SEO without Link Building – Is It Possible in 2024? (Ultimate Guide)

SEO without link building – is this a good idea?

No matter what many SEOs say, link building has always been an essential part of SEO, and probably will be unless Google makes a major update to its algorithms.

However, people became so obsessed with their link building campaigns that they were after all kinds of links – whether quality or spammy – believing that the more links they could get, the higher their rankings would be. As a result, many became less focused on other important areas of SEO, such as content, technical and on-page SEO, user experience, and more.

In November, 2022 Google’s John Mueller said:

“To some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It’s like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it?

But my guess is over time, it won’t be such a big factor as sometimes it is today. I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit.”

Here is the full conversion if you want to know more:

Although link building is not where you should invest all of your money and effort, it still has some impact. After all, some dofollow links from high-authority and relevant websites will always help.

But can you level up your SEO without link building? Well, we have seen blogs with 200k traffic a month without any major link building activities.

If you want to know the secret, follow our lead!

Why SEO without Link Building

Why would you try SEO without backlinks at all?

There are certain situations when you may have to resort to this option. For example, if you’re a start-up on a limited budget, you won’t have the luxury to invest in an expensive link building campaign.

Also, if you’re in an industry where getting backlinks is usually difficult e.g. real estate or insurance or low-end local shops, then you may have to keep link building out of your SEO strategy.

Strategies for SEO without Link Building

Link building may be a significant part of SEO but SEO is not all about backlinks. Here are the fool-proof methods to do SEO without link building.

• Research Long-tail, Low-Competition Keywords

Keyword research is the first step towards your SEO goal. If you don’t do it right, you’ll never make it to the top SERPs even if you publish great content regularly.

Long-tail and low-competition keywords always rule the SEO world. Long-tail keywords are not like the generic keywords that people use widely. They’re more specific and unique in the sense that only a user with clear intent will search for them.

This means that when your content aligns with what someone is searching for, you’re more likely to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in your content. This leads to higher engagement and better conversion rates.

What’s more, since long-tail keywords are more specific and less generic, it’s unlikely that many websites will use them. That means they are usually low competitive in nature.

Here is an example:

Short keyword: “laptops”

Long-tail keyword: “best lightweight gaming laptops under $1000”

Here, “laptops” is a broad and competitive keyword with a very high search volume and high competition.

On the other hand, the long-tail keyword “best lightweight gaming laptops under $1000” is much more specific. It targets users who are looking for gaming laptops that are both lightweight and affordable. This makes it easier for your content to reach a more targeted audience.

That’s how long tail, low volume keywords can help people easily find what they want  – the reason you should use more such keywords rather than the generic ones. This way, you can cater to a more specific audience and grab their attention.

Using long-tail keywords doesn’t require complex strategies. It’s all about understanding your audience, their specific needs, and creating content that directly addresses those needs. So, it’s time to leverage the power of long-tail keywords and boost your visibility without diving into the intricacies of link building.

• Create Quality Content

Publishing a blog or an article on your site every day is easy. But that doesn’t automatically make them valuable.

You can’t just post a blog and say you’re adding value to your site. Quality comes from catering to the needs of the audience. Don’t take it so lightly!

People will visit your site only if you can answer their questions or solve their problems. If you fail to do so, you will surely end up with little or no traffic.

A well-researched, well-written, and SEO-friendly content can help get you noticed online easily. The better your content quality, the longer people will stay on your page. Google takes this as a positive sign that you’re providing real value to your audience.

Also, if your content is engaging enough, they might share it with others and you’ll get referral traffic because of that wider reach.

You can create different types of content to make your site more resourceful and engaging, such as blogs, infographics, statistics, latest trends, and many more.

The content should be informative, easy-to-understand, and SEO-friendly. You can try to impress the readers with attractive visuals and interface but those alone won’t help ensure a steady click-through and conversion rate. Only in-depth information and practical solutions can do the trick.

But that’s not all. Your content should be updated as well.

For example, a blog titled “SEO Trends in 2023” will lose its relevance the next year. But if your content is about “Best SEO Practices,” it will likely be relevant for years to come as long as you update it regularly.

• Achieve Topical Authority

Topical authority simply means building a website with a number of in-depth content on a topic to the point that your site becomes the go-to resource for that specific topic.

