7 Ways to Increase Your Rankings without Leveraging Content Marketing

Hands down, my favorite approach to boosting search traffic is to leverage content marketing. Why? Because the data shows that it works!

I know, however, that not every business can leverage it. Whether it’s because you can’t write high quality content or you don’t have a blog set up or your legal team won’t approve the content, you might be one of those businesses that is not able to implement this strategy. In truth, it’s just not possible for everyone to leverage this particular marketing tactic.

So, if that’s your case, don’t worry. Content marketing isn’t the only tactic you can use to increase your rankings and search traffic. Here are 7 other strategies you can follow:

Did you know that there are 100 ideal links you should obtain if you want to rank for a specific keyword? Google actually shows you the URLs of these top 100 links.

How do you find them? All you have to do is google the keyword you are trying to rank for. For example, let’s say you are trying to rank for “Las Vegas Hotels.”

The first 100 web pages are what Google considers to be the most relevant for the term “Las Vegas Hotels.” If you happened to get a link from one of these web pages, you’d notice that your rankings skyrocketed.

Granted, a lot of those web pages will be competing sites, but you’ll find that many of them are not, once you start going to page 4, 5 or even 6 in the search results.

Once you’ve made a list of all of the web pages you want to gain a link from, you’ll want to send them an email that goes something like this:

Subject: don’t you hate it when people pitch you their websites, [insert their first name]?

Well, I too have a pitch for you, but before you hit the spam button and move onto the next email, just give me 37 seconds or else you’ll regret this for the rest of your life!

So, here it goes:

I noticed that you linked to [insert competitor #1] and [insert competitor #2] on this page: [insert the URL of the page that ranks for the term you are going after]. I have this website [insert your website URL], and I wanted to see if you wanted to include it. Here are 2 reasons why your readers would love it:

Insert benefit #1Insert benefit #2

I could keep going with the reasons why you should include us, but I won’t bore you with the details. If you’re interested, let me know. And if you have questions, we can set up a time to chat when you’re free.

Cheers,
[insert your name]

You won’t get every site you email to link back to you, but you can expect a 10% link ratio. In other words, for every 100 emails you send out, 10 of those sites will link back. And after you’ve gone through the first 100 results, you should go through the top 1,000 results.

Using this tactic, I’ve been able to rank on page one for terms like “forex trading” and even “online poker.”

Google takes load time into account when ranking websites. Why? Because Google found that when it ranks slow sites, it creates a poor user experience, and people tend to use Google less.

For this reason, sites with fast load times tend to get more search traffic.

How can you improve your load time? The simplest way is to put in your URL here. You’ll get a report that details what changes you need to make in order to increase your load time.

Once you implement the changes, give it a few weeks, and you should see a nice lift in your crawl rate, indexed pages, and overall search traffic.

A simple way to increase your rankings is to cross-link your pages, right? But chances are you are doing it wrong. Most people cross-link their pages like this:

As you can see from the image above, the page at the tops links to a handful of other pages, and then those pages link to more pages. Typically, that page at the top is your homepage, and the pages below are internal pages.

There are a few things wrong with this model:

The internal pages aren’t linking to each other.The links are within navigation bars instead of within content.Link juice isn’t flowing evenly throughout the whole site.

You can solve this by cross-linking your pages using a model that looks like this:

As you can see:

Many of the pages are linked to each other, which helps with indexing.You can link the pages together by using in-content links.You are focusing your link efforts to build authority to internal pages, which makes it possible to rank for more long tail terms.

Whether you believe social media affects search rankings or not, it is still a good source of traffic. And the more traffic you get, the higher the chance that someone will link back to your site, which will help increase your rankings.

So, how do you get the most out of your social profiles? Here are some quick tips for each major social network:

If you are going to post on Facebook, consider posting on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays as those are the peak days.The most shareable words in a status update are: Facebook, why, most, world, how, health, bill, big, says, and best. So, consider using those words within your updates.35% of Facebook users said they would “like” a page if there was a contest to participate in. So, start running them.

When I started out in the SEO world, I would manually build links, and it would take me months, if not years, to see good increases in rankings because my sites lacked links from authority sites.

But one day, I launched a site in the podcast space, and it got covered by sites like TechCrunch. Within weeks of the coverage, the site started to rank on page 1 for competitive terms in the podcast space.

It was then that I realized the power of press. From then on, I always got press for each of my companies, which helped them rank higher and faster.

So, how do you get press? A simple way is to pay a PR agency like PR Serve, who has a performance-based pay model, allowing you to pay it only when it gets you press.

A cheaper way to get press is to build relationships with reporters. By continually helping them out with their stories and giving them feedback, you will increase your chances of them eventually being interested in covering your company.

Or, if you want to go for the cold approach, which is harder but still works, you can always follow this PR email pitch template.

I’ve found that the easiest way to generate links is through interviews. Every time someone interviews you, chances are they will link to your website. The links will be fairly relevant too as the linking web page will typically talk about your story or what your company does.

I know what you are thinking though…it’s easy for me to get interviewed because I have a well-established brand. And although you are right, it wasn’t easy when I first started out.

During the early days of my entrepreneurial career, I would continually email two to four bloggers a day who interviewed other people in my space to ask them if they wanted to interview me.

Most of them ignored my email or said no, but then I quickly learned that if I emailed them with feedback on their other interviews, they were more likely to agree to interview me.

For example, if Mixergy did an interview with your competitor, you could email them with your feedback on the interview. You could tell them that the interview was great but also highlight the points with which you disagreed. You would then end the email by asking if they want you to come on the show for an interview.

By using this tactic, you should be able to get one to two interviews a week.

Google tracks the number of people clicking through to your website from search listings. It also estimates whether the click-through percentage is high or low compared to your rank. The reason it does this is to determine how relevant your website is to that specific search query.

In addition to tracking the click-through rate, it also looks at whether people are hitting the back button a lot. If people land on your site from Google and then hit the back button, it means they didn’t find what they were looking for. And if this happens a lot, it’s a good indicator your website isn’t relevant to that specific search query.

So, how do you maximize your click-through rate while decreasing the number of people clicking the back button?

To increase your click-through rate, you just have to follow the steps in this blog post. And to decrease the number of people clicking the back button, first survey your visitors through Qualaroo.

By asking your visitors “What else would you like to see on this page?”, you can learn what you are missing and then add it. This will help you decrease your bounce rate so that Google feels your website is more relevant.

Although content marketing is my favorite way to increase any search engine traffic, it isn’t the only way. From link building to optimizing your load time, there are many things you can do to boost your rankings.

This is important for you to realize because you won’t be able to leverage every strategy. You’ll end up running into roadblocks, and some strategies may not work well for your industry. So, instead of trying to do everything, focus on what’s working.

In what other ways, besides content marking, can you increase your rankings?

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