How to ranking #1 your site without backlink?

Create High Value Content

It’s easy to start a blog or add informative pages to your website.

But you couldn’t say the same about creating value.

You can’t just create a random opinion post about and call it a valuable piece of content.

You can’t be shy when it comes to solving people’s problems.

No—you have to answer the searcher’s query thoroughly.

They have to leave the page with a sense of satisfaction that says “Yes! This is the answer to my problem that I was looking for.”

(You can have opinion pieces in the mix, sure—just don’t make them 100% of your total content.)

Chad Zollinger, chief editor at Best Company, is a fan of content cocktails, a concept that I found fascinating and effective:

“For those who really want to dominate their industry’s search results, use the content cocktail.

A content cocktail helps you tailor your content exactly to your audience (3 story-driven videos + 10 long-form articles + 1 e-book = a great content cocktail).”

Zollinger is determined to effectively answer a search query for the user’s benefit and to achieve that first page ranking we’re all after—without the aid of any kind of backlink.

The secret, according to Zollinger:

“[Write] better content than the top 10 articles for your target keyword.”

It’s that simple.

But it takes hard work, too. You have to go more in-depth with your content, provide clear answers and include graphics that help the reader understand the concepts.

SEO consultant Francesco Baldini also agrees that content is central to a rank-without-backlinks type of strategy.

He talks about focused content.

Research Longtail and Low Volume with Your Keywords

We just covered answering searchers’ queries in the best way possible.

Now, the next step is to find those very niche, super specific, low-volume keywords that you know for certain you stand a chance of outranking your competitors for.

These keywords are called longtail keywords and they’re your friends.

With lower search volume and less competition, they’re much easier to rank for compared to the high-level competition you must battle daily for the most popular search terms.

Joseph Sloan from Advice Media is a big fan of longtail keywords. The way he puts it is genial:

“You should always aim to be the Wikipedia of your industry!”

Sloan shared with me an interesting case study for one of his clients (a sand seller), about how his team of six people got them to rank well with longtail content marketing only—no link building.

In the daunting world of SEO, they set a goal for this client to become the local Wikipedia of sand.

And so, they set to provide content that answers every inquiry a user might have about buying sand.

Sloan kindly shared a screenshot of a result obtained for one of these kinds of Wikipedia-style articles they created.

Copy Your Competitors’ On-Page SEO Strategy

It’s never too late to learn from your competitors, especially if they’ve been playing the SEO game long before you!

Among the many cool people I contacted for this article, SEO professional also uses a successful no-backlinks strategy, and it’s based entirely on studying the competition.

These are the steps he recommends taking:

Step1: Review your competitors on Page 1 of the SERPs for a given keyword

Step2: Find their average number of words per page

Step3: Write your content to that word count goal, if not a little more

Step4: Take note of other trends to get an idea of what your competitors on Page 1 are doing to be worthy of the top positions

Build Internal Links

There’s still something else to consider: the actual backlinks that every website gets.

Seriously, no website can exist without any backlinks at all—and that’s not denying anything said so far in this article.

Because you see, there’s one kind of backlink that’s always going to be there and that’s super easy to acquire: internal links.

Yep, you read that right. Every website interlinks its own pages, so it’s actually impossible to say that your site has no backlinks at all.

Now, I already mentioned earlier that internal links are part of any good on-page SEO strategy, but these links carry much more value than what they seem at first sight.

They can be keyword optimized and built like any other inbound backlink.

Call it your self-managed link building strategy.

Then work hard on your internal linking. Have optimized internal links that point to your main content page.

You have to give Google all of the possible signals so that it can read your content and say ‘hey, I like those pages, let’s get them in front of searchers.'”

It worked for Woodhead. He and his team ranked pages and sites above link-heavy competitors and major players like Amazon and Wikipedia by targeting specific keywords, producing great content in the niche, and using a strong internal linking strategy.

Conclusion

The content is king, no traffic with low value content.