Any good SEO will tell you that seeing keyword ranking results from SEO usually takes time. SEO is a process. It’s not constant quick-win after quick-win and it requires significant buy-in, understanding and time investment to be done correctly.
That is the scenario I recently had with a client. We went through a process of implementing incremental improvements to various pages targeting various keywords – pausing along the way after each implemented recommendation to observe and assess the ranking changes that occurred to validate the work and attempt to put an ROI on an individual SEO deliverable.
Some SEOs might not like that approach (and I don’t usually, given the number of external factors that can impact performance), however it was an agreement between myself and the client that this is the approach we’ll take, purely out of interest to try and understand direct results as best we could.
The Results
I’m going to start this case study a bit backwards, but showing the results of the work first, before delving into the individual pieces of work that was implemented in order to get there.
Below is a ranking graph from Accuranker for one of the keywords that I was working on.
There are annotations for the different types of work implemented, along with a line for the Page 1 threshold and some red warning arrows for when Google had their crazy few months with public update after public update.
As you can see from the above, the timeframe for this work is just over 12 months and the keyword in question moved from mid-70s and 60s, all the way up through the pages to rank 1st over the last week.
Along the way there were ups, there were downs, there were anomalies, there were false hope and there were some heart-in-mouth “do I really know SEO, am I just a pretender?” moments.
But we got there.
The above is one example for one keyword, however the same improvements across the same timeframe were made on various other pages, with similar results.
In the table I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible and show that this isn’t just similar variations of the same keyword for the same page (hence leaving the last word in the URL un-redacted and lengths of the redactions on the keywords being different).
The Work
So they are the results, but let’s dig into how we got there.
URL & Structural Changes
First we started by essentially creating a new page for these keywords to be targeted on. There were already pages with content that existed, but they were a little bit isolated in the site’s structure and the URLs weren’t as optimised as they could be.
So we did two things:
- Ensure the new URLs were within a subfolder that the pages and their content was relevant to. This helps aggregate the page’s and section’s authority and also helps Google understand relevancy of connected pages and subfolders.
- Break out the keywords in the URLs by including hyphens. As an example, that meant /notaurllikethis, /but-a-url-like-this. This helps with the readability of the URL for users and robots to understand what keywords are in the URL, helping determine what the page is relevant for.
As a matter of hygiene we then 301 redirected the old pages to the new pages (there were no backlinks to any of them, but this can also help maintain any existing performance in search engines) and then submitted the new pages for crawling and indexing in Google Search Console.
Everything else about the pages remained the same at this point; content, title tag, position in the navigation etc.
The result of this action was unremarkable. There’s always a time consideration when launching a new page but it was good to see that on average the pages saw some minor increases for keywords.
From the example above there was one keyword that went from mid-70s to mid-60s, and even flirted in the 50s at one point.
Page Title Tag Change
The next step we took was some more hygiene-style optimisations, specifically relating to the title tags.
The tags weren’t bad, the keywords were included already and they were formatted in line with best practice. However there could be some improvements made to ensure primary keywords were utilised at the beginning of the title whilst also allowing for either a brand USP or CTA-style message in some cases.
Within a couple of days there was a performance increase for most keywords. From the example above you can see that there was a little bit of a spike that resulted in that keyword sitting in the mid-40s for a period, before dropping down again. The feeling of false hope was frustrating!
However, I’ve definitely seen this type of behaviour from Google before when ranking for pages when optimisations like this have been made. Often rankings may be boosted to understand how Google users react to that new page, and then rankings may increase, decrease or stay the same based on user-behaviour with that page.
What this said to me is that there was an increase for another keyword (for the same page) into a more prominent ranking position which potentially had a knock-on effect with this keyword.
Content Intent Analysis
After a week or so of the pages settling down, the next step for us was to do some analysis into the content itself, to see if there was an opportunity to improve the overall content quality of the pages.
The analysis and research took a few weeks to pull together because it involved using Hotjar to look at scrollmaps and click heatmaps, as well as running a survey with some site visitors.
This qualitative and quantitative research led us down the path to additional keyword research to help us understand anything additional that visitors to the pages could want to see, learn or engage with on top of what was already there.
We unearthed some lower-volume FAQ-type queries that could be associated with the main topics we weren’t already covering.
These queries and adjacent topics didn’t have enough volume to warrant their own page and they could help enhance the information and overall experience provided on the main page. It gave site visitors who were coming to these pages with informational intent, edge-case scenarios and generally higher in the funnel learn more about a complex topic.
