How to rank your blog without backlinks

The number of people connected to the web has grown exponentially over the years, this makes it extremely difficult to rank your high quality, SEO optimized content. You could rank well for a target keyword but it would not allow you to outrank your competitors content.

You need to have mastery of how to dominate the search engines, and to do that you need to understand how google analyses your content.

Links matter for SEO, it a major ranking factor and so does content topical relevance.

Now, having topical relevance or topical authority is the new gold to an increased traffic, its not only dependent on the number of backlinks that you have.

If your content has ever been surpassed in ranking by new and low domain authority sites then you got a gist of what I’m talking about.

It’s no longer the case to state that you can’t rank in SEO without quality backlinks

Stay with me now, I am going to introduce you to the concept and how you can use it to increase traffic without focusing on backlinks

What is Topical authority

Topical authority is a measure of the depth, quality and relevance of the content on a topic or a niche area. It is another strategy Google uses to measure the perceived quality of your website content and contributes to a domain ranking. Topical authority is also referred to as topical relevance.

Topical authority signals to search engines and readers that your website is a one-stop shop for a given topic or area of expertise.

What is Domain authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric initially developed by Moz, it's purpose is to predict how likely a website or blog will appear in SERPs (Search engine results pages) when compared to competitors.
The predictions give out a score ranging from 1 to 100, the higher the score, the greater the likelihood of ranking. A page with more backlinks from high authority websites such as Google, Wikipedia and others who normally have domain rating scores close to 100 increases a sites probability of having a better score.

Domain authority is not a google metric, Why use it?

Moz invented their own proprietary algorithm to get more people to use their SEO tools, but Moz’s algorithm is not from Google, just because Moz gives a site a high domain authority score does not necessarily mean it will rank well in Google searches.

However, because they specialize in SEO and have a lot of clients, they have promoted their tools well, as a result, their metric has gained popularity in ranking webpages. Not only that, but their clients see results.

Google, however, keep improving their algorithms with updates, and the potency of domain authority scores may not be very precise as it used to be now.

During a hangout session with John Mueller, a webmaster trends analyst in February 2021, says the total number of links pointing to a website is irrelevant to Google.

How many links do I need to rank?

One good link from a higher relevant website is much more impactful in boosting your ranking than a million low quality backlinks (John Mueller, stated during the hangout session).

How to implement Topical authority SEO on page

To implement topical authority, you have structure your content in a way that provides value to your audience. a good content providing value should be able to answer the audience search query or search intents. The content can be in a form of text, video, image or a combination. The following are ways to structure your content for blog traffic.

#1. Choose your keyword

A keyword can be a word or phrase that tells what your content revolves around. Wait, It is now more difficult and competitive to choose a keyword, rather than phrases (also known as long tailed keywords) to use in building topical relevance.

Examples of keywords: SEO, Computers, Economy

Phrases or long tailed keywords include: on-page SEO for beginners, Choosing laptop computers for office, How public debt affects your investments.

#2. Research the competition for the keyword(s)

Researching your competition is a way of finding out how the keyword chosen is going to perform amongst other content that is out there. The more the volume of content available for the chosen keyword, the greater the competition and ranking potential for your content.

#3. Build topic clusters incorporating search intents

Building topic clusters involves creating content on the targeted keyword(s), building supporting topics or related topics connected to the keyword, then incorporating them within and across pages or articles .

Always bear in mind to choose keywords that users are searching for, keyword(s) or related keyword(s) that has no search volume will have no benefit.

A way to find related keyword(s) on Google is to enter a keyword in Google's auto suggest search box, related words will appear highlighted in bold, also, Google search engine displays related searches at the bottom of the page.

#4. Optimize meta tags

Meta tags refers to your page title and the meta description. They contain some information about your content and search engines most times use them to analyze your content relevance before displaying them in the search results. The SEO title is your article title, as it appears in the search results.

TITLE TAG
The title should be attention grabbing and contain the target keyword(s)

META TAG
The meta description should be a brief descriptive summary of your content, it can also be a call-to-action (CTA). It should be written from an audience' perspective, not the search engine. It should contain a brief description of what the page content will be about as well as keyword(s).

#5. Adapt description linking and page linking

In description text linking, one can understand the context of the link from its text without having to click the link. For instance, a better descriptive text phrase will show: 'learn about top SEO trends' as opposed to: 'click here'.

#6. Actively promote your content

Content promotion is one of the most important arsenals to use after a page is properly optimized. When content is promoted and shared widely on social media for a set of targeted audiences, they can immediately be hooked and will create engagement. This sends positive signals to search engines about the content.

Content can be promoted organically or by paid means (involves money). Paid means of promoting content is one of the fastest ways to increase traffic, this is because, it is a purposefully intended to make search engines and other platforms display your content to their audience.
Most social media platforms where you can promote your content organically, also have ways for users to use paid ways to promote their content. Some notable platforms, are Quora, Facebook, Twitter and Google ads.

Organic promotion involves the use of non-paid means to promote your content. For most users who have subscriber lists, there is an added advantage because they can leverage on social sharing as well as subscriber notifications.