The goal is to cover the topic from every angle possible so the readers don’t have to look elsewhere for relevant information.

Let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “Healthy Eating 101.”  Only one article with some healthy eating tips won’t be enough to cover everything you want to say about this topic.

So, you have to write a series of blogs to inform your readers on how they should maintain their health by eating nutritious foods. This is how you’ll be able to achieve a topical authority on this particular topic.

So, for this topic, the content structure may look like this-

Pillar Content

Healthy Eating Essentials: Nutrition Basics

Cluster Content

• Weekly Meal Plans for a Healthier Lifestyle
• Essential Vitamins and Minerals
• Nutrition Myths
• Healthy Cooking Dos & Don’ts
• Superfoods for Superhealth
• How to Find Sugar Alternatives?

Note: Pillar content is a comprehensive piece of content that serves as the foundation for a specific topic on a website. It covers a broad aspect of the topic with in-depth information, and is supported by related, more specific content (known as cluster content).

You can create a topic cluster; i.e., interlinked pages on the same topic to gain topical authority for your site.

First develop a pillar content covering the broad aspect of the topic. Then branch off to the sub-topics and provide more detailed information.

Organize your main topic and subtopics properly. For example, in the earlier example, the pillar content contains the basics of nutrition and overview of different eating habits. The supporting content should then break down each habit.

Finally, link the pillar content to and from other related blogs to help the user find relevant information easily. This internal linking practice helps Google understand the pages are topically related.

• Optimize On-page SEO

Another good strategy to rank without backlinks is to ensure you have a healthy on-page SEO approach. It’s so simple that you can take care of it all by yourself!

On-page SEO involves optimizing different sections in your articles like the titles, headings, images and other things like word counts and site speed.

• Your SEO and page titles are the first thing that the users and search engines are going to notice. Make sure they are click-worthy. When adding the title tags for each page, include the primary keywords because they’ll appear as clickable links on SERPs. If your titles are not SEO-friendly or keyword-rich, your chances of ranking will definitely go down.
• Meta-descriptions are another important element that provide a concise summary of the content on the page. You need to make them SEO-optimized as well to draw more organic traffic.
• Needless to say, your content has to be impressive enough to keep the audience engaged. We’ve already mentioned how you can write high-quality content and achieve topical authority to establish your authority.
• Keep your URLs short with the primary keyword integrated and there should be no unnecessary characters.
• Make sure you have used header tags (H2-H4) to structure your content and make it easier for both users and Google to understand the hierarchy and importance of different sections.
• Search engines can’t see images but they can identify them. Optimize your images adding alt texts that contain your keywords.
• Site loading speed is a crucial part of SEO and since over 50% of web traffic now comes from mobile, you can’t take this for granted. Google says that if your pages take more than 3 seconds to load, most of the users will leave your site immediately. You can reduce the size of image files, reduce the unnecessary HTML codes, and remove the redirect pages to minimize your loading speed.

You can check your page load speed here.

Set a word count goal for each content after researching the competitors. Maintain the optimal character requirements for each section, for example, finish your title in 55 characters, don’t exceed 155 for your meta description, and keep your URLs under 100 characters.

• Use Parasite SEO

Parasite SEO is a great way to dominate the SERPs if done right. A mutually beneficial strategy, it’s all about creating quality content for a high-authority website so you can take advantage of its traffic and authority. At the same time, the source website gets high-quality content from you for free.

It’s not that expensive either. Find a few reputable websites in your niche and request them to feature your content on their platforms . If they agree, write highly informative blogs for them.

Remember to keep your content relevant to the audience of the source website. Otherwise, they’ll ignore you altogether.

• Improve UX Signals

UX or user experience signals are becoming a popular metric for SEO evaluation now. UX simply means how the users feel when they visit your site. Google takes into account whether your audience has a good experience with your site or not. In fact, Google has officially published how it tracks UX signals.

These factors determine the UX signals of a website:

• Time on Site

It refers to how much time the visitors have spent on your site. Obviously, the more time they spend, the better your UX signal.

A research by Backlinko revealed that the top SERPs’ time on site is 2.5 minutes on average. The longer you can keep the users engaged, the better your rank will be. Adding visuals is an effective way to increase your session durations.

• Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of people that enter a website and then leave without interacting with any other pages on the site. If your bounce rate is high then this indicates that your site is not user-friendly and the UX design is poor.

