6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings Without Investing in Content Creation and Marketing

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I thought I'd address something that's going on in the broader SEO and inbound marketing communities, which is this idea that the only thing that SEOs do anymore is create content and do content marketing. So we build some content and then we go market and we outreach and we try and get people to link to it.

That is truly minimizing the job requirements, which are vast, incredibly vast and much bigger than this idea. So I thought I'd take a little stab and drop a pebble in the ocean of things that SEOs are responsible for by tackling these six ways, six out of probably 600 ways that you can earn higher rankings without investing in content creation or content marketing.

So, first off, number one, you can make your snippets better and your pages serve that intent. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

So basically, in the search results page, this is a very small mockup of that, but I might do a search and I'll see a bunch of titles and then the URL below it and the meta description below that. I might even see an author profile. I might see video snippets. If you've got some rich snippet mark-up, I'll see those in here, and this leads off to your page. By improving both the snippet here, so that could mean adding rel="author",
that could mean adding a video, that could mean adding some rich mark-up, that could mean changing the title, tweaking the title to be a little bit more compelling to click on, changing the description, even actually, surprisingly, changing the URL. Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do contribute to whether people choose to click on them.

Then it's not just about making this compelling, but also making whatever is on that page, whatever is on that snippet match what's on the page that users get to, because as we know, pogo sticking, people jumping off of this page hurts you in two big ways. One, it hurts you because the engines directly look at pogo sticking behavior and go, "Oh, people click on this and then they go back and they don't like it. I'm out of here. I don't want to rank this page." Two, you don't have an opportunity to convert those people into buyers or into potential sharers or linkers to your content.

All right, so number one, completely outside of content creation can seriously move your rankings up.

Number two, improving the crawl friendliness and the pages-of-value ratio on your website.

So I was talking to a very smart SEO over email the other day, and he said something that I loved. He said, "I have never seen and never worked with a large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn't mean significant increases in organic search traffic." I thought that was very wise and well said. That's certainly been the case that I have seen as well, but I liked his phrasing of it in particular. So this idea that, well okay, I've got a good page here, a good page represented by smiley face dude, and smiley face dude is linking out to, well, three not so great pages, pages that Google doesn't particularly want to index. They don't provide a ton of value to them or their searchers or to users in general. It's often the case that websites just have these.

Go and look at your website. I bet you'll click around, and you'll be like, "Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help anybody." Well, if you improve the ratio of those pages, get rid of or toss out or even just remake some of those pages, you can significantly improve your crawl bandwidth and the happiness that Google sees with your site. I'm not just talking about sort of penalties, like Panda, that might affect people who have very large quantities of low quality stuff.

But, in addition to this, in addition to the ratio, you can also look at your navigation. If you've got something like this, so this is a pretty clean navigation system. This one page is linking out to six or seven other pages. That's fine. But what about when I get to this page and he's linking to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to another page that's actually a duplicate of that first page I was talking about? Improving this kind of stuff, making these models of navigation clean, making your site more indexable, making your navigation get you into deep pages in fewer clicks, and making all of the pages accessible rather than having to go down these wormholes can really improve your site's traffic as well.

Number three, probably the simplest one on the list. You make your pages faster, the Internet will reward you. Some of this is direct. Some of this is Google essentially saying, "Yes, page speed is a very small portion of our ranking algorithm. We do take it into consideration." But a lot of it is not Google directly. A lot of it is users being much happier and doing the same thing we talked about up here, which is reducing your bounce rate, reducing that pogo-sticking activity, and meaning that you have an opportunity to convert a lot more of those people into buyers, sharers, appreciators of your brand.

Number four, I actually really like this one. This is one of my favorite ways to do link building in general, link earning in general, and that is to leverage your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc. I've seen a couple people that I really admire in the field who've basically taken this tactic. They say, "Hey, whenever someone tells us we really love you, we think your service is amazing", they say,
"Thank you so much. That means the world to us, and it would mean even more if you would tell someone about it," your friends, your social network, point to us on your site somewhere.

We don't care if it's a followed link, a no followed link, we're not asking for links. What we're asking for is if you think you've got something great by working with us, by buying our product, by using our service, by interacting with us, we helped you in some way, please share it. That's all I'm asking. I saw it in one woman's email signature. She just said, "If I have ever been helpful to you, it would be awesome if you could share our website."

I don't know what the conversion rate is like for her, but it doesn't even matter if it's 0.001%. That is a bunch more links and shares and help. What a wonderful way to earn the kinds of signals that will help you rank better.

By the way, for a little bit more on this topic and a specific tactic here, check out a blog post I wrote a little while ago called "The Help Me Help You Dinner." It's a little Jerry McGuire I know, but sorry.

Number five, go try this process for me. Identify the pages on your site that make people happy but that aren't earning organic search traffic. Here's what I mean. They've got high engagement, a low bounce rate, a good number of visits, a high browse rate, meaning people are clicking and visiting other pages after them, but they don't get organic search traffic.

This actually happens quite a bit, that you see pages like this. Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes the culprit here is that the keyword targeting and the keyword optimization just isn't there. Essentially, these are pages that are created not by SEO folks or by SEOs who just kind of forgot or were targeting keywords that have long since stopped being searched for. Go improve those. Go find the keywords that those pages should be ranking for and then update the page, the titles, the content a little bit. You usually shouldn't have to tweak much of the content at all on the page in order to get the targeting right and dialed in just a little bit. Sometimes you might even change the URL, and then you can do a URL rewrite or a 301. That's fine too.

If you're doing a more significant update process, go ahead and relaunch and reshare it as well, especially if a lot of people have forgotten about it or search engines have forgotten about it. Just that update, just that freshness signal can help you get a little bit more in your rankings.

Last thing I'll mention. I don't know where the ideas come from that classic link building is entirely dead. It's not, and one of the things that is truly still alive and still very powerful is what I call classic competitive style link building. I recognize that kind of low-quality guest posting and directory link building and a lot of these other more manual, scalable features have really gone away, but classic competitive link building is still just as valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can earn from those places too.

So go and use your favorite link building tool. We like Open Site Explorer or Fresh Web Explorer if you're looking at sort of things that have been just recently published. We do have a tool as well called Link Intersect that helps you find pages that two or more of your competitors are linked to by but you have not been, those kinds of things. I think Majestic SEO also has a feature like that, so you can check them out.

Then you create this sort of prioritized list for outreach and starting to try to contact some of these people. What I recommend, because a lot of people get disheartened if they go to the first guy and there's just a bunch of hoops that they have to jump through and it's very hard to find any contact information and then it's very hard to get a response and when you do get a response, it's negative, and you can just get beaten down.

What I like to do, therefore, especially because getting links from a diverse group of places is often more valuable than just getting one or two here or there, is to go ahead and prioritize the list by how easy you think it will be. If there's a journalist who's already following you on Twitter and they've written about some of your competitors and you figure they're going to keep writing about this topic, why wouldn't they write about you?
Great! Do a little bit of outreach. Ask them what you can do to be a feature in the next story. It's probably a relatively simple one. If there's a page that's listing resources of the kind that you already have, great, go reach out to them. That's probably a very simple one.

This sort of stuff and hundreds more like it are all in the realm of what modern SEOs still have to be doing in addition to the newer obligations that we have around content creation and content marketing, all of this social media work and those kinds of things. So I try not to forget any of this, but I know that we have a lot of other obligations as well.

I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next time. Take care.