Ideas To Boost SERP Ranking Without Building Backlinks of 80+ Expert Bloggers Roundup in 2023

I have been preaching this idea of being able to rank without the use of backlinks for a while now and I am finally glad to see the broader SEO community are catching up to it.

Backlinks are great and of course, I can not deny the fact that so far, they are a strong metric that will help you rank your content better but that “pull” they hold on the search engines – in my opinion – is dwindling fast.

My SEO strategies are now focused on creating content that answers a specific query with intent to the best of my ability.

Being able to match the intent behind the keyword (i.e reading people’s mind of why they are searching such keyword will be incredibly powerful in the coming years – it already is, but undoubtedly that would be the case more and more in the near future.

By focusing on that, you’re also increasing the chance of someone else linking to you, thus acquiring natural backlink over time.

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Boosting rankings without building backlinks is very hard. But, I have to admit that it’s easier than what it used to be 3-5 years ago.

The first thing to consider is the niche selection. If the niche you select is of very low competition, then it’s fairly easy to rank without backlinks. So, niche matters a lot if you don’t have enough bandwidth for backlink building.

The next one is quality content. The Google’s Rankbrain and AI can easily read and understand the web-written content to some extent. So, Google is giving less priority to indirect quality signals like backlinks. So, quality content is a must if you are not willing to build backlinks for your site. But I have to admit that even with quality content it takes a lot of time to get rankings without a single backlink.

So, to sum it up, to gain rankings without any backlinks.

– Ultra-low competition niche
– Very-high quality content

The above two things are very important. Without the above two, ranking without building backlinks is tough as of today.

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What I believe “Content is the King”,

• “On-Page SEO is Mother”,
• “Off Page SEO” is a prince but
• “Spamming is Father of King”

As you know Son lives more than Father such thing happens in SEO, Spamming won’t make you rank and bank for a long time but Content + On Page would make you do.

To Stay on SERP and boost my ranking without backlinks, I use some basic tweaks which everyone let it off and don’t do it,

#1. Page Size

I reduce my Page Size as low as possible, so it can open immediately on user device even it is on low data.

#2. User Comfort

Whenever the user lands on your page it should be comfortable and smooth for the user to use.

#3. User Interface

The user interface would allow User to stay a bit more time on the web page.

#4. Content Presentation

No one likes to read bulky content instead, divide it into 2 lines paragraph and add some memes making content more relatable, comfortable and understandable.

#5. Interlinking

On my money blog, I always go for a well-desired site structure where link juice is passed perfectly to the page I wanted to pass, interlinking should be specific and only on relevant places, don’t spam your own site in name of interlinking or it would pass irrelevant link juice to irrelevant places.

#6. Frequently Content Updation

Frequently updating article can help you to boost ranking in SERP’s. Google loves article which frequently get updated with fresh content and you’ll get benefits of updating the article.

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It’s easy to boost your position in the Search Engine Results Pages without building external backlinks. The process is called on-site optimization.

#1. Do your keyword research! Find keywords with high-interest but low competition for readership on the internet.

Many free keyword tools are available for this purpose. I recommend tools like Ubersuggest. As I explained in my post, UberSuggest is a great tool to find keywords in large part because the list of keyword and keyword phrase choices is so extensive.

#2. Optimize your post with that keyword or keyword phrase. Put your phrase in your SEO title, your image tag, the post’s alternative text, and the meta description.

#3. Use Yoast SEO. Yoast will tell you if your post is optimized correctly before you publish.

#4. Have a CTA encouraging comments. Comments are an indication of an active blog and Google likes active blogs.

#5. Research your competition. Google your headline. See how many tips people are already offering about your topic. Beat that number. Tools exist to help you beat your online competition. Spyfu is one of them.

#6. After publication, internally link to the post in your other articles.

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Boost rankings without backlinks; there are a few ways to do this. But one of the main ones is getting into the answer box in the Google SERP.

#1. Aim for the answer boxes in the search by looking at the related searches; figure out the questions and craft the best possible answer in approx 3-5 sentences under the question; this works like a charm on long-form articles, own these for all of the related questions.

#2. Create properly structured html tables if the answer requires a HTML table (like a comparison of features etc. for your products etc.), this will increase your possibility to rank in that precious nr 0. position.

#3. Another one to increase your ranking for the right terms is creating more context on when you are relevant (in terms of search intent) by marking up your services/proposition using schema.org markup and the SameAs fields using JSON-LD.

#4. Different, but optimizing load times using Google lighthouse and other speed related tools for both desktop and mobile can increase rankings by removing the damping that lies upon having a slower site.

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We write longer-form content that targets longer-tail keyword phrases with the help of thousands of contributors

At Databox, we do not ask others for links. But, we do ask people to contribute to our content at a very high rate. We have the approach of creating content “with” our audience, not “for” them. More than 2,000 marketers have contributed to one of our crowdsourced guides.

These guides are longer form content – 1,000 words or longer — that target longer-tail keywords. For example, we asked HubSpot partners what their favorite integration is. We got 35 different answers and compiled that into a post called, “35 HubSpot Integrations Top Users Swear By” that ranks right behind HubSpot’s own list of integrations.

There are no other longer lists on the internet with real information about each of these integrations. There aren’t many companies that have an incentive to do so as it’s a pretty long-tail keyword phrase. But, with a contributor pool of 2,000 experts, we can produce a high-volume of these guides — we’re producing 25+ per month now. And these guides attract links naturally because they are thorough and represent a diverse set of experiences.

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#1. Research

Put simply research is the most important way to boost your ranking without having to worry about building backlinks.

By research I mean really understanding the traffic and keywords used to find your products. There are any number of tools out there to do this – my weapon of choice at the moment is Ahrefs.

Lets use this keyword as an example: fishing rods.

(now before you attack me – this is just an example :-))

As you can see this is a high traffic keyword with 9.9k searches per month but its very broad and according to Ahrefs you will need 11 decent backlinks to potentially rank for it.

So what do we do then – the idea here is to rank without backlinks…

Let’s take it down a level deeper into the Niche and see what keywords pop up… Here is one example of a keyword that you could easily rank for -> foldable fishing rod – > 300 search per month ->

If you look at the top ten results you will see there are already 4 Amazon Niche sites ranking and a couple of them are very easy to overtake.

This is just one example of a way to find easy to rank keywords, with enough volume and user intent, that you could easily rank for with our backlinks.

It is worth noting that you need to manually examine each site and look at the quality of the content, structure, and backlinks before your proceed to the next step which is content.

Next up we are going to look at content – because without it you will never rank…

#2. Content

Content is everything when you are trying to rank or boost a website in the SERP’s without having to worry about finding decent backlinks.

I like to break my content writing down into bite-sized chunks so I can get the job done without feeling overwhelmed at the start.

I use a lot of Q&A in my content to answer the questions people type into Google. This has multiple benefits – easy to research and create a small section of content that makes up a much bigger blog post.

A great tool for this is answerthepublic.com

Within 5 seconds I have a list of questions that have been asked about this keyword.

This is a goldmine of information so pick out your top 10 questions from this list and away you go.

The added bonus with this strategy is if your answers are good enough you can dominate ‘rich snippets’ – (position zero) even if you page sites down the results on page one.

The above example shows a site that sits in position 5 below the fold – not going to get any clicks without the rich snippet…

You will also notice that the image is from a different website – this is also a great strategy for grabbing clicks when your site is nowhere to be found. – Make sure to optimize all your images and mark them up properly with schema to give yourself a chance to show up here.

Another great strategy for content is comparisons – compare product a against product b. Using this strategy you can load up your content without having to even think about it.

Each product has the same high-level features (keywords) and each on will be unique in it is on way (more keywords)

One of my favorite ways to boost my existing SERP positions is to look at some of the content I already have on my websites and make improvements.

You can use SemRush for this or just manually run ‘incognito’ searches to get your positions.

Look at any page that sits in low down on page one and does the following:

•  Examine existing content
•  Look at the competition – they may have updated theirs and knocked you down a few positions
•  Search for questions related to your page or topic and add these in.
•  Remove any previous over-optimizations you may have
•  Simply add more detailed content to the page

This is not complicated but it does take a bit of time. It really the easiest way to boost positioning.

#3. Silo’s

Next up you need to look at your website structure. I won’t go into too much detail here but you should have your site setup in a Silo structure to really give your content a boost.

Satish has a great post on Silo Structures for SEO that is worth a read to give you a better understanding of what I mean.