To lower the bounce rate, you have to optimize your web design with user-friendly features like intuitive navigation, fast loading speed, consistent branding, whitespace, high-quality images, accessibility, search functionality, CTA buttons, and more..

• Pages per Session

Pages per session is the average number of pages a user views on your site during a single visit. The higher the number, the better the experience for the user.

Quality content and intuitive design are the way to go. Also, create a robust internal linking strategy to keep the audience on your site for longer.

• Return Visit

It shows how many previous users have returned to your site. If you have increased return visits on your site, that’s a huge positive sign; which means your site is providing real value to the audience.

You should create more interactive content with some special offers like flash sales or seasonal discounts to establish a loyal customer base.

• Focus on the Core Web Vitals

Google analyzes Core Web Vitals as a metric to rank your website. Focus on these three factors that Google takes into account:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the largest element that you have on your page to load, for example, the largest image or multimedia file.
• First Input Delay (FID) measures the delay or time it takes for your page to respond after a user has tapped a button. In other words, it checks how interactive your site is.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) sees how much your content has shifted away from its original position while loading the page.

Improving your UX design and CSS and JavaScript code, you can optimize your core web vitals.

• Create an Effective Internal Link-Building Strategy

Internal link building is often overlooked as an SEO strategy. But it’s still one of the most effective SEO approaches. It’s creating hyperlinks within your own website that connect one relevant page to another.

When you interlink the different relevant pages, it makes the user experience smoother as people can easily find more information on a specific topic. This also means they’re going to spend a longer time on your site.

Internal links can also help rank your site. How?

Well, it’s called Link Juice. With different pages linked together, it helps pass page authority and allows Google to crawl and index your website. The more people click on your internal links, the higher the related pages move up in SERP.

• Use descriptive anchor texts to give people a clear idea of what they can expect after clicking the links. Avoid generic terms like “click here.” Also, don’t worry about using keyword-heavy anchor texts because according to Google, there’s no internal linking over-optimization penalty.
• Always add Dofollow tags when building your internal links. The link juice won’t pass without the tag, and as a result, search crawlers will ignore the link altogether.
• You should link back to the relatively newer posts. This will not only give the users more relevant information but will help Google index the new updates.
• Fix or replace your broken internal links. If links like these redirect your users to a dead-end, it may affect your SEO and user-engagement.

• Go for Organic Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Organic CTR is the percentage of users who click on a particular organic (non-paid) search result when it’s displayed in response to a search query.. The more people click on your listing, the more traffic you have.

Google confirmed that it considers CTR as a ranking factor because it

If you want to increase your CTR organically, you have to do a couple of things-

• Create SEO-friendly and keyword-rich titles and meta descriptions. Keep them brief but informative enough for users to understand what your page is all about. You can add catchy words and phrases but always avoid clickbait titles.
• Analyze your user intent that can be divided by informational intent and transactional intent. If your audience is looking for information e.g. “SEO Best Practices in 2023,” you should optimize your title and meta-description for informational intent. However, if they’re searching for “SEO Services in Boston,” they’re most likely interested in an SEO service. So, your focus should be on transactional intent.
• If your content is research-based and informative, you can try to win “rich snippets” in the SERPs. For that, you have to add structured data to your content so Google understands the type of content you create and their purpose. Use Schema Markup to generate the snippets as a special search result.

• Earn Non-linked Mentions & Citations

If you’re a startup, you may not have enough resources to invest in expensive link building campaigns. In that case, citation is a good way to get noticed. Google actually counts citations as a ranking factor.

All you need to do is conduct in-depth research on a topic, which could be a case study for instance. Make sure the information is up to date and accurate. This will serve as a reliable reference to all those interested in this topic and you will gain authority as a researcher in your niche.

The best part is that you don’t need to have an academic background for this. Just make sure all the information is taken from trusted sources.

You can also leverage social media. This is where your business grows and gets popularized. So, find out the keywords people search with to find businesses like yours in social media search engines. Optimize your social media presence accordingly and get mentioned by your loyal customers.

• Submit Press Releases

This is an underrated method of SEO without backlinks.

Just prepare a press release of your product and submit it to the local news outlets.

If your press release stands out, other news websites may pick it up and publish it. In this way, you’ll get a massive exposure.

