Reasons for SEO-less Sites

[humble pie]

Good evening. Does anyone else own sites that seem to require no 'seo', as in you could go mad with links, content etc but it seems to make no odds really - its always ranked 1,2 or 3 for over 15 years - maybe 1 blog post update a year

I'm not talking super niches either, relatively competitive markets.

So, I'm questioning the point of SEO now, I can see if I was starting from scratch it would take some effort to get page one even.

Any thoughts..

 

[ian]

Well, I may not fit entirely within that brief, but my main two sites have never had a thought when it comes to any real SEO and both are positioned 1 or 2 for any product related keyword searches. One site has regularly visitor comments so stays fresh, the other is a commerce site that rarely sees any updates.

 

[zehrila]

I remember we did a Psp Themes site in 2007 or 2008 circa, so Sony went ahead and started allowing people to upload themes to their psp devices, we quickly threw a webiste and did not focus on any link, over next few months website became the most popular psp themes website getting close to half a million page views a day, what happened was, since we were the first in the game there was no competition, our site started getting natural links from forums and other sites and it validated our strong presence in search results.

However, in most cases, if client starts a website in a really tight vertical, it is going to take a really strong backlink profile and time for those links to mature before it ranks. For instance, if you start a Voucher Codes website and get links from Guardian, Forbes, Huffington to begin with, it is very likely that you won't see the needle moved for the reason that most of the competitors will have 1000s of links in place and most certainly the best 10 to 20 of those competitors will have links as good as Forbes Gurdian in large quantities. Needle does move, but it takes quite an effort and deep pockets.

 

[denchomsky]

It all depends what niche or sector the website is in and as zerhila said, age, authority and competition

Some websites I have built for clients rank well purely because the website is built correctly, meaning it is coded correctly and has keyword focused content, but generally they will be location specific where the competition is not really strong.

I also look after SEO for some companies in very competitive sectors where the big directories like Yell, Thompson Local, Checkatrade are competing. These companies have tens of thousands of backlinks, age and authority. Without any SEO you won't outrank them, but with proper focused SEO you can.