While getting good backlinks is still the best way to rank your website, it is certainly possible to rank your website without backlinks.
The following methods focus more on on-page SEO, creating valuable content, and off-page mentions.
So, here are 9 ways to rank your website:
1. Create valuable content
Make sure you have content on your site that answers questions that your visitors might have. 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, telling 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.
For example, if you have a website that sells gardening tools, you can create a comprehensive guide on how to properly prune different types of plants, including step-by-step instructions and accompanying images to aid your readers in understanding the pruning process effectively.
2. Try to rank for longtail keywords
Longtail keywords 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.
Let’s say that a small bakery in a suburban town wants to attract more customers looking for specialty products. They may choose to target longtail keywords like “gluten-free cakes for birthdays” or “vegan pastries near me” to attract niche customers and establish an online presence before expanding to target 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!
If a restaurant consistently receives positive reviews online praising its delicious food and friendly staff, its search engine ranking will likely improve, attracting more customers to dine at its establishment.
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.
Analyzing competitor websites and their content is important to understand the effectiveness of various forms of content for ranking purposes, while also considering the specific pages that are ranking for each search term.
Assume you have a bakery with an online presence. You analyze your main competitor’s website and find that despite having shorter blog posts, their specific pages on wedding cake designs are consistently ranking higher in search results than yours. You can take that information and change your content strategy and then measure the results.
5. Build internal links
For each of your longer, authoritative articles, link smaller supporting articles on your website to this main page. This will help your longer page achieve higher rankings.
For instance, if we have a comprehensive article about “Tackling Climate Change: A Global Perspective,” we can link smaller articles like “Renewable Energy Sources Explained” or “Government Policies to Reduce Carbon Emissions” to provide readers with more in-depth information while boosting the main article’s search engine 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.
If an online shopper struggles to find the desired product category or faces confusing menu options, they may quickly leave the website and visit a competitor’s site with a more user-friendly interface.
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.
If a restaurant’s website is not mobile-friendly for example, potential customers trying to view the menu or make reservations on their smartphones will have a frustrating user experience, leading to decreased bookings and ultimately affecting sales.
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.
Having a slow-loading website can lead to a high bounce rate and decreased user engagement.
If an online shopper tries to access a slow-loading e-commerce website to make a purchase, they are more likely to abandon their shopping cart and switch to a competitor’s website offering a faster and more responsive experience.
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 their 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.
For instance, if a user searches for a clothing store and sees a search result for a website without an SSL certificate, they may choose to click on a competitor’s website that displays the SSL lock symbol, ultimately causing the non-secure website to lose potential customers and decrease its rankings.
Having an SSL certificate not only boosts website rankings but also ensures user trust and avoids potential loss of reputation due to security warnings.
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.
So, 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. The backlinks will come.
