High Ranking site with very low amount of texts, HOW?
-
Hi All,
As I was surfing the net, I recently encountered a beautiful and well known site - indochino.com
An e-commerce site that sells custom made suits and shirts.
They do not have a brick and mortar store, just the site and built an amazing reputation in about two years (maybe less).The question is....
HOW do they rank high in competitive niches like suits with practically no texts in the website?
Is it "ONLY" because of the amazing UI and Links?
(I thought texts is the king...)There is no blog or any other visible content area besides for the product pages and a couple of explanatory sections which are also with not that much texts...
Thanks!
-
Good question BeytzNet and good answer Schwaab.
High domain authority comes primarily from quality backlinks and, to some extent social likes and sharing (I think the strength of the social signals will continue to grow more important as time goes on). So, the question really is, how do you build links and get social shares with a site that has no text on the site?
First, you don't need text for people to have something they think is compelling and worth sharing a linking to. There are plenty of other forms of content that people link to.
Beyond that, there are really 3 ways to build links to a site:
- Create content that is valuable to people and post it on your site. You can get social shares by posting things on other sites (Facebook, Google+, etc.), but that usually doesn't lead to links to your site. As noted above, the content posted to your site doesn't have to be text based.
- Do an awesome job doing whatever you website/company does. As an extreme example, Apple doesn't need to put out any content to get links at this point. People link to them because they like the Apple products. When they release a new iphone, even if they just put a product product page for it on their site and they would get tens of thousands, if not millions of links. This works for smaller companies, too, though usually on a smaller scale. Just do a great job, offer great products, etc. and people will link to you.
- Do link building strategies. Most of these, if not all, are now against Google and Bing's guidelines, so these are pretty much all black hat now. But black hat can work...at least for a while. Personally, I recommend people stick with options 1 and 2 above because I think the risk is too great with the linking schemes. However, I mention this because, when investigating how other sites are ranking well, this is always a possibility.
-
High Domain Authority. Quality back links. Good user engagement.
-
Thanks Kurt.
If that's the case, how do you build authority with no content...?
I think that it is practically impossible -
The indochino site has is a high authority site and has built up a brand. Content on a site is only one part of the equation and, like many equations, if you increase one part of the equation, you can decrease another and get the same results. For example, 2 x 6 = 12, but so does 1 x 12. I've seen sites, especially decently branded sites, that had no readable content on their website but were ranking very well for competitive phrases in their niche. It's because their site authority and brand were strong enough to over come the lack of content. I'd say the same thing is happening in regards to your question.
-
I've done a little SERP analysis recently to help figure out how much content I really needed to rank well. What I found was that for the queries I researched sites that were ranking in the top ten either had a low PA/DA and a ton of text (2k + words on the page) or a high PA/DA and a low amount of text (~300 words). Obviously sites that had a high PA/DA and a ton of text crushed it in the SERPs. This all goes back to classic correlation does not equal causation.
There seemed to be a point where a page with low PA/DA could still rank well if you had enough content, and vice versa. I would think if the site you are referring to has minimal text on the page its backlink metrics are pushing it to the top of the SERPs. Also, good UX will improve time on site which may help it surface to the top of the SERPs.
Again, correlation does not equal causation. This is just something I've seen for a sample of keywords I am targeting. I've used this to determine which landing pages on my site have low PA and have worked on adding some relevant text to those pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does a site with only one blog post a month rank alright?
I manage multiple websites and want to start new ones but want to know if one blog post a month is acceptable for SEO since I'm worried about rank.
Branding | | hssm20191 -
Does anyone has experience with Q&A Sites in terms of SEO value?
I would like to increase mentions to my site and brand. I thought the Q&A sites might be useful here (like Yahoo Answers). Can anyone give me some tips where to go and what to do? I would be very happy about that 🙂
Branding | | MichaelJanik0 -
Changing domain name and site design while recovering from penguin? Still SEO power in EMDs?
Our website recently suffered from a penguin update courtesy of some black hat techniques used by an SEO company we hired a few years ago. We are working on cleaning up and disavowing the old spammy links, but at the same time this penalty has hit us while we were working on making some major changes to our website. As a law firm we have 2 separate practice websites we are planning to merge under 1 domain to help boost our local results. Our problem is that the domain names for each practice are specific to the type of law they practice, so we will have to move both practices to a branded name domain that works for both practices. I thought since traffic was already affected because of the penguin update this might be an opportune time to change the domain name, but since I am far from an expert at SEO I'm wondering if there are variables I am unaware of that might make this decision a very bad one. Also we currently have exact match domains for our two different sites -- the way I understand it EMDs don't carry the same SEO weight they once did, but the firm is worried that losing the EMDs is going to cause a dramatic drop in traffic. If we keep the EMDs but permanently redirect them to the new site, will it maintain their SEO value? Would google consider that black hat and possibly penalize us for it in the future? Thanks for any advice or insight!!