To break it down you have a top-level page and have a group of supporting pages with ‘level down’ content.

This is a great way to rank for any number of keywords because you are promoting great content and covering all bases when it comes to keywords.

The idea is you are positioning yourself as an authority on each main subject and covering all bases in terms of content and answering the needs of customers.

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Here’s the hardworking, honest way of growing your organic traffic that has worked for years and will continue to work: Write jaw-droppingly good content and hold your work to a higher standard.

I have multiple posts that have done very well because they are the very best articles available on a particular topic. To this day, even years after they were published, these articles still bring me a ton of traffic and revenue. I have people emailing me thanking me for the content. They end up sharing and linking to these blog posts – without any additional effort on my part.

Do some research, and make sure that your post is much better than the best post available about your topic. This could mean providing 100 tips instead of 50 tips, adding screenshots or adding extra case studies, and designing amazing graphics to supplement the post.

Whatever it is, stop posting mediocre content, and start publishing amazing content. It takes a long while to create such content but it is 100% worth the time and effort in the long-run.

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Rankings are, above all, about the quality of the content. This does not mean good grammar and sentence structure. That’s the quality of the writing, at least in part. And that is important, but the most important factors are that your content is:

• Accurate
• Complete
• Original and interesting

If it is, people will want to share on social media. They’ll want to email it to friends. They’ll come back to read more. And there is no more powerful form of marketing than word-of-mouth. Once word gets out, bloggers will blog about you and journalists might even write about you. Backlinks will come on their own.

So the best investment one can make is in good writers, who think creatively and create epic content for your website.

Interestingly, not everybody understands this. I recently quoted a potential client, but he was not happy with my price. Here is his response.

“It would still need to be original content, never used on any other website, with good English. Good English writing is why I asked for your price in the first place.

I’ve tried Indian writers but the English is not good. However, your articles don’t have to win any Pulitzer prizes. It just has to flow well, have a logical train of thoughts, and be written in good English.”

Rankings are…wait for it…ranked. If you want to ranked near the top, you need to be amazing. This description isn’t for amazing content. It’s for ho-hum content. Could you image going on a dating site with these expectations?

“She doesn’t have to be a beauty or very clever. She just has to have all her vital organs in the right place, be able to walk upright and be able to count to ten.”

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Just like backlinks are a big SEO win, you have to be strategic about your internal links too.

You have a ton of power on your very own site to signal relevance to search engines based on how and where you link.

At my company, chatbot tools platform MobileMonkey, we coordinate backlink building efforts with on-site SEO planning. We use a spreadsheet of our top 10 keywords, the best ranking pages and the ideal anchor text so everyone on our SEO, social and content teams know where to link and how.

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Here’s my take on boosting SERP Rankings without link building:

The best way to boost your SERP rankings without building backlinks is to continuously produce high-quality, relevant, and informative content for very low to no competition keywords.

However, the problem with this is that you can only boost your rankings for keywords that have little to no search volume, which means minimal traffic to your website. Link building is still one of the most important factors for SEO and if you don’t build backlinks to your website, then you can’t hope to rank well for most keywords that should be useful for you.

So, if you want to boost your rankings for high-volume keywords, all SEO experts you’ll ask will tell you to start building links. To help you get started, I wrote something to help my readers learn some link building strategies.

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“Ideas To Boost SERP Ranking Without Building Backlinks”

I do a lot of optimization without the need for backlinks. Especially, I love working on local sites as for a lot of them, I don’t even have to build backlinks to.

I start with the most basic one. Google Search Console. Find the keywords that are getting the most impressions even if you are still page 2 or so. Optimize the pages for those keywords by simply improving the meta details and content on the page. You’ll start to see improvement within a couple weeks. It’s super easy.

Then make sure you do check the new stuff suggested inside Google Page Insights. For most people, simply running the domain there of your site or blog will show you a bunch of things to fix that will take up the rest of your week. Just give it a try now and see for yourself.

I’m playing with the Chrome UX Report right now and I hope to be able to discover some new things and eventually show some results from what I learn there soon.

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“One way to boost your SERPs that is relatively easy without having to build backlinks, is to simply look at what is ranking in the top 10 results right now for your keyword.

Read each of those articles, take the headers in all those articles and add them to your outline. These are obvious areas and subniches to discuss in your content.

This can also beef up your content by making it longer and stand a better chance of getting into those top serps with less backlinking needed.

It also makes your content in general more of an authority because you’re covering more ground than the other results since you’re taking ALL the topics from those results and discussing it in your article.”

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It sounds like a great question too!

To boost your rankings without building links, reduce your bounce rate. Provide reasons for people to stay and engage with your site, rather than clicking the back button.

Invest in quality content that provides value and differentiation immediately, then design a funnel to keep folks on your site.

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With user experience data being such an important ranking factor these days, the easiest way to better your rankings without building backlinks is to improve your metadata.

Google now pays very close attention to click-through data. The idea being, the best and most relevant web pages will get the most clicks.

If your content is good and generates clicks, it’ll move up. If it fails to impress, Google will drop it like a stone in favour of a URL that does.

Now, you can have the best content in the world, but if your metadata is poor and uninspiring, you’re not going to get the clicks you deserve.

Likewise, if your content is okay, you may be able to surge up a few spots by providing search engines with a compelling meta title and meta description.

The logic is simple: use your metadata to sell your content better than everyone else. Because if you get the most clicks, you’ll probably win.

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My #1 suggestion for improving your SERP rankings without link building is to focus on on-page optimisation, and I don’t just mean your page titles. Make your you look at all elements of each page, such as image alt tags, H1’s, H2’s, internal links to other pages on your site.

Page titles and meta descriptions are the most important, as page titles can have a big impact on your rankings and the meta descriptions help users understand what your page is about before they click through from the search results. So while meta descriptions don’t have a direct impact on rankings, it can impact click through rate.

Once the essential are sorted, you then need to focus on other elements on your pages. Image alt tags can be super useful, but you need to make sure that you don’t over optimise these, as some people can get carried away. You can also make small tweaks to your H1 and H2 headers as they too can improve rankings.

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Search engines are designed to give prominence to websites which contain high domain authority and quality back links, high quality content, quality server and hosting service.

There are blackhat SEO methods to rank a website without building links. But you don’t wanna go down that road.

With the advancement of AI and machine learning algorithms in Google, Baidu, Bing and Yandex search engines, old methods of ranking a website without link building don’t work in 2018.

In the past you could rank a website with zero competition and get it on page one with a quality SEO friendly wordpress temaplate. Not all templates are good for SEO.

In the past you could put all quality and profitable keywords and phrases in one article (which is readable for human), then 301 redirect it to get traffic to it, now that method doesn’t work anymore, but it did in 2016.

In 2018, I have tried all ethical SEO methods possible to rank a website without link building and none works. You do need to run different SEO processes in order to rank a website for a low and middle competitive key phrases. It depends on which search engine you want to rank your website. Because every search engine has its own rules and algorithm to give importance to a domain. However all search engines have one thing in common:quality content.

To boost traffic to your website you need some strategies in place otherwise your quality content won’t be visible to your audience

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Although backlinks are a great way to build authority for your website and help with ranking, they are certainly not the only way to score SERP features that can help you to rank on the first page of Google.

For example, optimizing for the featured snippet has proven to be an effective tactic for skipping straight to position 0. Websites that otherwise rank outside of the top 10 results can actually overcome major players by effectively and concisely answering a searcher’s question within the body of their content.

Incorporating schema markup is another tactic that may help you to rank higher for given terms. At the very least, they may help improve your click-through-rate thanks to the additional context they provide.

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Want to Boost SERP Ranking Without Building Backlinks?

Focus on giving visitors a good user experience

User experience, is a critical component of how Google values a website with even more importance attributed in recent algorithm updates, therefore, if you want to boost your SERP ranking this is exactly where you need to focus your efforts.

The main foundation elements of SEO should still be an important part of your SEO strategy, but paying attention to the user experience will further boost ranking, drive engagement and achieve higher conversion rates.

There are many tools available, such as Google Analytics, which provide insights into your audience and your traffic. This information can help you create the best possible user experience.

According to Peter Morville a pioneer in the UX field, the following 7 characteristics describe User Experience:

• Useful
• Usable
• Findable
• Credible
• Desirable
• Accessible
• Valuable

An easily accessible website with the appealing design which is easy to use and provides high-quality, credible and actionable information relevant to the query offers a fantastic user experience and therefore has a high chance of being rewarded by Google with better rankings.

