9 Ways to Rank Your Website Without Backlinks
Karl R. Carter, ASBC®
Despite what you may have seen online and from various experts in the field, it is certainly possible to rank your website without backlinks.
The following techniques will focus more on on-page SEO, creating valuable content, and off-page mentions.
So, what are these techniques?
1. Create valuable content. When you answer a search query thoroughly, then you’re giving your readers what they want to know.
- This will increase user engagement on your website, which will tell the search engines that your content is valuable. Consequently, the search engines will rank your website highly for that search term.
- For the highest rankings, go more in-depth than your competitors, provide clear answers, and provide graphics or illustrations to help your reader understand the content clearly.
2. Try to rank for longtail keywords. These are keywords that are niche-specific and may have very little search engine traffic. The reason why you will be aiming to rank for these terms is that there is less competition, so they should be easier to rank highly for.
- Ranking highly for these terms will be easier and maybe quicker to achieve too.
- Plus, if you rank highly for lots of these terms, your overall traffic will increase. At this point, you may be able to consider ranking for more competitive search terms.
3. Get customer reviews. With local businesses, reviews submitted about your website online can affect your search engine rankings as well.
- For many reasons, it’s worth your time and effort to ensure that you are providing the best service possible for your customers. This will lead to great reviews and more customers!
4. Copy your competitor’s on-page SEO strategy. Visit your competitor’s website and study their content. You may think that creating longer forms of content is best when it comes to ranking. However, this is not always the case. Check whatever pages are ranking for each particular search term.
5. Build internal links. For each of your longer, authoritative articles, link smaller supporting articles in your website to this main page. This will help your longer page achieve higher rankings.
6. Ensure that your website is easy to navigate. If your website isn’t easy to navigate, your visitors will just click off your website and go somewhere else. This can lower the time spent on your website and increase the bounce rate. These are both negative SEO factors.
7. Have a mobile-friendly website. These days, most internet users will access your website through a mobile device. If your website isn’t rendering properly on mobile, this will have a negative impact on user experience, rankings, and sales. So, be sure to optimize your website for mobile devices as well as desktops.
8. Increase your page speed. Page speed refers to how fast your website page loads, and this affects your rankings.
- A faster-loading website improves the user experience of your visitors. No one wants to be waiting for a website to load. Chances are if they have to wait more than a few seconds, they will leave the website entirely.
9. Get an SSL certificate for your website. It has been shown that having an SSL certificate on your website increases your website rankings.
- These days many search engines will warn its users that a website without this certificate is not secure, which will result in a user leaving the website immediately. This harms your rankings and possibly your reputation as well.
If your website is still new and has yet to establish any authority within the niche, or if the competitors in this particular niche have very few backlinks, then it is certainly possible to rank highly for various search terms using these strategies.
As your website becomes more competitive, then building backlinks will certainly help you to continue to rank higher.
But in the meantime, don’t worry about the backlinks. Draw your visitors to your secure, quick-loading website and provide quality content that they’ll want to engage with and share with others.