We also realised that, during our keyword research, we had some of the content and answers to queries we were discovering, but they were hidden in PDF content. Being able to lift this content out of the PDFs and implement on-site kept the workload lower. (Check out my PDFs and SEO article for more info on how to do this).
Implementation took a while too, for a few reasons:
- Content development team had to fit our recommendations into their schedule
- Legal and Compliance reviews take a while
- Having to wait for the release sprint to put all changes live
In the meantime (without any other optimisations) the keywords started to see a slow but steady trend in a positive direction. This gave us reassurance that we were on the right track with the fairly minor work we’d done to that point.
Once the recommendations went live and the pages were pinged for re-crawling, it took around 24-48 hours for some serious improvements to be noted across the keywords for these pages.
As you can see from the graphic, the keywords jumped from mid-40s and mid-50s to, on average, the top of page 2.
We were of course very happy with the outcome here and we waited to see how performance would settle.
It was, again, frustrating to see performance then start to drop slightly over the next few weeks, moving down page 2 and even in some cases back to page 3.
Internal Linking
We hoped that implementing some quick wins in the form of internal linking would stem the flow of the volatility in rankings, or drops in some cases.
Thankfully internal linking does not have to go through the same checks or wait for a site release (it can be done in the CMS) so it was a quick win in terms of ability to implement and (hopefully) performance outcome.
I have always found that contextually-relevant internal links from related or semi-related pages within a user-journey work best for a performance improvement than linking between any and all pages on a site.
So the first step we took was to identify which pages we thought were the best candidates for adding internal links from, to these other pages. A ScreamingFrog crawl helped us quickly get a list of all of the pages on the site and quickly filter by other pages within the same subfolder, and pages with related topics in the H1 or URL to create our list of pages to add internal links to.
There were a few different methods used for adding internal links, because I wanted them to be as natural and helpful as possible:
- Add a link within content that already exists, or re-write a sentence(s) paragraph that helps us be able to include a keyword-rich anchor text for the internal link without jeopardising the context and purpose of the original content.
- Create a new paragraph or section on a page that is about a related topic, and where it makes sense to link to the updated pages, but there is currently no content directly related to them.
- If the updated pages we are linking to are article pages, then apply a module on an information or product page that contained links to articles to help the site user find out more information on adjacent topics than the one they’re reading.
We wanted to make sure that, where possible, relevant and without compromising the flow of content, that the anchor text included the target keyword(s) of the pages we were linking to.
The end product of this work, after a little bit of volatility, was stabilised rankings at the bottom of page 1 and top of page 2 that seemed to fluctuate between the pages.
Having started out in the mid-70s for the majority of these keywords, it was definitely a welcome sight to see some of these keywords finally be included on the first page, even if it took 6 to 7 months for all of this work to result in this performance outcome.
But we weren’t done yet – we wanted to go even further and see how far we could push these keywords up the first page to get visibility for queries that thousands of people in Australia are searching for every month.
Core Web Vitals
After implementing the internal links, we started with a Core Web Vitals audit. At the time of doing the audit, we were still expecting the Google Experience Update to launch earlier in the year, before it was delayed to a slow rollout between June and August.
For more detail on what the Experience Update is, you can read my blog on Core Web Vitals.
The pages, on average, were seeing Page Speed Insights scores of around 30-40 before doing any work on them. As mentioned previously, the development implementation timelines for this type of work can be relatively lengthy, so some of the recommendations and optimisations that were delivered in the audit are still planned for release.
However, we did manage to get some quick optimisations implemented by working with the developers to help their workload by managing their expectations that we were working on a page-by-page basis.
I’ve found previously that delivering a large-scale audit with site-wide recommendations and fixes scares the developers into inaction because it just looks like too much work. Chunking this out and working through a prioritised list can help get work implemented and gives you proof of results.
Some of the actions the developers helped us with in the first instance:
- Compressing JS
- Removing Duplicate Scripts (when they were present in GTM and hardcoded)
- Changing GTM Triggers from Page View to DOM Ready or Window Loaded
- Lazy Loading images
- Preloading Fonts
- Updating images on those specific pages (Compression, reduction in pixel size, updating format)
This helped us improve about 15-20 points on average across the pages.
Whilst we didn’t see anything particularly outstanding in terms of ranking results, the idea of doing this now was twofold.
First we wanted to see if there would be any improvements at all immediately after doing some quick wins. This was before the Page Experience Update launched, so the likelihood was quite small, but it was worth investigating.
We knew that the Page Experience Update was coming, so we decided it was better to get something done before it was released. Unfortunately the release was delayed so we didn’t get to see any improvements until August when this may have been a factor into our ranking jumps.
Performance stayed pretty much the same with daily fluctuations on and off page 1.