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“So, backlinks are basically recommendations, and people recommend you only if you have good content, or at least appear good overall.

Make use of this and prepare your strategy overall. You need to predict the future, people might not have expected “Drone” niche will be popular all these years, but it’s very trending, so pick the niche accordingly and start to make a foundation.

After writing an article, let’s say “Best Drones You Can Buy In India” you can include resources from the web, maybe blog posts, forum threads, etc.

You can let them know about this, and this builds the connection aka trust, they’ll do the same to you eventually, if things work out good.”

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For me, the easiest way to do so it through focusing on two critical parts – duration the user is on a page and the click-through rate (CTR). Studies had shown (even Brian Dean did that too) that Google gets the right signals that the content is useful when the user hit the back button slower (and stay longer on a page). It shows relevancy and with sufficient traffic, you will easily increase your ranking on search engine result pages.

How to do this?

1. Keep your introduction interesting
2. Creating a content table at the beginning of the article helps the readers with navigation (especially when the content is super long)
3. Use images, videos and other forms of content apart from words to keep your readers entertained

The second part is click-through rates. This is can be done by crafting the best headlines for your content. User intent is always the same – relevancy and updated content. Imagine both of these content titles:

How To Achieve Better SERP Fast?

How To Get Better Ranking In Just 30 Days? (updated 2018)

The obvious winner is the second part because it gives a quantitative duration (which is 30 days) and “updated 2018” represents the latest update/updated within the year.

Here’s what you need to know.

Working on both of these will not help you get better SERP in just 24 hours. It takes time and after a few months, you will notice your content get better ranking and ultimately, getting more traffic.

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The recent massive update we observed on the 1st of August (and 27th of September) put more on-page SEO in the spotlight.

Given that, Linkshero has 4 tips for you to win with on-page SEO today:

#1. Make sure your title is attractive for people to click.

CTR is a huge ranking factor (especially when you are already on Page 1).
So the more people like your title, the more they click, the better you rank (other factors, like bounce rate, still apply).

That’s why you need a killer title!

Get ideas from how to create awesome titles from Buzzfeed – these guys nail it.

#2. See whether you can update your content you are already almost ranking for.

This can include spying on competitors (maybe they covered something you didn’t) and checking your Google Search Console data.

If you see competitors using certain keywords that you are not, just add them into your copy (it would probably require an extra paragraph but not necessarily).

Same with GSC – just find high(er) volume keywords you are ranking for in positions 5 – 20 and consider adding more content using those.

#3. Check intent.

Intent and relevance are now more important than ever.

Trying to rank some keywords where they don’t belong (i.e. going against the search intent) can be undermining your success.

To check that you got the intent right, Google for your main keyword and see what SERPs look like.

• What pages appear in top 10?
• Are they mostly videos?
• Are they info pages?
• Try to understand what the user is looking for and give them what they want (i.e. let Google help you).

#4. Go straight to the point.

• Last but not least…
• Make sure you don’t write fluff.
• Go straight to the point and answer the query.
• Make your content as short as possible and as long as necessary.
• You can see what Google likes by checking with your competitors again.
• One might have 1500 words and another – 3000.
• It doesn’t mean you should go for 3500 (!) but rather for 2200. A sweet spot 😉

Link building is just one thing that you might need but there are other ways to get traffic. Good luck!

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Our tip:

Something that’s often overlooked as part of an on-page SEO strategy is the supporting content around the topic you’re trying to rank for.

Creating what we call topic clusters can help show Google that you’re an authority on that subject. A good example of this is having a service page that links to sub-service pages — e.g. if you’re a kitchen designer, having a main kitchens page that links through to different types of kitchen (e.g. modern, traditional).

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• The only way to rank high in search engines such as Google is to make sure you do a number of things:
• Provide high-quality, valuable, in-depth information… in a clear, easily understandable way.
• Include personal experiences and stories within your blog post. It also helps if you link to other posts on the same subject.
• Balance the number of OBLs with the same number of IBLs (Outbound and Inbound Links).
  Format your blog post properly and use H tags correctly.
• Accurately fill out the metadata for your post. This includes categorizing your posts, adding tags to it, customizing the slug, filling out the snippet information, etc. Here, the Yoast SEO plugin will help you tremendously.
• Have your readers leave appropriate comments on your post. (Google’s web crawlers/spiders will also crawl the comments, and if the comments provide additional value to your post, Google will rank your post higher. I know this because I have 534 comments on my #1-ranking post.)

Lorraine Reguly owns Wording Well, where she helps bloggers, writers, and freelancers prosper online through great writing and content creation. Lorraine is also an author and a freelance writer and editor for hire. Visit her site’s Resource Kit and pick up some of her freebies!

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While backlinks should be an integral part of your SEO efforts as they are essential to helping you rank in search results, there’s a lot more that you have to do in order to achieve better ranking.

Namely, by focusing on your on-site content. Try to create content that is relevant to your target audience on a regular basis, publish new content, and update your older content as needed. What’s more, try to create more evergreen content, as that is the type of content that people search for, for months and years to come. That means you’ll not only get more traffic for this content but it will also help you rank higher as your resource becomes more popular.

Of course, you also need to take the time to optimize all of this on-site content for search engines; research keywords and use relevant ones in your content, optimize your headlines and images, add meta descriptions and focus keywords, and try to make your content as reader-friendly as possible – search engines are smart enough to realize when you’re only writing for search engines and not your actual audience.

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Boost SERP Ranking by creating in-depth, quality content solving the specific needs of your readers. Go thorough.

Be practical. Add helpful images to the post.

Rocking way to boost your SEO sans building links. Do not forget to build something though; relationships. No blog or blogger is an island.

Generously promote other bloggers on your blog and through social media. Be of service. See how being generous increases your exposure, traffic and boosts your SEO juice, too.

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•  Keep updating your content. Always try adding 100-150 words after each update. The more in-depth content, the better.
• Make sure to update the title and meta description by analyzing the competition. For example – Writing the title as “Top Bluetooth Earphones to use in 2018” in comparison to “Top Bluetooth Earphones”. The whole aim to increase the CTR.
• Format the content to increase the On-Page Time. Try to make the content consumption easier for the reader. Using different content boxes and subheadings can help a lot.
• Tip – Adding Video in the middle of the post helps in increasing the On-Page Time.

You can increase the CTR (which ultimately helps in increasing the rankings) by adding elements like Ratings (if using WordPress try WP Review) and Author Name to the SERP.

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There are many ways to improve visibility without building backlinks but the major one should always be to create great content.

By creating content that speaks to the pains and objectives of your target audience you have a chance to get in front of your customers earlier in the purchase process.

If you can then connect this to other tactics like lead gen, email marketing & remarketing you can better build brand awareness and nurture these initial clicks to customers.

Create the best possible answer to a given question is the number #1 strategy to build traffic and improve rankings. And of course, ensure your technical and on-page SEO is all dialed in.

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The best idea always begins with a review of what you have. Great help here can be from the Google Search Console. After all, it tells you what you can improve, what your users are looking for when they get to your pages.

To find out how you can boost your rankings, go to the Performance tab, pick PAGES, find the page you want to raise. Now select the QUERIES tab. (Do not forget to choose the Average CTR and Position in the upper panel!)

Google shows you the keywords that users searched for. Sort the table by Impressions.

Now you have to explore the results carefully.

Your task is to find the phrases by which your page is most often shown in search results, but it occupies a low position (>10, those are on the second page of the SERP) or it has a low CTR.

With this information, you can easily understand which topics should be covered in more detail on your page.

Create additional headers, write more advanced text for the selected phrases.

Your goal is to satisfy the user’s intent, to give a comprehensive answer.

After you have updated your page to speed up the reindexing by Google, go to the URL inspection, enter the URL of your page and then click on Request Reindexing.

Sometimes these changes will not be enough to boost your rankings. So you need to become a detective for a while and analyze the current SERP for the desired keywords.

Open each page of competitors, read the entire content and determine which topics were revealed by them, but were not written by you. Write your opinion on these topics on your page.

This update process can be endless. You can always improve your pages to get more search traffic and very often you will not need additional backlinks.

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I think content marketing is the most important way to boost your SERP ranking.

Search engines are in the business of delivering what searchers are looking for.

That means content.

When somebody searches for a solution to a problem, or to make a smart purchasing decision… they are looking for information.

They want to know more about their topic of interest.

That means content.

