No Backlinks SEO Guide: How to Rank Keywords Effectively in 2024

Do you want to improve search rankings without building backlinks? If yes, then you have landed at the right place. Search engine optimization, or SEO, involves changing your website to boost its rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Building backlinks is a great way to boost your rankings. Say, you visit a high-authority site and find a hyperlinked term there. You click on it and get navigated to another site. These are backlinks. They are an essential part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because they provide the search engine with an indication of the website’s popularity.

Although backlinks are essential for SEO, it is possible to rank keywords without them. Several methods can be used to rank keywords without backlinks. These include focusing on long-tail keywords, optimizing on-page content, building relationships with influencers in your industry, and using social media.

Ultimately, it is not impossible to rank keywords without backlinks. However, you must be equipped with the right tricks and tips. If you are not well-versed in the process, we recommend you to seek help from highly professional digital marketing companies in Dubai.

Still, if you want to try a few facets of ranking your website, in this article, we will talk in detail about how to rank keywords without relying on backlinks.

Ways to Rank Keywords Without Backlinks

Here are some top ways in which you can rank keywords without backlinking:

Keyword Research

Keyword research refers to finding keywords that your target audience is searching for. It is the first step to help you determine what keywords you want to rank on the SERP and optimize your website content around those keywords. Keyword research is vital for the success of any SEO strategy.

When you use keywords that your target audience is searching for in your website content, your pages start ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) for those keywords.

When conducting keyword research, it’s essential to focus on long-tail keywords. This is because long-tail keywords are more specific than short-tail keywords and have less competition. Therefore, targeting such keywords can increase your chances of ranking higher in SERPs.

Check this out to learn how to track the position of your keywords on SERPs.

Optimize Your Website Content

Optimizing your website content is the key to ranking higher in SERPs. Optimization of website content refers to doing on-page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to making changes to a few content elements according to the SEO guidelines. The elements include the content, page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt tags. If you are looking for ways to optimize your website, check this out.

Find below some tips for optimizing your website content:

• Use your target keywords in page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and content.
• Use descriptive and relevant image alt tags.
• Write high-quality, informative content that’s relevant to your target audience.
• Break your content into headings and subheadings so that it is easier to read.
• Ensure that your website has a clear structure with a logical hierarchy of pages in the form of Htags, and use keywords in them.
• Use internal linking so that the search engines understand the relationships between your pages.

Target Low-Competition, Long-Tail Keywords

As stated, long tail keywords are longer, more accurate, and more specific. Therefore, you will know what a user wants with such search queries. Furthermore, since such keywords are particular, they have low competition, as many websites need to be using them to their advantage. If you implement them in your content, your website will rank at the top. Furthermore, it makes targeting a niche audience for businesses easy. When you search for the competition of two to three-word keywords, you will know how high their competition level is.

For instance, keywords like “best garden tools” or “best tools” will have tough competition, and you will have to put in extra effort to make your website rank on it. So focusing on long tail keywords like “best garden tools for beginners” or “best tools for gardening for beginners” is the right thing you should do, specifically if you are just getting started.

You can use keywords based on some of the solid topics for your niche industry and then target keywords with good monthly search volume. Try to be the Wikipedia of your industry, i.e., post more informational content. If you are a comprehensive source of information for the users, not a single backlink is required to rank at the top of the SERP.

Optimize Your Website for User Experience

Optimizing your website for user experience is essential for ranking higher in SERPs. Users who have a positive experience on your website are likely to spend time and engage with your content.

This can help increase your search engine rankings.

Find below some tips for optimizing your website for user experience:

• Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and responsive.
• Ensure that your website loads quickly.
• Use easy-to-read fonts and not-so-vibrant colors.
• Use images and videos to make your content more engaging.
• Ensure that your website is easy to navigate.

Smoother navigation, improved visuals, and faster loading time helps to reduce bounce rate and encourages users to spend more time on your website.

Additionally, optimizing for user experience can help to reduce the number of errors and broken links on your website, making it more accessible for search engine crawlers.

All of these factors can help to improve your website’s ranking and visibility in SERPs.

Use Social Media

Social media is a robust tool for driving website traffic and increasing search engine rankings. Content, when shared on social media, helps increase its visibility and attract more visitors to your website.

Find below some tips for using social media to increase your search engine rankings:

• Share your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.
• Stimulate your followers to share your content with their followers.
• Use hashtags relevant to the content to increase the visibility of your content.
• Engage with all your followers by responding to comments and questions.

Social media can also help you gain valuable customer feedback and insights that can be used to enhance the user experience further. Additionally, social media can be used to gather user data that can be used to inform product development and design decisions.

By leveraging social media, businesses can create a more engaging and personalized user experience that can help them rank better in search engine results.

Schema Markup

Though schema is not a direct ranking factor, it helps give proper structure to your page. Furthermore, it helps determine how your web pages will appear on specific featured snippets of the SERP.

Identify the best schemas for your website by reviewing all the ones available. If looking to rank on the Google search engine, know that Google prefers the JSON-LD version.

Be careful with the schemas, and ensure that the page shouldn’t have anything different from the components present on the page. Google prefers cloaking and schema to rank better because it allows them to deliver a more personalized search experience to users.

Cloaking and schema help Google to understand the content of a website more accurately, so it can deliver better search results. By using cloaking, Google can recognize the intent of a search query and deliver the most relevant content for that search query.

