Link building is not the key to ranking high on Google.
We analyzed 42,391 sites over 4 years to figure out what factors matter.
Out of the 42,391 sites, 138 sites performed extremely well.
In which they had a baseline of 10,000 organic visits per month and their organic traffic grew by AT LEAST 50% per year for 4 years.
Here’s what these 138 top-performing sites had in common:
1. Large focus on updating content.
No one likes reading outdated content. So make sure your content is fresh.
2. They have built a brand.
As Eric Schmidt (Google's old CEO) said, "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
Google and even social networks know that brands are less likely to create fake news.
Here is the percentage of their organic traffic that came from brand queries.
3. The leveraged trends.
These sites randomly had spikes in organic traffic.
Some months were notably higher than others and in most cases, it wasn’t due to algorithm updates.
It was more related to news. In which they were riding the waves of trends to gain more search traffic.
You can use these tools to find trends within your vertical:
* Google Trends
* Answer the Public
* Exploding Topics
4. Fast load time.
Here was their load time on average.
5. Big TAM (total addressable market).
The riches are not in the niches.
The bigger the market you are going after the more potential search traffic you can get.
So does all this mean that you shouldn't build links?
We've seen sites with a lot of backlinks rank poorly.
And we've seen sites with a lot of backlinks also rank high.
You need links to rank. But you don't necessarily need more links or a higher domain authority than the competition to beat them.
Make sure you also focus on the above 5 traits if you want to win.
We analyzed 42,391 sites over 4 years to figure out what factors matter.
Out of the 42,391 sites, 138 sites performed extremely well.
In which they had a baseline of 10,000 organic visits per month and their organic traffic grew by AT LEAST 50% per year for 4 years.
Here’s what these 138 top-performing sites had in common:
1. Large focus on updating content.
No one likes reading outdated content. So make sure your content is fresh.
2. They have built a brand.
As Eric Schmidt (Google's old CEO) said, "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
Google and even social networks know that brands are less likely to create fake news.
Here is the percentage of their organic traffic that came from brand queries.
3. The leveraged trends.
These sites randomly had spikes in organic traffic.
Some months were notably higher than others and in most cases, it wasn’t due to algorithm updates.
It was more related to news. In which they were riding the waves of trends to gain more search traffic.
You can use these tools to find trends within your vertical:
* Google Trends
* Answer the Public
* Exploding Topics
4. Fast load time.
Here was their load time on average.
5. Big TAM (total addressable market).
The riches are not in the niches.
The bigger the market you are going after the more potential search traffic you can get.
So does all this mean that you shouldn't build links?
We've seen sites with a lot of backlinks rank poorly.
And we've seen sites with a lot of backlinks also rank high.
You need links to rank. But you don't necessarily need more links or a higher domain authority than the competition to beat them.
Make sure you also focus on the above 5 traits if you want to win.
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