They want to consume content that will help them get the answers they are looking for.

If you create content to solve the big problems that your target audience struggles with, then people will be interested.

When you market that content aggressively, wisely and consistently, more and more people will be exposed to your solutions.

And remember, that’s just what the search engines are looking for, too!

They want to refer people to content that responds perfectly to their search queries.

Create that content, and market it effectively so that your crowd is finding it and liking it.

The search engine bots will detect this flow of relevant traffic to your content and will reward you with the higher ranking.

It’s a win-win.

Search engines get to showcase your on-target, relevant content, and you get more traffic via higher page ranking.

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Improve Organic CTR: CTR is an important ranking signal in Google’s algorithm. If you are getting high CTR in SERP, your ranking will improve.

Understand User-Intent: Closely understand user intent for your targeted keywords, study your top competitors content and see where are you lacking. Make required changes and update your article.

Create Supporting Pages: If your main pages are struggling to improve the ranking, then create some supporting articles around the same topic and internally link all of them. It increases your topical relevancy and improves the ranking.

Do Authority Sculpting: Pass the authority (link juice) from your top authority pages to the pages that you want to rank higher in SERP using internal links.

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A tonne of high-quality backlinks can get you into the top-ten positions, but if you want to rank number one in the era of RankBrain, you need to master organic click-through-rate optimization.

Google’s machine learning algorithm (AKA RankBrain) measures your website’s click-through-rate versus the expected CTR for it’s ranking position. If your site beats the expected CTR it gets moved up, if it loses it gets pushed down.

In the modern era of SEO, user engagement signals matter a lot, and organic CTR is a key RankBrain ranking signal. Here are five tips to improve it so you can rank higher:

Ditch keyword optimized page titles and replace them with emotionally driven page titles.

Swipe elements from the top-perform Adwords ad copy for your target keywords.

Use numbers, brackets, and parenthesis to make your titles stand out.

Add calls-to-action into your description tag.

Run ads on YouTube, Facebook and Google Display Network to increase brand affinity.

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Backlinks are still a crucial factor to get your content ranking well, however, there are ways you can still do fine without them. Just need to change your focus and pay attention to the following matters:

Target long tail keywords

It’s almost impossible to rank for competitive keywords without backlinks pointing to the website or the specific page so that’s why you should target long tail keywords which have a lower number of searches but are less competitive. Use Ubersuggest, to get keywords ideas and select those with an SEO difficulty less than 30.

Pay attention to On-site SEO

Onsite SEO is a crucial matter if you care to rank that’s why you have to write quality, authoritative content that answer user’s questions.

Pay attention to meta description, title tag, headings, optimize your images, add the link to reputable sources that sustain your points and link your new piece of content from the previous articles you wrote, when is possible.

Improve User Experience

If your site is slow to load, confusing to navigate, or just plain boring, Google won’t consider it one of the best results and will rank you low in search results.

Check your Bounce rate in Google Analytics and make sure its bellow 50%. Also test if your website is mobile friendly in Google Mobile Friendly test tool. It’s mandatory to be, now that Google use Mobile-first index to rank websites.

Besides that make sure your website use a SSL certificate and it’s loading fast, as both are now ranking factors. Here are several ways to improve your website loading speed.

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Boosting SERP ranking without backlinks? I’ll say publish top quality, highly relevant, and timely content.
Of course, you’ll have to start with page optimization and all the basics but without focusing on actively getting people to link to your pages or content, that part where you give real value in what you publish should be optimal.

But let’s say you want to focus on what you already have – a content that you published a few weeks/months ago, analyze the traffic it is getting specifically the bounce rate and the average session duration.

The goal is to lower the bounce rate and increase the average session duration. How? Optimize for the keyword that you are ranking for, improve the site speed (maybe even design), and add more relevant information to your post.

If you can lower the bounce rate and up the average session duration, then that post will rank higher and higher eventually – because those two things are very important ranking signals for Google.

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Backlinks are killer when it comes to ranking, but sometimes, you can get great results by doing things on your site as well.

When I work with clients, the first things I look at are the following:

#1. Is your site mobile ready? And I mean truly mobile ready. Not just passing Google’s mobile test or looking ok on your phone, but actually working on lots of different devices.

Firstly, Google is testing this stuff and also placing your mobile version’s ranking as the priority (for the last few months, they have been rolling out the “mobile first” index).

But, Google is also measuring user experience – which means they have ways of “knowing” how happy a user is with your site. So, if they can’t read it, can’t use it and don’t like it on mobile, it will hurt your rankings, even if it does not seem obvious.

#2. Site Speed. Another thing that Google is indirectly measuring. They have tonnes of tools to help you (such as Lighthouse and I also use the WebPageTest to measure speed.

You want to make your site as small and fast as possible. So go and test it. If it’s not less than 4 seconds. Fix it. If you want to take it even further, go for 2 seconds. Your visitors will love you and so will Google.

Sure, there are lots of other things you can do (and I am sure others here will pipe in about “on page” and internal links etc) but these are the starting points for me. Slow and non-mobile ready websites are dying!

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A technique that we have had a lot of success with over recent times is the introduction of designated content areas on category, sub-category and product pages.

These specific content areas can be used to answer the questions of the target audience and provide insight on the product/services on offer.

There are various ways that these content areas can be structured; I personally, really like some explanatory content accompanied by an easy to digest FAQ section – this gives you the opportunity to include some very focused content and target featured snippets for relevant, high volume search terms.

When creating content for these areas, it’s important to maintain relevance and include a focussed selection of keyword.

Google’s Natural Language API can be a very useful tool when it comes to analysing your content for topic relevance and magnitude.

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The organic traffic can be improved without backlinks in 2 ways!

1. Writing the New Blog Posts
2. Editing the Old Blog Posts

To implement both the ways, proper keyword research is mandatory.

1. Publish New Content

Way 1

Competitors are the best topic resources for the bloggers. If you keep watching your 2-3 competitors, you can craft the new blog posts better than them and rank for the same keywords that they are targetting.

To execute this method, it would be better to follow the useful article by Brain Dean on the Skyscraper Technique so that you can beat the competitors and boost the SERP ranking.

Way 2

Google Webmaster Tools is a great source for the bloggers to find out the keywords that can be enhanced to perform well in the search results. Go to Google Webmaster > Performance and Look at the keywords and no. of clicks under the “Queries” tab.

If you have a high number of clicks for a set of keywords, then no doubt that you are ranking top for those keywords. However, you have the less number of click counts for some specific keywords, collect them and write relevant content about those topics by including those keywords.

If you look at the below image, you can easily understand what I’m trying to suggest!

In the above screenshot, you can see some of the keywords with good search volume but with low no. of clicks. They might rank on 2nd or 3rd page or further and hence getting low clicks. Create helpful content by targeting these keywords.

2. Improve Old Content

Check the on-page SEO of your old blog posts. Add some relevant content with latest data & facts and include some long tail keywords related to the article. Get some social signals and audience to read your new content. It might help in the improvement of organic traffic.

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Ranking without getting backlinks is quite challenging because backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible though.

You should start by doing keyword research using a tool like Ahrefs and choose a topic that has a low keyword difficulty, while it still gets some searches. You can find keywords for which you need zero backlinks to rank and that still have a few thousands of monthly research. Depending on the niche you can have more or fewer options.

Then you must do excellent on-page SEO.

Also, make sure that your site loads fast because the loading speed can have a big impact on your bounce rate.

Then run a social media campaign, preferably some Facebook ads so you can get more traffic and social signals.

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Write the Well researched article:

If you are into blogging or content marketing, then you may have heard about quality content. Quality content is the content which talks about the problem and provides the solution without distracting the readers. The well-researched article is the best type of content always add value to the user experience and give them reasons to come back to your site again and again.

When you write a well-researched article, then you have more chances to rank higher in SERP. The reason is that the search engine wants to rank only high quality and engaging content. The more people find your content helpful and engage with it the more it ranks higher.

Use Creative visuals:

You can count infographics, videos and even gifs as the creative visuals. When I say creative, that means you should create them for your post. Using unique visuals will help to make your content media rich.

Creative visuals help to lower bounce rate and boost engagement. This type of content rank higher in SERP and increase organic traffic.

Use Long Tail keywords:

Using long tail keywords is another way to increase organic traffic and boost ranking. Always look for long tail keywords with low competition. You can use tools like Google instant search, LongTail Pro, SEMRush etc. to find the long tail keyword and stats.