Pause for Breath – Google At Work
Enter SEO-crazy times.
Throughout May, June and July Google went wild with a bunch of back-to-back core algorithm updates, something which I’ve never seen so close together in my time working as an SEO.
- An unconfirmed core update that was supposed to be huge around mid-May
- A confirmed Core Update in early June, rolling out through to 12th June
- Page Experience Update starting in mid-June and rolling through to the end of August
- A two-part spam update on June 23rd and 28th
- Another confirmed Core Update in early July, rolling out until 12th July
- A link spam update rolling out from July 26th for about two weeks
There was a lot of fluctuation throughout this period for our rankings, and with the keywords of interest in particular, they saw some relatively negative fluctuations throughout the course of a few weeks from June to July (annotated in red on the ranking performance graph).
Through this period we didn’t make many updates to the site at all. We wanted to see where the dust was going to settle with the first core update, before learning the second was going to roll out, and then further relevant updates were also coming.
So we thought it wise to play the waiting game and ultimately see if all of the work we’d done so far was to pay off.
As you can see from the end of that volatile period where Google was throwing around update after update, the results were quite pleasing. After dropping down a few pages for a couple of days, and then bouncing up, the rankings started to stabilise towards the bottom-mid of page one across all pages.
Content Restructure & Page Design Update
The general guidelines from Google after they’ve rolled out a core update are always the same: focus on quality and help meet searcher intent.
We knew their recommendations wouldn’t change. And we anticipated that Google releasing so many updates so closely together could mean a major shift in how they understand quality, therefore rank pages and sites.
So while Google was going through their rounds and rounds of updates, we decided to do some prep work to help meet these quality objectives.
As we had already made content improvements by undertaking intent analysis and additional keyword research, we wanted to focus more on the presentation and structure of the pages to help showcase the quality and trustworthiness of the content whilst enhancing the overall experience and flow.
Some of the work this involved, included:
- Making longer content on some pages more mobile-friendly by introducing concertinas/accordions/click-to-expand functionality for less-critical content. This allowed us to showcase our content prioritisation whilst catering for mobile users.
- Ensure definition content is more prominent on the pages where the page is an upper-funnel informational page – this could be done either by making that particular content the first piece of content on the page, making it stand out by using slightly different formatting, or using a “callout” box that used a contrasting colour to the background to make that content stand out even more.
- Ensure the page catered to multiple audience types by sectioning different information and content within a tabulated experience. Depending on the purpose of your website and content, examples of doing this could be:
- Men | Women | Non-Binary
- Members | Non-Members
- Owners | Renters
- Buy | Sell
- Develop a more logical information content flow that mimics visitors’ thought processes and user-journey, allowing us to better place internal links and CTAs. Usually I would recommend a CRO program when changing CTA position or messaging, however we wanted to do this as part of an SEO implementation, so didn’t test.
- Apply better H2s to chunk out content more appropriately and align the headings to common keywords and queries.
This was when the sum of all of the parts of our collective efforts culminated in amazing results. Rocketing our keywords across our worked-on pages to position 1 in the vast majority of cases.
Whilst there was initially some volatility, moving around between positions one, two and three, ultimately the majority of keywords settled in at position 1.
Of course the client and I were absolutely delighted with this outcome. It took many months, ranking improvements, false hope, a raft of Google updates and finally, results for keywords with thousands of searches that the client had struggled to rank for quite some time.
Without Links
As the title of this case study alludes to, all of this work was done on-site, without any linkbuilding or link reclamation.
You’ll notice that two of the pages are reporting backlinks from Ahrefs. So for the sake of transparency that these weren’t built I have also included the screenshot of the links pointing to that page, filtered by dofollow.
That reduces the number of links down to 1 for each URL, with a Domain Rating and URL Rating very low at 5 and 6.
These links are from those automated / scraper / spammy type websites that will almost definitely be filtered out by Google’s spam detection and ignored for ranking purposes.
Final Word
And there you have it. Thanks for sticking it through to the end to read my overview of SEO tactics to help you rank first on Google WITHOUT building any backlinks, for keywords with high search volume.
SEO is a long-term strategic discipline that takes a collaborative and understanding approach to get good results.
There are always some quick wins, but to be truly successful in SEO you need to lay solid foundations and build upon them with best-practice tactics and techniques that do right for your website visitors and search engine robots.
If you can do both properly and comprehensively, then you will be well on your way to achieving high ranking performance.
Don’t be disheartened if improvements don’t work immediately. If they are legitimate improvements then ensure you keep building and going in the right direction, your performance will eventually come.
Patience is key.
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