Find Out If You Can Rank Your Website Without Any SEO

Ever wonder if it’s possible for your website to rank on page 1 of Google without applying any search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to it at all? From time to time we get questions from people asking this exact question. We are also quite frequently asked, “how does Google determine what sites rank at the top of their search results?” In this blog post, we’re going to answer the question of if it’s possible for your website to rank on page 1 of Google without applying any SEO to it at all. By answering this question, you should be able to figure out the answer to how Google determines what sites rank where. The short answer is it’s doubtful- and here’s why.

You see, Google is just really nothing more than a giant computer that reads data. You have to be able to supply Google the correct data in the correct format for Google to really understand what your website is about. If you don’t provide Google the correct data or you don’t do it in the right way, there’s an excellent chance that Google may have no idea what your site is about. So you really have to understand that if you want Google to figure out what your site is about, then you’re going to have to provide Google specific data in specific places. If you don’t that, there’s going to be other people out there who will do that, and everything else being equal, those sites will rank above yours. Without supplying Google this data, your site is going to get buried in the search results. Your site is certainly not going to be on page one, and probably not even on page two or page three- simply because of all the other people who are supplying Google with the proper data for their website.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. At the beginning of this post, I said your site would PROBABLY not rank on page 1. I did not say it’s impossible- and here’s why. For illustrative purposes, I am going to give you an extreme example of how your site might actually rank without applying any, or at least very very little search engine optimization to it. Let’s assume you have a website on how to lose weight. If someone is searching for how to lose weight in Google, you can see in the picture below that there are approximately 829,000,000 results! So this is saying that Google believes there are 829,000,000 websites that are related to how to lose weight. Now if you just think about that from a common sense perspective, if you did nothing at all to optimize your site for the search engine, it’s very unlikely that with 829,000,000 other results, that your site is going to show up on the first page.

But let’s dig down a little bit deeper. If we run the intitle query string, we can see how many of those 829,000,000 websites have how to lose weight in the title. If you look at the picture below, we then can see there are almost 28,000,000 websites.

This means that those websites have “how to lose weight” in the title tag of their website. The title tag is one of the important data points that Google reads to try and determine what your site is all about. The title tag is also considered an “on page ranking factor.” So, in this case, we went from 829,000,000 websites down to 27,000,000 which is obviously a big difference, but it should also be obvious that if your site does not even have how to lose weight in the title, it’s very unlikely that it’s going to rank.

Now weight loss is a very very difficult keyword, and I’m merely using it as an extreme example to illustrate what I’m talking about. So if you did nothing at all to your site regarding search engine optimization, then all else being equal, the people who have “how to lose weight” in their title tag are going to be ahead of you in the search results.

Let me show you the other extreme where it’s possible that your website COULD rank without any optimization at all. This is going to be the opposite extreme of what I just showed you. Let’s say you have something ridiculous that you’re trying to optimize your site for or rank for. Let’s just say that you want your site to rank #1 for “maximum super terrific band-aids.” Doing the same thing we did for the term “how to lose weight” we can see in the picture below that Google believes there are 169,000 websites related to that. Now obviously we know that these sites are not specifically about maximum super terrific band-aids, because most likely, as far as I know, there’s no real product like that which is why I picked it. So Google is probably pulling data off of band-aids or bandages and things like that.

Now let’s just say that this is what your site is about. You’ve gone from 28,000,000 sites in the how to lose weight niche, down to 169,000 websites in this made up niche. If you do a search to see how many people have “maximum superterrific band-aids” in their title tag, you will see that none of them do.

So if you had a website, and the contents and maybe the URL of the site had something about super terrific band-aids in it, or maximum super terrific band-aids, there’s a chance it would rank on page one, maybe even number one, without you doing anything else. The reason is simply because there is nobody else trying to rank for the term “maximum super terrific band-aids.” Now, if you put “maximum super terrific band-aids” in the title tag of your website I would almost guarantee you that you would rank on page one and most likely #1, but that also is doing a little bit of search engine optimization.

Hopefully, by me illustrating this one specific data point, and a very critical data point at that, you can see why it’s not very likely or realistic that a website can rank on page 1 of Google without any search engine optimization at all. It’s even less likely when you consider other businesses out there that offer the same product or service as you are competing for the top spot in Google. As I’ve mentioned, title tag is just one example of a data point that Google uses to try and determine what your site is about and determine where it should be ranked in the search engine results.

There are dozens and dozens of other variables and data points that affect where your site ranks in the search engine results. Below is a list of a few other crucial data points.

• Meta Description
• Page content (what is the content about, how is the content structured, what type of keywords do you have in that content, at what frequency do you have those keywords in that content etc).
• H1 tags, H2 tags, H3 tags (think of H1 as a large overall topic, H2 as a subtopic, and H3 as even a smaller subtopic.
• Power of your site (your site gets a lot of that power from other websites that may be talking about are linking to your website).
• Authority of your site (of those sites that are talking about your site and are linking to your site, how relevant are they to the topic that you’re site is about. If they’re highly relevant it’s going to make your site more of an authority in the specific niche that you are in).
• Visitors (Is your site getting any visitors and if so, how many visitors is it getting compared to others?)

Everything I just mentioned in addition to a lot more is all data that Google needs to see, and what I’ve just listed are the more powerful important data points that are necessary to even begin the search engine optimization process.

You can find out how many data points your site currently has by taking advantage of our free website report card. Once you request your report card, you can even schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation where we will explain everything in the report card to you, and give you next steps to help your site move up in the search engines.