Use long tail keywords and start writing a highly resourceful article related to your niche. Because of low competition, your keywords will rank easily and boost organic traffic

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Backlinks are one of the most important pieces to ranking well, but there are many other actions you can take to push your rankings up further (without needing them).

#1. Perform a Content Audit

Content audits help you find outdated, thin, duplicate, and low-quality pages. These pages either needs more content, need to be deleted (left as 404s) or need to be 301 redirected to a relevant page (that’s higher quality). How to determine which course of action to take will depend on each individual page’s metrics. For example, if a page is thin, but has existing backlinks, you may want to make it better or 301 redirect it to preserve the link equity.

#2. Technical Optimization

Fixing 404 pages that have link equity, breaking redirect chains, and changing 302s to 301s are all actions that can increase your site’s authority.

#3. CTR Optimization

One of the quickest ways to drive more organic search traffic is to increase your SERP CTR. Test title and meta description variations and benchmark your CTR using Google Search Console.

#4. UX Optimization

Building your pages for maximum User Experience (UX) will increase dwell time and increase the likelihood that they share your content. One quick tip is to add a unique video to your pages. This is the fastest way to increase dwell time (which is a positive user signal).

#5. Internal Linking

Use Ahrefs or any link analysis tool to find your most authoritative pages. Then, add internal links to the page you’re trying to rank.

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Building backlinks in the present time is really a hard nut to crack. Most of the publications will charge you sound amount of money to acquire a worthy dofollow backlink for your website. So, here are my ideas to gain rankings without building backlinks.

Use a simple layout and make sure that your content is structured (in terms of HTML tags and the hierarchy). If you have been writing content for long time, removing old and expired content is yet another smart step towards clearing trash and outdated stuff from web, and google rewards it. Another way is to update that old content to make it the most relevant one for your target keywords.

You can also redirect and merge the content to a single piece of content. It actually combines the page authority of two pages and boosts your SERP ranks up a bit. Yes it does, and it works as well.
Last but not least, Keep adding content (updates and useful text but not just keywords) to your posts regularly.

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Contrary to the popular belief that building backlinks is the only way to climb up the search rankings, it can be done in other ways as well. Let’s face it, link building is hard and tedious work to do unless you’re using some software that’s going to pop up thousands of links at just a push of a button which btw, is a sure shot way to get yourself penalized by the Big G. So, what can you do in such a situation to boost yourself in SERP’s without building those links? Here’s what I suggest:

#1. Focus On Your Content

There’s a saying in this world, “Content is The King” and there’s a reason behind it. Google loves to push up content that’s worthy of being noticed. That’s the whole idea of a search engine. So, when you get your basics right and start writing wonderful content for your audience instead of the bots it will naturally get you the buzz and you’ll slowly start climbing up the SERP’s because Google takes such things into notice maybe not instantly but eventually.

#2. On-Page SEO is Essential

There are 2 aspects to SEO as well all know – On-Page & Off-Page. While most of us keep focusing on off page what we forget about is the importance of the other. Now, I am not saying you need to push it up as much and end up doing yourself more harm than good but keeping it inline to the best practices will surely help you out.

#3. Get Your Site Secure

Did you know that 65% of the sites appearing on the top positions for high-volume keywords are secure? Well, you’re welcome! Getting your site an SSL Certificate will probably be one of the best things you could do. Not only it will help you raise up your rankings but will also lead to your audience trusting your site further because of that small green padlock they’d be seeing on

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We know backlinks have a huge influence on ranking on SERP but it’s also very possible to rank quite well without a single banklink.

One of the ways to rank without backlinks is to anticipate keywords and be the first to post on a topic. I phrased and have written about keyword anticipation here. It’s a technique I have used to rank well and generate income.
The second method that works very well is to optimize for long tail keywords with very low competition. The search volume may not be massive but you stand a great chance to rank on top of SERP for very targeted.

The third tip is to focus on other OnPage and Technical SEO. Select a premium host for load speed, reduce bounce rate, improve dwell time with sticky post introductions and well formatted and beautiful content, use attractive images and write in short, attractive sentences and paragraphs. In other words, put in considerable effort to reduce Pogo Sticking, improve your CTR through attractive Meta Titles and Descriptions. Add videos to your posts to make readers spend more time on your site.

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The best way to get a boost in your SERPs is by starting with an easy to rank for keyword. You must do the Keyword Research properly and ensure you target keywords where top ranking websites don’t have many backlinks.

Target that keyword and make sure you have the best content for it than anyone else ranking on the first 2 pages of Google for that keyword. Then, ensure the content is optimized as per the factors Google checks for in their ranking algorithm. The basic things you should do are:

•  Include the targeted keyword in your post title, SEO title, the first 100 words of your content, in the image alt   text and your H2 headings.
•  Make sure you link to it using keyword rich anchor text from your other relevant blog posts.
•  Share it on social media.
•  Make sure the page loads fast and is user-friendly.
•  Don’t put too many ads on the page.

You won’t believe how many bloggers are making a killing following this easy-to-follow yet powerful method of boosting positions in the SERPs.

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Rich Snippets are a great way to indirectly increase your SERP as they encourage more clicks resulting in higher traffic. Google will see how many clicks you are getting compared to others and your rankings will start to increase.

WordPress has an awesome little plugin called WP Review Pro that gives you so many cool features. You can choose one of the 14 different types of rich snippets that are supported and boost the way your website appears in Google.

For example, you can see after applying a rich snippet this listing now has an image, a star rating, the number of reviews and even the time it takes to cook!

There are also a bunch of other features that come with this plugin, it’s mobile friendly, optimised for speed and will work with any WP theme.

Rich Snippets work especially well if you have an ecommerce store because you can include everything from pricing to customer reviews and more that appear directly in the search results.

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There is a widespread perception that backlinks are most important to boosting SERPs. However, there are other strategies that can help you rank high without the need to earn or build backlinks. I would like to share these two ideas that can help you see your SERP rankings moving up.

Create High Quality Content

Content is your best bet under all circumstances. And it can be best if you can create well-researched viral content. It is important to come up with ‘hot’ topics in your niche to be able to create such content. So how do you find what is ‘hot’? Check YouTube.

Create Solutions to Audience Questions

Most people, when searching online, are looking for answers to questions. There lies a great opportunity for you to boost your SERP rankings by providing solutions to your target audience. It is recommended to use the autocomplete feature in Google and other search engines to find these questions and include them as long-tail key phrases in your content.

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Do proper keyword research: If you want to boost your SERP rankings without building links, you must find keywords with less competition (preferably 1000 or less searches in a month) and make sure it has good CPC value so you’re not only driving traffic but highly profitable visitors to your site.

I recommend you to use SEO tools like SEMrush to do keyword research and make sure you’re spying on your competitors to see what keywords they are using to get more traffic.

Learn how to optimize better: Once you’re done with keyword research, you must know how to properly optimize your keywords for both search engines and people. Make sure to include your primary keyword in most common places like;

• Title
• URL
• Meta description
• Image alt tags

And sprinkle it here and there within your texts (including the subheadings)

Then, also make sure to use highly relevant LSI keywords and secondary keywords which are relevant to your primary keywords. These keywords help you easily optimize your content without “keyword stuffing”.

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Links are still the foundation of a strong website. However, I see it to be changing entirely in the future. Google is now giving most weightage to the website having “Topical Authority.”

To rank without building backlinks you need to show Google that you’re the only authority talking about a particular topic.

How about an example?

Suppose if I have a website that talk about Fishing. It includes everything from fishing rods, fishing food, fishing boats. On the flip side, you’ve a website that has huge authority and you talk about everything under the sun in which one such topic is fishing.

Being a human being, which website you’ll trust the most? The authority website that talks about everything or the small website that only specializes in one category? Of course, the fishing one, right?

Same is the case with Google’s new algorithm. Google loves websites that talk about a single topic in detail. Building a Topical Authority around a particular topic is the key to rank without backlinks today and in the future.

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A recent tried and tested SEO tip that has helped me achieve top rank in Google for specific search query is Featured Snippets.

About 50-60 words long, this block of content is a short summary of the entire article and includes keywords.

Featured snippets helps capture user attention instantly and this, in turn, helps you garner more clicks.

The most popular type of featured snippets are paragraph, list and table snippets.

Apart from this, the good old SEO techniques like optimizing the meta title and description along with writing in-depth informative articles is another great way to boost your site’s ranking on SERPs.

