Ooh boy. As a link enthusiast, it pains me to say this – more often than not, the element holding most sites back from ranking is their on page.
Too many folks think that by smashing a site with links all day they’ll eventually rank. Remember, links are just the “votes” for your site. Sure, Google wants to see that you have lots of other sites endorsing your content, but even more so they want to see that what those sites are endorsing is good and relevant.
The dirty secret is that typically, my link approaches rarely ever change from site to site. I could conduct broken link building for local sites, national sites, international sites – and they would all benefit the same. No site is going to not benefit from such a whitehat link building approach.
It’s the on page where the real nuances lie, and where the needle is often pushed. Sure, you’ll need links to get a needle in the first place, but without proper on page it won’t move much.
By the way, “proper” on page doesn’t mean a checklist downloaded from Moz. It means acting like a freakin’ scientist. Study the SERPs you’re competing in closely – take the top 5 pages ranking and stick each of them into the ahrefs site explorer. Take a look at the position history and see which of these pages has been ranking most consistently for the term you’re competing for. You’ll want to be paying attention to the differences between these pages (specifically whichever have ranked most consistently for the term) and the other pages which aren’t ranking in the top 5. I like to have all 5 sites open in different tabs and to literally write a list of what I’m seeing – which ones mention “best”, which ones mention “review”, which ones include a publish date, which ones allow comments etc. Anything that makes them different. Then once you’ve taken notes for all 5 pages, you’ll start noticing that they all have at least a few things in common – your job is to make sure your page includes the same stuff. So if they all include gifs, you better figure out how to make a gif (and how to pronounce it).
Example time!
A few weeks ago I was on the Niche Pursuits podcast with Spencer Haws. We spoke about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and furniture (we also spoke a bit about link building). I’m a fan of the Niche Pursuits podcast, and a few months ago one of the guys from DollarSprout.com was on there chatting about their strategy for ranking for competitive terms. What struck me about the conversation was that there was very little chat about link building.
Now, obviously I had a poke around their backlink profile and found that they were indeed conducting quite a bit of link building (looked like mostly press placements which, hey, I don’t mind). But interestingly what really seems to have set them apart in these competitive SERPs is how they approach their on page. Observe:
That’s some consistent ranking for a fairly competitive term. There are some authority sites in that SERP and none of them seem to be able to dethrone DollarSprout. So what are they doing so well that their competitors aren’t doing? Here are some nuances I’ve noticed:
- It’s the only page in the top 5 results which mentions the brand name within the meta title. Why might that matter? Well, Google wants to rank trustworthy results, especially for content aimed at teens. A site willing to include their brand name across all meta titles wants to develop a real brand and use that to draw clicks rather than stuffing every keyword possible into the meta title
- They’re the only site in the top 5 results not using a publish date – this SERP probably favours evergreen content rather than content published on a specific date
- They have the least amount of jobs listed of all pages in the top 5 – less is more in this SERP! Perhaps Google knows that teens have low attention spans and want an answer quickly?
I got all that from just looking at the SERP for this term. If you ventured deeper with Ahrefs, you’d pull out a ton more info.
Anyway, my point is – links are not always the answer (cries inside).
