It is not unusual to think that having backlinks is the only way to rank a website. Here’s how to rank in Google without backlinks!
There are 67,000 Google searches every second. The Google search engine offers a powerful tool for businesses to promote their products and services.
In order to rank in Google searches, you need an effective SEO campaign that includes several actionable strategies.
Many brands receive great search engine rankings when they achieve backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other websites that lead back to your website. Since other websites are linking to your site, this tells Google you are a reputable website.
But do you need backlinks? There are still other strategies you can use. Here’s how to rank in Google without backlinks and more facts to know.
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How Do I Get My Website to Rank Higher on Google?
Getting backlinks is a great way to rank higher on Google. But there are many other strategies that will land you at the top of search engine results. If you’re wondering how to rank in Google without backlinks, here are a few SEO and smart marketing techniques to use.
Write Great Content
Have you heard the expression, “content is king?” If not, you’ll soon learn why this saying rings true.
When you produce great content, everything will follow. You’ll find it easier to rank for keywords. Traffic will increase to your website. And you may even get some backlinks (for free)!
What do the statistics show? Small business websites with blogs receive 126% more growth than small businesses without a blog.
In order for your content strategy to be successful, you need to produce high-quality content. That means content that’s well-written, error-free, and written for your target audience.
Be sure to use core SEO strategies, such as keyword optimization and internal/external linking. You’ll also want to improve the readability of your content by breaking up blocks of texts with headers/sub-headers and bullet points.
Improve Your Website’s User Experience
If your website performs poorly, you won’t achieve great SEO results but Google may penalize your website. Most importantly, you want to create a website for the end-user.
Why is website experience important? Google ranks your website on many factors, including:
- Time spent on a website
- Number of website visits
- Bounce rate
- Pages visited per session
In short, the better all of these metrics are, the better your website will rank.
Improving website user experience isn’t difficult. Ensure your page load speed is fast, use plenty of white space, and use media wisely (you’ll also want to optimize your images for SEO).
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is more than one of the most valuable marketing hacks. More businesses are understanding technical SEO is a must when optimizing a website for search engine results.
Technical SEO comprises of multiple strategies that help Google bots crawl your website.
These strategies include:
- Eliminating broken pages and links
- Eliminating mixed and duplicated content
- Submitting an XML sitemap
Technical SEO not only improves your website’s crawlability but it contributes to your overall website performance, increasing your website traffic, and improving your search engine results even more.
Optimize for Local Search
If you own a brick-and-mortar business, Google has many local search resources to attract customers to your storefront. Some local marketing tricks include claiming your Google My Business listing, optimizing your content with local keywords, getting listed in local directories, and gaining reviews.
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Can You Rank Without Backlinks?
In the previous section, did you notice how link building wasn’t mentioned?
Link building is a core aspect of SEO and receiving backlinks will quickly improve your search engine results. But backlinks aren’t the end-all-be-all of SEO strategies. That’s because ranking is extremely complex.
How Google Ranks Websites
Google ranks websites based on a variety of factors. These include:
- Industry and niche presence
- Geolocation
- Anything that’s personalized to the user (or the one who’s using the search engines)
The keywords you rank for also have a significant impact on your SEO positioning. Some keywords have low difficulty, meaning you don’t need a lot of backlinks to rank for that keyword.
Even though you may rank for a primary keyword, Google can crawl your website and identify similar keywords in your content. This gives you more chances to improve your search engine positioning.
High-Quality Backlinks vs. Low-Quality Backlinks
There’s another reason why backlinking isn’t always necessary. That’s because only high-quality backlinks can improve your SEO. Receiving backlinks from low-quality and spam websites won’t improve your SEO value; instead, they may hurt your results.
This often happens when websites use what’s called “link schemes.” These are companies that place your website links on low-quality and spam websites. Google’s Penguin Algorithm update identifies manipulative link building and penalizes the website and the websites they link to.
How Google Penalizes Bad Linking Practices
Google will penalize bad linking websites in one of two ways: their algorithms will penalize you or they will manually punish your website.
Algorithm penalties aren’t the easiest to identify. You won’t receive a warning; rather, you’ll notice your organic traffic is decreasing. You may also notice your website is completely de-indexed.
Google also manually cracks down on bad linking strategies. The benefit of that is you’ll receive a warning. This is usually an email sent to you by Google’s Search Quality Team. You’ll have to remove the bad backlinks and resubmit your website to Google’s search results.
How to Create a Successful Link Building Campaign
Is there a way to invest in a successful link building campaign? You can choose to work with a link building company that has a good reputation and can place your links on quality websites. But the best thing to do is create good content.
When you create great content and another website finds your content useful, they will link to your website in their own content. This process is natural and tells Google your content is influential.
There are also many trustworthy and effective link building strategies that land you backlinks and improve your off-site SEO. This includes:
- Directory submissions
- Guest blogging
- Blog commenting
- Press release distribution
- Forums and community websites