Not to forget making use of LSI keywords, especially to upgrade your existing content. Creating infographics can help you to increase your search ranking and get more organic traffic. Plus, it can also help you get a good amount of backlinks through a strong outreach strategy.

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I went a little over the word count, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile. I’ve added 2 links at the bottom.

I’m going to assume that multiple other answers are to optimise speed (get your sites fast yo!), so I’ll go another direction.

You should be taking a scientific approach to on-page SEO regardless of building links or not. With that in mind the best way to increase your rankings is to run correlation studies on your search terms.

Figure out what the pages that are ranking are doing and ensure that your page has those factors covered.

Use tools such as Page Optimiser Pro (POP) and Cora (preferred but expensive) to grab reports on what your competitors are doing.

A quick workflow

Run a POP/Cora report

Match your page to the ones that are ranking in the top few results (perhaps even go over by a small amount)

Do it one factor at a time and monitor your ranking for 3-5 days

If you see increases then keep the change, if you see drops, undo it

Have the page recrawled after each change

Notes:

Always run reports on like for like pages, don’t compare a product page to an informational page for example.

Always test the changes, just because cora tells you that all of the top results are doing one thing, doesn’t mean that thing is a certain ranking factor, they could all be doing the same thing wrong.

Ensure that when traffic gets to your pages they get what they want, match their search intent and perform conversion rate optimisation (CRO), the more your pages convert, the higher your page will rank.

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If you want to improve SERP ranking without building backlinks, you could rely on the power of content marketing.

If done right, quality content can help you get a huge amount of traffic. Also, such content can make search engines consider your website more relevant and give you a higher ranking.

Step #1. Brainstorming article topics

Articles should always solve the actual problems of readers, otherwise, they won’t be relevant.
Examine your target audience, specify all their pain points and challenges. Come up with topics then.
If you still have troubles creating topics, use research services as Ahrefs and BuzzSumo. They can help you explore the blogs of competitors and find their most popular topics.

Step #2. Writing articles

Write an article using relevant topics.

Step # 3. Optimizing articles

If your website is based on WordPress, the easiest way to optimize articles is to use the inbuilt SEO snippet. We discover relevant and popular keywords and tie our articles to them.

Step #4. Promoting content

When the article is written, optimized and published, we need to make sure it receives its first stream of readers. As a viable option, share it in subject-related Facebook communities.

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It’s very hard to rank a site without backlinks, especially internationally, except if you are a local brick-and-mortar business that is aiming to get the top 3 spots on the Google Maps ranking and local SERP.

You can achieve this without backlinks at all, as the most important ranking signals here are your Google My Business account, building citations (business listings) on local directories, and positive reviews from customers on Google Maps and third-party sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages and etc.

One cell phone repair shop that I optimized was able to rank on the first page of Google organically (with their website) and top 3 from Google Maps.

We optimized the website for local searches and keywords, added their business to 50 local directories and were able to manage to add 30 positive reviews to Google Maps listing.

By optimizing the most important ranking factors for local SEO website started to generate 100 calls and 30 store visits every month.

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Here’s what I’d recommend:

Plan your pages carefully. Your URL and the content on the page should closely match the intent of what the person is searching for.

Once you have a page selected for your target keyword phrase, include that phrase, variants of it, and related phrases in your

• URL
• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Headers
• First paragraph
• Image filenames
• Image Alt Attributes
• Write as many words as you can without being repetitive. Treat your subject exhaustively so you have the best page on the internet on that topic.
• Include internal links to your other pages.
• Include external links to reputable resources.

If possible, create a video that covers the same ideas, create closed captions for it, upload it to YouTube, and embed the video on the page. People take in information in different ways, and Google likely indexes the captions for YouTube videos. You also want to keep people on your page and your website as long as possible so Google sees this is a quality result.

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Our favorite trick to increase rankings without building backlinks is to optimize high-quality blog posts with term frequency, inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). TF-IDF is a means of identifying the frequency of certain words or phrases in a series of documents, in comparison to the frequency of those words in a much larger set of documents.

In the context of SEO, TF-IDF is a means of identifying the phrases that are used very frequently across the top 10-20 search results for your target keyword, yet are found far less frequently across the average indexed page in search engines.

For example, an article about car repairs would be far more likely to include the phrases “mechanic” and “timing belt” than the average indexed page on Google. Seeing these related terms, search engines are able to get a much stronger sense of what your content is about and rank you higher in the SERPs.

There are many paid tools to optimize for TF-IDF, we use ClearScope. However, you can also do a free basic analysis of this by searching for your target keyword, scrolling to the bottom of the SERPs, and including the phrases in the box labeled “Searches related to [keyword search]”

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Link building is an important factor to strengthen your website. But there are plenty of other things Google consider to rank a website. Using those things, you can increase your SERP ranking without creating any backlinks. Here’s few of them:

Find keywords having high search volume and low competition.

Include LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords in your content.

Try to use long tail keywords (get some keyword ideas from Google autocomplete and Google related searches results).

Create a unique and attractive title (including your keyword)

Try to be the first to write a topic no one has written (for example, an in-depth review of a recently released product).

If you need any other pieces of information or suggestion, feel free to ask.

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A lot of SEO experts focus on building backlinks to boost SERP rankings, but it is equally important to get organic website traffic without building backlinks. Following are some ideas to boost SERP rankings, without building backlinks:

Write on Your Industry’s Hot Topics or Latest News

One of the best ways to get organic search traffic to your website is to write about the latest hot topics in your industry. You can search for trending topics using free keyword suggestion tools like BuzzSumo and then write better content than currently available. You can also write about the latest industry news to get more organic traffic to your website.

Write on Niche Topics

If you want to avoid competing with a majority of industry players who write about trending topics, you can choose this tactic to cover topics that no one is writing about. Writing about niche topics will establish you as an authority in the field and will also boost your SERP rankings.

Focus on Long-Tail Keywords

This is another great way to boost SERP rankings without building backlinks. A lot of marketers compete for small keywords like “digital marketing” or “influencer marketing.” To avoid that competition and boost your organic traffic, you should focus on long-tail keywords like “digital marketing tactics for customer acquisition.” Focussing on such keywords is bound to improve your SERP rankings because most consumers search for content using long-tail keywords.

Get started with these tips and improve your SERP rankings without building backlinks.

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Boosting search engine ranking without building backlinks is a challenge but not one that’s impossible for low competition keywords. For keywords that don’t have a high level of competition but are still very much searched and relevant for your business, on-page optimization can go a long way.

I’ve found that for local clients in smaller communities, optimizing the content of their website can boost their ranking into the top page and beyond. The most important factor for these search rankings is to make sure you combine in a relevant way the keyword(s) to rank for and the location.

Many people focus on their keywords and what they do but fail to fully take advantage of location. It’s not always obvious where a business serves if they’re a local business and that can be a huge factor in ranking and for users.

If somebody searches for a business and clicks on their website, they want to know if that business even serves their area. For a local business that means one of the first pieces of content on the website should have what you do and where you do it.

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“Or as we have stated in 90 Digital in the past: “Look Ma, no links and I am ranking!”.

Links have always been a very important ranking factor (along with content). Links are crawled and give a good idea to SE for the type/trustworthiness of the website they link to. But crawlers are no humans. Search engines must have some human input as well in order to rank pages. What this could be? Well, there are two things humans do with a search engine: they put something in the box and they click on a result. That’s it right there, this click or as we say it CTR is a ranking factor.

Improving your CTR is like telling Google that your result is more relevant to the user’s query and it is all about relevancy. How to do this? In my opinion, it is all about the meta description, this little snippet gives the user an idea of what your page is about. Think of it as your store front in a mall, this will help a potential customer to either enter or walk away. “

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Work on Latest Trends, as the trends are discussed so they are much more likely to get shared on social media and generate public attention.

Create Tools and Plugins, This will attract natural exposure, shares, and authority.

I also believe that making the process easier, simpler and quicker for end users improve your rankings. Such as improving site speed helps user not to think about anything else meanwhile it’s being loaded, Google also likes it. Having a separate mobile version makes the browsing experience easier for mobile end users and Google also consider it as a sign. So consider this element and aspect while working on your website will naturally improve SERP’s. So remember it; Easier, Simpler and Quicker

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One of the best ways to improve a site or brand search rankings is to rely on the power of social media and social profile pages. For example, most of us already have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts. All of these social networks rank extremely well in Google, even without a lot of effort. With all of this in mind, the following can be done.