For your convenience, we’ve listed some of the news websites and directories for SEO purposes:

• Business Wire
• Marketwired
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb

• Share Customer Reviews

Adding customer reviews on your portfolio is one of the most powerful tools in sales and SEO, especially if you’re running a local business competing against the giants of your industry.

Google looks at the positive reactions to your business and counts them as a vote of confidence. The specific things that it considers are –

1. a) The sentiment behind the review (positive or negative)
2. b) The number of stars your customers rated your business with
3. c) Any target keyword used in the reviewers’ comments

So, convince your loyal customers to put in a positive review of your website and see the result for yourself!

• Be Socially Active

At the end of the day, the entire success of your SEO efforts depends on how many people you can reach and how well you can communicate with your audience. If you can efficiently share your brand story with the world, it’s likely that you will have a large and loyal following.

Your branding has to be unique and you should always remind that to everyone through your content, presentation, and design. Set yourself apart from your competitors by being empathetic to your audience.

Always focus on user intent. If your audience is mostly young people, be youthful and glamorous in your approach. If you’re targeting an elderly population, stay compassionate with them. If the customers are looking for information, provide highly informative content. Also, if they’re only looking to sell a product, make it worth the purchase.

Be active on social media and always engage with your audience. This audience will then help widen your reach by commenting, reviewing, and sharing your content. This is how social media can ensure your domain authority without any need for external backlinks.

Some More Tips on SEO without Link Building

Apart from the methods above, you can apply some general tricks to keep boosting your SEO, for example:

• Share content across different platforms to grab attention.Distribute fresh content in Reddit, YouTube, newsletters or any other media that your audience commonly uses.
• You can generate research reports to analyze your website performances and take steps to modify your approaches.
• If you find that some of your content is underperforming, that’s probably because the information is outdated. Look for the issues, review and finally, update the content accordingly.

Conclusion

You can always invest in a great link-building campaign at some point of your career as a businessman. But if you’re a start-up or lacking the budget at the moment for some reason, you can still improve your SEO by following some simple strategies.

Just create some killer content and establish a topical authority in your niche. Optimize your content with low volume keywords. Focus on your on-page SEO or use a Parasite SEO technique. Get your UX right and incorporate content marketing and social media marketing practices.

All these methods we’ve listed are enough to help you rank on search engine results without obtaining any backlinks.

So, to finally answer your question one more time- is SEO without Link Building possible after all? Yes, it is.

FAQs

Q. How can I optimize for local SEO without backlinks?

Ans. For local SEO without getting backlinks, you should register in the local directories and Google My Business platform, manage NAP citations, get customer reviews and keep creating content relevant to your local culture.

Q. Are citations as important as backlinks for local SEO?

Ans. Citations are absolutely essential for local SEO. Getting citations can build up reliability in your business from your local customers. Depending on your niche, it can be just as effective as getting backlinks.

Q. What tools can help with citation management for my SEO without backlinks?

Ans. For local SEO without link building, you can use tools like MozLocal, Whitesparks and BrightLocal to build and eventually manage your citations.

Q. How do I improve my website’s authority without backlinks?

Ans. The foremost thing to do is publish informative content regularly and establish your brand as an expert in the corresponding field. You’ll get yourself noticed this way and pull in more organic traffic. Earn mentions and citations. With time, your site will be considered a reputable and authoritative entity in your niche.

Q. Can I rank well in competitive niches without building backlinks?

Ans. It’s going to be difficult to rank in highly competitive niches without any link-building campaign at all. But it’s still possible. In that case, you have to produce extremely exceptional content on a regular basis and get mentioned and cited by other authoritative websites.

Q. Is it better to focus on content or backlinks for SEO?

Ans. Both the content and backlinks are equally important for SEO practices but if you can’t afford backlinks at the moment, it’s imperative that you should enrich your content and engage with your website visitors.

mothasim

SEO & Growth Manager

A distinguished SEO and Business Development Consultant with a proven track record of helping businesses achieve outstanding results in the digital landscape. Throughout his career, Mothasim has worked with a diverse range of businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

His strategies are characterized by his meticulous attention to detail, data-driven decision-making, and a deep understanding of search engine algorithms. In his personal life, Mothasim enjoys hiking, photography, and volunteering in his community. He believes in giving back and is actively involved in mentoring aspiring SEO professionals. LinkedIn .