Improved Page Speed

As already discussed, page speed is essential in making your website rank at the top of SERP; let us put more light into it. When you have a slow site, a user will immediately bounce back. A slow-loading website can lead to decreased engagement, higher bounce rates, and decreased conversions. On the other hand, high page speed makes your website rank at the top, leading to more traffic.

You can use several free online tools, like page speed insights, GTmetrix, etc., to determine your webpage’s load time. The tools also provide some improvement suggestions, which, when implemented, will help improve the overall page speed.

If the page score is low, it means that the page is taking too long to load and needs to be improved. To boost page speed, optimize your website for faster loading. This includes compressing images and code, using browser caching, and optimizing your code.

You can also reduce the number of requests sent to the server, which can help improve the page speed. Additionally, you can use a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your content faster; here, we’ve shared the list of the best CDNs.

Focus on Local SEO

Focusing on local SEO can help you rank higher in SERPs for location-specific keywords if you’re a local business. Local SEO is the optimization of your website and online presence for local searches made by prospects.

Here are some tips for optimizing your local SEO:

• Claim your Google My Business profile and make sure it’s accurate and up-to-date.
• Ask all your customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business profile and also on other local directories.
• Ensure your website includes your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on every page.
• To target people in specific locations, you need to use location-specific keywords in your meta tags and content.
• Create location-specific pages on your website to target specific areas.

You can also hire a professional SEO service to look after the SEO part of your site.

Maximized CTR

CTR is the acronym for click-through rate, and it helps determine how many people click on your website’s link after seeing it. The CTR of your website has a huge impact on the placement of your website on the SERP.

For instance, if the fourth listing on the SERP gets more clicks than the first listing, the fourth one will be pushed above. User satisfaction is the epitome of making a website rank; hence, CTR is a no-brainer. To ensure high CTR, you need to work on the headline.

The webpage headline is the first thing a user sees on the SERP, so you need to ensure that it is worth clicking. A headline is critical to converting a casual visitor into a paying customer. Take your time to create an engaging title that will appear on the SERP.

Focus on the Creation of Informational Content

When uploading images and videos on your website, make sure that you create detailed and easy-to-understand content. It will help you create a powerful impact on your visitors and also increase their satisfaction. In addition, when you create informational content, users will engage and share it with their peers.

Hence, it is advisable to always focus on creating informational content, be it images or videos, and also focus on the lean factor. Such elements in the content encourage sharing more. If people find something interesting and informative on the internet, they are more likely to share it, and this will help you with increased visibility. You can also take the help of AI writing tools to curate good-quality content.

Here are the top AI writing tools I use for growing my business.

Optimizing Mobile Version of the Pages

Today, around 60 percent of users prefer using their smartphones over desktops to browse the internet. Furthermore, Google also pays more attention to the mobile version, which means it should perform well. This is why paying attention to the mobile version of your website pages is of utmost importance. Ensure that they are all up to the mark and perform as expected.

The elements to make your website mobile friendly include a visually rich experience, fast-loading pages, and videos explaining something about your business. Let us know a few elements in detail so that you can work on them to secure a high rank on the SERP.

• Fast Loading Pages: Fast-loading pages on mobile devices are a critical requirement. They are vital both for user experience and the performance of SERP. For this, you should pick a good web host for your website and also choose a fast website builder. Such elements ensure that your website loads fast on mobile devices.
• Visual Representation: Besides optimizing the load time, you must ensure the website looks good on mobile devices. A website not loading properly is a significant turn-off. If it is not easy to navigate, your user will only spend a little bit of time on it, and you will lose them to your competitors. A professional-looking website is vital to increasing your SERP ranking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Below mentioned are a few commonly asked questions;

Can I Rank My Website Without Backlinking?

Yes, you can rank your website for specific keywords even without backlinking. Though backlinks are one of the most critical factors that contribute to the rank of your website, other elements help in the process.

However, if your niche has tough competition, know you can only hold the position briefly.

Do Broken Backlinks Hurt Seo?

Broken backlinks can hamper the conversion rate of your website. It indirectly affects the rank by impacting the time spent by a user on the site, the bounce rate, and how link juice is passed.

Broken links send signals that the website needs to be updated and is quite old, which is why the SERP rankings get impacted.

What Are The Reasons Behind My Keywords Not Ranking?

Even after all the efforts, your keyword may not rank. The reasons can be that your website has too many spammy links, you are using some over-optimized anchor texts, duplicate or thin content, and many more.

So watch out for penalties and be vigilant; you must ensure everything is in place to rank at the top.

What SEO Technique Should I Avoid?

It would help if you avoided over-prioritizing keywords. Undoubtedly, keywords play a critical role in helping your website rank, but at the same time, you should use them sparingly.

Ensure to maintain a decent keyword density on your webpage content so that there are no traces of keyword stuffing. Excess use of keywords will harm your SEO strategy rather than do good.

Conclusion

Ranking keywords without backlinks may seem challenging, but it is possible with the right approach. By following the tips we discussed above, you can achieve a high rank on the SERP. All it takes is to create informative and high-quality content to be on the top of the search results. External links are undoubtedly highly beneficial and add brownie points to all your effort.

However, without external links, your efforts will not go in vain, and the search engine will reward you. You must offer your visitors the information they seek and prioritize user experience.

If your visitors are unhappy and not satisfied with your website and its content, they will not engage, and you will lose rank.