•  Add your site link to your social profile
•  Make sure each social profile has a username of your name or your brand name
•  Cross promote and link to each of your social profiles when possible
•  Link back to your social profiles from your site

While many social profiles won’t send link juice to your main website, it can still help with sending traffic and giving your site a tiny boost in the SERPS. At the same time, if you are serious about branding your personal name or business as an authority, this will allow you to potentially own the whole first page of Google for your personal/brand name. Use social profiles to your advantage, as they are very easy to rank in comparison to a new website or blog.

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Guest blogging and participating in expert roundups are still two of the most effective ways we are focusing on backlink creation, brand building, and of course… SEO.

Some might consider this as a link building method, but it can also be considered outreach, branding and expertise marketing as well.

By providing our expertise and helping to share information with others, it allows our content to be shared on other sites and also to generate new social shares and backlinks in the process.

All of these methods work great for increasing traffic and boosting search rankings. The only downside to this is that it’s quite time-consuming. However, in the world of SEO and online marketing, that is usually the case with the marketing methods that work best.

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Email marketing and generic brand name branding/anchors are definitely a big focus of ours. In addition to this, we are also actively creating new content for our website and blog all the time. As more site owners and bloggers continue to read our content, we gain more backlinks and social shares in the process.

Another nice little tip that we have for you, is to perform a brand name search on Google and see how many people are mentioning your name or brand but not linking to your site. All too often, if someone is writing about your site and not linking to it, it was just an oversight. Sending over an email for a quick text to link request can be quite effective!

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The internet is obsessed with visual marketing these days. As much as we would all like to rank at the top of Google for generic keywords and juicy search phrases, visual content is working just as well — if not better!

We are currently using visual content on social media and through the use of infographics for many of the sites we own and brands we work with. The internet is already cluttered with more than enough content, so we search out the best resources, industry reports, statistics and more, and then turn them into amazing visuals.

The end result is a constant flow of new incoming links, which are all natural and high value. Create something amazing, share it through social media, and then start to pay attention to how many other sites reposted it, value the visual content you are creating, and even provide a nice referral link as the source of information.

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To be honest, you cannot really rank for some really high competitive keywords without having some good quality backlinks. However, exceptions are always there. Moreover, for low competition keywords, it is fairly possible to rank on Google SERPs without building backlinks. But, for this, you have to do these:

•  Choose keywords wisely.
•  Analyze competitors as for how they have written content for a particular topic, how they have used keywords,   how descriptive their articles are, how much time their pages take to load, etc. Once you are done analyzing them, start creating content for your topic and make sure, you do better than your competitors. Technically, it is called Reverse Engineering. Analyze competitors, and do better.
• Make good use of LSI keywords.
• While writing, link out to various sources wherever needed.
• Add Alt Texts for images.
• Always write well-researched content.
• Keep a better structure of your post by making use of Heading tags.

Some other ideas you can try such as writing more on viral topics, concentrating on Local SEO if you are promoting such products or services.

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Link building is one of the most crucial factors for ranking in SERP. I read many case studies and gone through the huge list of 200 ranking factors, but in the end, it is building quality links to rank higher.

But this topic is also quite interesting, as one can actually get higher ranking even without building links.

However, this statement is not generic, as this is not everyone’s task to achieve. If you are serious about getting a higher Google ranking, then you must have to follow below guidelines.

Low Competitive Keyword: If you can find out a low competition keyword which has good search volume then definitely you have a chance to rank for that keyword. But to make it 100% sure, you have to create a unique, in-depth article around that topic.

List Based Articles: Another good way to get a higher ranking in creating Top 10 or list-based articles. These articles are loved by readers and easily get ranked well. You might have noticed Amazon affiliate websites regularly updates such Top 10 articles.

High-Quality SEO Optimized Content: This is kind of combination of the first 2 points. If you are done with the first 2 points, then make sure your content is interactive enough, on-page SEO optimized, have enough images, video, and call to action to increase user engagement. Also, it should be extensive enough to explain every single topic related to the main topic.

So, the bottom-line to rank higher without building links is that you have to find that low competition keyword, so that you can work hard to create an awesome content. But, even if you get #1 ranking in Google without building links, in the long run, you will lose this position as competitors will target that position.

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Backlinks are crucial when it comes to ranking a particular keyword. It is a popular belief that one must get a number of quality backlinks to rank a webpage in the search engines. Otherwise, it will show up only in the 4th or 5th page.

However, this is not always the case. Ranking without backlinks is possible if you follow a few simple rules.

Find a Low Competition Profitable Keyword

There are different tools that can help you to find low competition keywords. However, make sure it has some search volume too. You surely don’t want to rank for a keyword which no one is searching for.

You can use tools like KWFinder, Long Tail Pro, Ubersuggest etc. to find such keywords. SEMRush is a good option if you want to find competitor keywords.

Write In-depth Quality Content for the Users

People come to your site with the hope to get the best answer for their queries. They will bounce back if their expectations are not met. So, make sure to provide every possible information for that query in a user-friendly way.

Writing quality, content formation, the validity of information – everything is important for boosting SERP ranking. Think about your readers and create a content worth their time.

Optimize Your Content for the Search Engine

After you have created a great content for the readers, now is the time to optimize it. On-page optimization has several elements. From title tag to meta description, from keyword density to using keyword variations, from interlinking to SEO friendly URL – everything is important.

Take care of your images as well. Optimize them with a proper name, alt text etc.

Backlinks are still important. However, it is necessary to know how to rank without them too.

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I’ve spent the last seven years running an agency built solely through valuable content marketing, and I’ll have to be honest: “building links” has never been a content goal of mine — ever.

Yet it is a side effect of the content we produce. It’s all about quality if you want to earn those organic rankings. Google thinks like a human – their 200-page manual, the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which I dissected not too long ago, shows this.

The better you answer your searcher’s question, and the more comprehensive the information you present, the better the results in organic ranking. So, when you’re creating something with a goal of SEO rankings (top 3 organic spots in Google), think quality.

Invest the time, the resources, the trouble. Care about your reader. It will pay off!

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If you are going after organic rankings without creating backlinks, you are going to have to become the best resource that answers the keyword query.

When we do content development, we look at the top ranking sites for the main query and related queries and develop page content that is a complete guide for the topic.

Then we design those pages using images, data, and graphs if applicable, and a layout designed to handle a lot of content. We call this process “10X” – as we are aiming for a page that is 10X better than the existing ranking sites.
10X takes into consideration the content, structure, images, UX/UI design, FAQs, comparisons, benefits, and resourcefulness of the page. Don’t get fixated on a “keyword” but rather on the topic and a mix of related keywords.

Provide a great resource for the user, and you’ll start ranking. You’ll certainly want to create some internal links to help funnel PageRank and help get it crawled for indexation.

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There are a lot of things that need to happen to help a site rank well in search. This is a compelling question because technically, Google does not want anyone building links. I want to start off by saying that building links (whether you’re doing it proactively or organically), is critical to success in SEO. In other words, you’re not going to move up in the SERPs much if you aren’t building links.

That being said, there are other things site owners need to do in order to be successful other than building links. There are of course hundreds of ranking factors that Google’s algorithm uses but here are some notable, high-impact tasks that site owners can leverage.

Mobile responsive site: You need to have a mobile-friendly website to do well in search. Google made this a ranking factor back in May of 2016. Make your content easy to read, render well on mobile devices, and make your site easy to use on devices like phones and tablets.

HTTPS: Security is important to Google for its users. In August of 2014, Google announced on the Webmaster Central Blog that having a security certificate installed on your site would influence rankings in its search results pages.

Page load time: In July of 2018, Google reported that page load speed would also influence a page’s rank in search. This is especially critical for mobile devices.

Long form content: The length of the content is not necessarily a ranking signal, however, there have been numerous studies showing that longer, more in-depth content tends to rank better in the search. High rankings tend to be a secondary effect because more in-depth content tends to be more helpful and hence gets shared more on social and linked to more by other site owners.

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Although links are the most important factor in enhancing your rankings, they are not the only factor.

If you already have domain authority above 30, you may be able to move the needle just with on-page. This is dependent on already having links, though.

Without a high DA, your best bet is to target lesser competitive keywords that come with search demand. Perhaps aim for long-tail / semantic options, and be sure to use synonyms and paraphrasing to further show Google what search intent it matches to.

