed correctly or quickly enough.  This is why it's important to monitor backlinks and understand how backlinks work.

Rank without backlinks.  Build High-Quality Content

While there are numerous factors that play a role in growing your site's traffic and improving your ranking on google, developing high-quality content is one of the most important parts of SEO.  Follow the SEO techniques mentioned above and watch how you will attract traffic to your site, build links from high authority sites, generate high quality links, expand your external backlinks, and gain more organic traffic.

Keep us posted on your success - we'd love to hear from you!