Branding | | MyOwnSEO0 -
New site just launched - would appreciate some feedback!
Hi, Some may have seen me around the forum recently asking a few questions about my website which was being re-vamped. Well its now live. www.followuk.co.uk Would love some actionable advice / constructive criticism. Website background: It started life as a website displaying dates for UK bank holidays, noticed some good traffic/sharing so decided to open it up to UK occasions. This resulted in more traffic and social sharing so over the last month I have re-built the whole website to be responsive and 'I hope' professional / interesting to visitors. I also opened it up further into other UK dates such as sporting events and festivals - these categories will gain more pages as well as new categories to come. I'm hoping to turn it into a little UK resource for this type of content. Thank you.
Branding | | followuk1 -
Site Disappeared For Exact Match Search?
Can anyone help me figure out what is happening to a site I recently set up? The site is http://intervalmanagementgroup.com/ and it completely fell off for an exact match brand name search of "Interval Management Group". It had been climbing to the top spot on page one shortly after launch and has now disappeared from Google while Bing and Yahoo seem to have no problem with it. . . Any insight is much appreciated!
Branding | | TroyAIE0 -
Redesigning a Site - What Optimizations are "Must Haves"?
I'm psyched - a client has just approved a complete redesign of their site! Feel like a have a little bag of gold in my hand, and want to spend it wisely. My question to you, fellow Mozzers, is what elements would you make sure to include a site to make it as optimized as possible? A few details about the site: 1. It is an informational site, designed to generate leads for a medical product. No products for sale, no e-commerce functionality needed. 2. The site has approximately 250 pages. Last site update was in 2009. 3. Videos are an important part of their marketing strategy. In addition to shortening their URL structure (some URLs have 6-7 folders, ugh), I plan to utilize schemas and incorporate mobile responsive design. What other areas would you prioritize for optimization? Thanks, Allie
Branding | | Allie_Williams0 -
High authority brand expanding product line, domain question
Hi MOZers, I've been given a handy little domain puzzle to deal with and would love insight from the community. Here's the situation: We're retailers of one specific, big, nationally known product. Let's pretend it's the Snuggee (IT'S NOT). People search for it and buy it from our site, or from Amazon or other retailers that we distribute it to. We're about to expand to carry a bunch of related, but different products - so from a one-product brand to 5 or 6 different items, relating to different keyword searches. Imagine Snuggee people want to start selling a whole bunch of products that solve the same needs of warming the front of your body and making you look silly. The owners want to change the main domain from [specific product] to [name similar to specific product, but is more general]. What concerns me is how to handle the fame of the branded product in terms of domain names. Current domain, based on that product, has a ton of links and a decent age. Owners are thinking to redirect everything to fresh new unestablished domain. While I know 301s will pass most link value, it will also be a home page that will be about a bunch of products - not just that main known one. In fact, we're considering making a URL for each product as landing page, of which old famous product would be one of 5 or 6 pages. Two main options we're considering right now: Keep old domain as a doorway page featuring just old product, with same look and feel, and from which any links would point to the new domain. Try to keep this as ranking for top result for this search, which should be easy. Unify everything under new domain, with old product being featured on a separate page / subdirectory. Hope that new home page still can rank pretty well for our old product, even though it will be talking about other products now as well. What we'd stand to lose would be the SERP for old products featuring too many big box retailers that sell our stuff and take a chunk out of our margins. The goal is to help us become known for many things, while still being always the best search result for what we're already known for. Which of those two options seem best, or is there another I'm missing altogether? Thank you!
Branding | | advancedSemiotics0 -
Subject: Brand anchor text distribution. Does the HP url classify as brand anchor?
Hi guys, I just wanted to know what your take is on this and whether anyone knows if google has published any info on this. I am wanting to analyse a fairly large backlink profile. The idea is to discover how far it correlates alongside recent SERPS ranking data (based on anchor text distribution) information that has been published across the web. There is so much data to categorise and segment. This is due to overlaps in categorisation, (which is possibly a good thing as it appears more natural) though I often it difficult to decide which goes where. My question today relates to brand anchor text - in determining the % of overall brand distribution for a backlink profile - Which out of the below do you think rings true? 1.) Should I be considering the homepage url anchor text as a branded link anchor? 2.) Should the brand % just be 'pure brand' anchor text? 3.) Should it contain partial brand + KWD data? 4.) Should it comprise of all of the above elements? 5.) Should I divvy up / segment partial brand, pure brand, brand + kwd, citations etc into new sub categories and see how this individual data correlates to current ranking factors in the SERPS? (Not sure if there is any recent published data in this amount of detail) Anyway, I just wondered what you guys thought about this in the eyes of Google., and also to find out how you go about classifying and segmenting backlink profile data. Thanks for now
Branding | | Turkey0