And don’t forget the huge importance of load times, especially on mobile. If your site is loading in seven seconds or longer on the desktop, you won’t get much love on mobile searches. Be sure your site loads fast, and is mobile responsive, to improve performance for phones and tablets.

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Quality content is the single best way to get traffic to your website, and more often than not, this will lead to natural backlinks from people who want to link to your valuable content.

As an example, putting out a free eBook, infographic or ‘Ultimate’ resource list. You should also focus on “evergreen” content, that will support your business for years to come – quality over quantity!

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” If you are looking to boost your rankings without building backlinks then you must create great content.

This is the step that most people miss.

So what is great content? It is content that answers the search query completely and also serves as a knowledge hub.

By knowledge hub, I mean that it helps the reader to grow their knowledge further even if that means they leave your site and go to another.

This is why linking out is important for a web page, yes you don’t want to link out to dross, that is the sign of a black hat SEO specialist.

Link out generously to pages that add value to the experience of your article.

So if you are writing an article about ‘slow cooker meals’ and you talk about saturated fats, you should link out to a high-quality article about saturated fats.

To know which words require links from them perform what I call the ‘what does that mean test’.

Ask a person not in your industry to read the article, your partner, your mother, your neighbor, it doesn’t matter, they just don’t need to know what you know.

Then ask them if they see a word or phrase that they don’t know what it is, they say ‘what does that mean?’

That is usually a good sign you need to link out.

This will give your article more impact, be of more use and of course, that is what Google loves and rewards”

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“As we know, link building is an important step towards ranking higher in search engines. The rank depends on the quality of your contents, traffic, and quality of backlinks you have.
But we can boost ranks even without building backlinks and I saw many websites that get huge traffic with numerous linkbacks to them.

Writing about trending topics is one of the effective methods to gain top positions in Google and similar places. Find the latest news in your niche or analyze the search trends for past 7 days.

If users search for a certain topic steadily without any downs and the output is too low, write about it. Make your content keyword rich and share it on social media channels, communities, and other sources to get massive referral traffic to your page.

A trending content can also bring organic traffic to the site within no more time. You don’t need backlinks for that. “

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Nowadays SEO has been tricky, times are gone when only link building can make you rank in the search engines. With the advancement of AI in the search algorithms. Google give more preferences to the quality of content and relevancy of the web page to other connected pages.

We can simply rank our web pages without creating any backlink by keeping these practices in mind:
1. Generating keyword rich content. Don’ stuff too much keywords but use related keywords.
2. Proper content formatting that includes the use of heading tags H2, H3 and if needed H4.
3. On Page changes like give a unique keyword rich title, meta description.
4. Including an authority source, youtube video or slide share ppt in content if possible.
5. Interlink with your old related articles.
6. Social Sharing on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest.

These simple but effective practices can help your web page rank without any backlink with a time of course.

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Thank you for including me in this round-up post. Backlinks are important to boost SERP Ranking but they are not everything. And most of the time bloggers end up making bad links for their site which results in poor search engine ranking. There are hundreds of ranking factors and we do not know every factor but we do know a few factors that are helpful and very important. So always focus on those factors that you know about.

At 3nions, our Aim is to write a better content. So the first thing is to write a good and engaging content and then optimize it for Search Engines. Follow the basic rules of SEO. Share it on social media.

For better SERP ranking, the frequency plays a vital role. Regular posting is a way to go. Post as many posts you can without compromising the quality of posts.

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Ranking is not all about backlinks, it is about a lot of factors.

Every day we see a lot of people who rank their pages with nearly no backlinks. Furthermore, a lot of bloggers get the backlinks but they are not able to compete with other sites who have no backlinks!!

To rank with no backlinks, I suggest you implement the following two tips:

Know Your Right competitors:

You should learn from your right competitors, not the ones that you want to compete. You might build a blog with big intention to challenge giants in your niche. It is not possible anymore. Check your site metrics and try to compete with sites with equivalent metrics. These sites will help you a lot to get traffic as you can spy their keywords and beat them easily.

Write Epic Piece

Don’t put the cart before the horse. Content is what visitors search for, so if your content does worth, these visitors will spin around it and Google will notice that then their user experience factor will do the rest for you. The very long piece with great value to the readers always win the show. So, focus on this point carefully too.

With these two tips applied perfectly, I’m sure that anyone can rank in the reasonable time, and enjoy the laptop lifestyle.

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One common question that has been doing rounds among the marketers recently is that Will Google support the concept of backlinking or link building in near future?

My quick thoughts or suggestion in this regard would be, not now maybe but in the near future Google would come out strong and say no more link building and even it would take serve action to those sites by dropping the rankings.

Already fellow bloggers and SEO experts would have experienced the recent updates and have taken few smart steps in avoiding regular link building and focusing more on website contents, its performance and getting natural links.

Google is getting stronger and they are sure not to compromise with the quality for its users. We can see there have been changes almost every day, new concepts and various suggestions have been shared to the marketing world from google.

My ideas of approaching SEO without creating backlinks are

• Content! Do not generate content for ranking but create to serve users
• Website optimization – Focus more on-site performance and quality.
• Drop the idea of building regular backlinks and start earning natural links

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Ranking without links… is it possible?

Yes and No.

It depends on the search term, the industry and search intent.

Let me explain.

The basic way to SEO a site since the beginning of SEO has always been to optimize a page around a certain keyword based on a pretty universal formula – then build the authority of the page with backlinks.

However, it’s now 2019 and that kind of approach just doesn’t cut it anymore.

So what’s the best way to rank without any backlinks?

Tune up your site for the exact factors, the exact keyword, in the exact region that Google is currently rewarding.

In simple terms, copy what’s working on the first page of Google!

The way to do this is analyzing every ranking factor and the importance they play for the chosen keyword. Then tune up your page around these exact factors exactly to the level Google wants.

Finally, find opportunities where any of the first pages aren’t optimizing – I’m not talking about over optimizing for your keyword. I’m talking about adding more value via schema mark up, video content etc.

This is the only way to outdo your competition without backlinks.

Having said this – please note. If your competition has 100% optimized their pages the way Google wants it done for that specific keyword/industry/region and there is nothing you can do except match their current tuning – backlinks will be required to beat them out.

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Everyone knows after the infamous SEJ article the cat is out of the bag about our secret science methods. You MUST use science to rank in today’s SERPs, links or no. SCIENCE will tell you when and where and how to use links, no “tips” are gonna work.

The problem with today’s SERPs is that no “guess-eo” is going to be good enough. You will be too far off the mark too many times. Google has hired some of the smartest people on the planet whose sole job is to trick you. you think you can guess-eo your way through that effectively over time?

Oh, and did I mention they read all the same SEO blogs and PURPOSEFULLY make algos to catch what the latest Black Hat or White Hat SEO trend is, like Silos, or Skyscraper BS, or blogs, or etc.

Without science, you can’t win. Measure and win. Google is using software to beat you (and the best Go players in the world). Use scientific measuring software to beat them!

Use scientific measuring tools like Cora (get Cora with 25% off forever! bit.ly/get-cora) or join my mentorship to learn the secret ways dictated by scientific methods! (YOU can be the secret SEO guru)

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I am more curious to add my ideas too in this post about improving SERP ranking without backlinks.

Having your website loading faster would be crucial when we think about ranking. You can stop frustrating with dirty bounce rate increase. Make sure that your website loads within 3 seconds. Though it comes under technical SEO, pay more attention to optimize your website for fast loading.

Implementing silo structure to your website or blog can highly impact your search engine ranking. Having organized content based on the relevancy, both Google and users will likely to navigate through other posts on the same topic. Hence, you can improve your user engagement too. Use the power of authority pages to boost the ranking of other pages with proper internal linking.

You may use rich snippets to provide more bulleted or highlighted points about your business to both the search engines and the users. With that, you can improve your click through rates resulting in improved SERP ranking, ultimately.

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Though you are familiar about keywords, I just wanted to mark its importance here. Stick to the potential long tail keywords that has moderate search volume and low competition in your niche. Moreover, know the capability of the keyword based on your authority, before targeting it. Only if you are optimally picking your target keywords, any other tactics would make sense. The next, content repurposing. Search for a post or topic that performed well in the past. Repurpose the content with trending information about the topic. Things changed in years.

A topic that grabs top ranking, rewritten with latest piece of content will get higher ranking. And then, don’t put your legs on wide range of niche topics. Make sure that you are fixed to a particular micro-niche subject and your content is all about it. Be master in that micro-niche. Once gaining authority and ranking, then extend your niche variants.