Article by: Lyfe Marketing
How To Do SEO For A Small Site With No Backlinks? It’s Possible!
Today’s post is all about how to do SEO for a small site with no backlinks.
We all know that backlinks are a major driver for SEO rankings, which are very hard to earn these days.
This is especially true when there are over 1.8 billion websites on the web.
Because of this, it’s easy to think that it’s impossible for you to earn #1 rankings on Google.
But that’s nonsense.
You have to start somewhere and continuously build your SEO up over time.
So if you’re ready to start building, read on because we’re going to show you a few tricks that can help you do SEO when you’re starting from nothing.
We’re about to give you the 5 steps to improve your SEO and website traffic.
But before that, let’s talk about some backlinks.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website.
Google and other search engines consider backlinks to be a “vote of confidence” for a specific page.
This is why pages that have a high number of backlinks also tend to have a high search engine rank.
A backlink tells search engines that the page they are linking to provides valuable content that can be useful for those performing searches.
This is why they play such a big role in determining your SEO rank.
With that said, here is how you can increase your backlinks to improve SEO.
5 Steps On How To Do SEO For A Small Site With No Backlinks
- Create Keyword Dense Content On Popular Topics
- Invest Into Promoting Your Content
- Fix Your Technical SEO Issues And Optimize Web Pages
- Engage With Your Audience
- Focus On Local SEO If You Can
1. Create Keyword Dense Content On Popular Topics
You can use a tool like SEMrush to enter all of your competitors’ domains.
On SEMrush, you can use their traffic analytics feature to enter your competitor’s domain and see their top pages.
You’ll also be able to see which keywords your competition is ranking for.
With this information, you can make a list of these keywords and plan to create content around them.
However, your content needs to be better than your competitors if you want a chance of beating them in search.
So when creating your content, try to include everything the user needs on that given topic.
You don’t want them to search anywhere else on the web for the answers to their questions.
By having longer and more engaging content, you will increase your audience’s time on your site.
It will also lower your bounce rate, which means people are moving on to other pages on your website.
Both of these metrics are very important factors when it comes to determining your SEO rank.
2. Invest Into Promoting Your Content
The next step is content promotion.
You spent so much time making it the best piece of content available, now it’s time for the world to see it.
A hack that some people do to help with this is to take a look at SEMrush to see who is linking back to your competitor’s content.
Since your content is better, you can simply reach out to sites linking to them.
And, let them know that you have more updated content that includes things that theirs did not.
Provide them with a link to check it out and let them know that if they like it, they should share it.
As you begin to send out more and more of these emails for each piece of content you are producing…
…over time, you will begin to see more and more people linking to your article.
You can also repeat this process with Twitter.
All you have to do is search your competitor’s URLs on Twitter and it will show you all of the people that tweeted out your competitor’s article.
Send those people a link to your article and kindly ask them to share it.
This means that in addition to backlinks, you will now be getting social shares which can ultimately lead to more backlinks.
Lastly, you can also reach out to everyone you linked out to in your article via email.
You can let them know that you’ve linked out to them, and kindly ask them to share your content.
That is the cherry on top for getting more backlinks and social shares.
3. Fix Your Technical SEO Issues And Optimize Web Pages
Another one of our SEO tips for very small websites is to fix any technical SEO issues and optimize your web pages.
Technical issues like:
- slow site speed,
- broken links,
- duplicate content, and
- poorly optimized pages
…can negatively affect your SEO.
So let’s discuss how you can fix this.
-
Site speed
To optimize your site speed, you can run a speed test on Google.
If you find that your website is not at an optimal loading speed, there are a bunch of different things you can do.
For example, if you have a lot of images on your website, you can compress the file size.
By reducing the size of the file, it increases the speed of your website.
You can also speed up your site by using browser caching.
Each time somebody visits your site, there’s a process that occurs that takes time.
This process includes loading each image, page element, and all of the HTML and coding that goes into your website.
Caching helps alleviate these steps.
Browser caching “remembers” the previously loaded resources so that it doesn’t have to reload them each time the user visits your site.
Using browser caching will result in a huge increase in site speed which should also help decrease your bounce rate.
-
Broken links
Broken links are links to web pages that no longer exist on your website.
Google can detect sites with a lot of broken links, and consequently, decide to lower your rankings.
The good news is that you can detect this with a broken link checker.
There are a ton of free options to choose from that will ask you to enter your domain and they will search your site for any and all broken links and pages.
Once you find the broken links, you can fix them by reinstating the dead page or redirecting the dead page to an appropriate alternative.
-
Page titles and meta descriptions
You’ll want to make sure your titles and descriptions include the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
You can easily do this with the Yoast SEO plugin.
4. Engage With Your Audience
Engaging with your audience is one of the best ways to get more social shares, backlinks, and brand queries?
This means responding to comments and having meaningful conversations with your audience.
Try to respond to as many comments left on your social posts and articles as you can.
This will help build that trust and brand loyalty that will keep people coming back to your site time and time again.
Although you are not directly asking people for something, responding to comments instills a sense of community.
Over time, this can help increase your number of brand queries and overall connection with your audience.
Brand queries are searches for your company, your products, or your services.
This also helps to improve your SEO rank.
As searches for your name increases, Google may coin your website as being more relevant.
That is compared to the others you’re competing with and push you higher in their search engine position ranking.
5. Focus On Local SEO If You Can
The next tip we have for how to do SEO for a very small website is to focus on local SEO.
If you have a local business with a physical brick-and-mortar location, then this is an absolute no-brainer!
It is a lot easier to rank higher locally versus nationally or worldwide.
The best way to start with local SEO is to create your Google My Business listing.
This is the sidebar panel you see when you search for a business on Google.
Google My Business integrates seamlessly with Google Maps.
So, whenever a consumer searches for near them, the results will display the top local listings.
Ranking in one of those top spots is much easier than becoming the top-ranking organic result overall.
To rank here though, you need to have a Google My Business listing.
So sign-up and fill out as much information about your business as you can.
Be sure to include keywords in your description so you can rank for specific categories.
And be sure to ask your customers to leave you 5-star reviews on your page. This will help you beat other local businesses.
In the end, you should have an optimized listing that looks like this.
As well as provide the user with all of the information they’ll be looking for as it relates to your business.
The end product may not look like much but it can do wonders for your SEO.