How on earth is a site with ONE LINK ranking so well for a competitive keyword?

[Webrevolve]

Ok, so I'm sure you get the gist of what I'm asking about in my question.

The query is 'diy kitchens' in Google UK and the website is kitchens4diy[dot]com - which is ranking in third from my viewing.

The thing is, the site has just ONE BACKLINK and has done for a good while. Yet, it's ranking really well.

What gives?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Matthew

We have some sites in similar fields ranking highly in local and organic and have done no link building at all. New players, outperforming established players, in organic and local and no links have been built. Times are changing and whilst links (the right kind) are still powerful, there is a multifactorial way of doing things that in many cases is more powerful when going up against folks who have just tried to heavily go after one aspect.

I tend to think and our recent experience shows this that search has several factors and the effectiveness of each factor is amplified to some extent when they all work together. Brand, URL, Local, Citations, Links, Content, On Page etc.

The keyword in the brand / URL is a great example of this where it can still seemingly help as long as it is not abused and forms part of a larger cohesive strategy. A recent client starting out was advised by us to add the location they serve to the company name and it has worked out fabulously for them. This is a local client ranking in organic and local well above the competition with only 8 weeks or so of very light local SEO (and again, whilst it was one of my guys that did the work, I am sure there was no links built as it was just a whole lot easier than that).

Still, there is no better tool than an experiment so try adding some citations and see if you can influence your clients listing as performance for every keyword in every market is different so only through close analysis and tinkering will you know exactly what will move the dial for your client.

Marcus

[G2W]

With regards to the co-occurrence of the keyword and brand comment, I'd just like to point out that in this case they are effectively the same thing. From a branding perspective, if you are choosing a name for your business you could not do better than incorporating a relevant keyword you're trying to rank for.

[Webrevolve]

I suspect this is the biggest factor in its ranking, you're right. Which shouldn't be the case, of course.

[Webrevolve]

Hey Marcus,

First off, great response. I appreciate the time you've taken out to reply with such detail.

Now, to address the points you've raised;

1. I think we can both agree on that.

2. The keyword is probably more competitive than you think. Like I've just mentioned above, there was a great deal of spam EMD sites infiltrating the search over the past few months and they've only just been removed.

3. It's been there for at least two or three months by my reckoning. The competition was spammy. Now, less so.

4, 5) Interesting. Although, I doubt it's intentional. I know people say the future is "linkless" but this is taking it to the extreme.

[whiteboardanimator]

Well I would say that their domain name is definitely having something to do with them ranking well

I know EMD (Exact Match Domain) have taken hits from google, but this is not an EMD, but very close.

[Webrevolve]

Hey Rikki,

The one link they have comes from here;

http://www.globalknives.org.uk/best-quality-kitchen/

Although, I can't see whereabouts it is on the page.

Our client's site is one of those on the second page with decent DA/PA. Only today have I actually noticed the removal of some spam EMD sites from the search that were infiltrating the results. The keyword is probably a lot more competitive than you may think.

[Modi]

I will like to ask

• Has the keyword recently been searched or came into search

We can give you an example of one of the blogs which is :- http://www.highsecurityplates.com

The keywords - high security number plates, high security plates are recently been on search in google.co.in for last 1 yr.. Hardly any link building has been done.. Still we recvd a traffic of over 1000 visitors every day 2 months back which though fallen to 150 visitors - though ranking remains intact. when ever there is a news in media the traffic increases

However, the site is ranking number 1 from the very first month till now despite of many high competition sites

So, this could apply to the site given, if the keyword competition is not much...

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Matthew

There is really no substitute for tinkering and running some experiments of your own but we can do a bit of digging and see what we can turn up here.

1. The site is weak from a link perspective, no doubt about it

2. The keyword is only returned as moderately competitive (34%) in the Moz keyword tool and there are other sites in the top 10 with only one link.

3. How long as the page been there? How spammy is the competition?

4. They do have some decent UK citations which you can dig into like this:

"Kitchens4DIY" "DY5 1TX" -site:kitchens4diy.com

You can even expand that to look for the keyword in those citations to see if we are seeing more of this co-occurance that is such a hot topic at the moment:

"Kitchens4DIY" "DY5 1TX" -site:kitchens4diy.com "diy kitchens"

5. They also have tons more unstructured citations with the brand + keyword combination.

"Kitchens4DIY" -site:kitchens4diy.com "diy kitchens"

Summary

• The keyword is not terribly competitive in link power terms
• There does not appear to be tons of competing sites for the term
• This is a new site with no negative equity
• Possible spam signals amongst the competition
• Lots of unstructured and a reasonable amount of structured citations
• Frequent co-occurrence of the keyword and brand
• Homepage title is well optimised for this term

Obviously, this is a five minute analysis but really, I see no mystery here. The keyword is not competitive, the site is new, has a clean profile, plenty of citations and good co occurrence of the keyword.

Would be interesting to see your clients site to do a side by side comparison though as that would likely reveal more insights than this general overview.

I wrote about this a little here if it helps:

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/types-of-citations-for-seo/

Hope that helps you dig in and build your plan of attack!

Marcus

[RikkiD22]

I was expecting to see a page which is very well optimised and with lots of content but it only seems to use that phrase once on the page and doesn't have it in either the H1, Bold tag or an image alt. The page content seems very average too.

I guess its not a massively competitive phrase but the other sites on that page (and a few on the pages below) do have decent DA and PA. What is the one link they have? Is it a strong one with exact anchor text for that phrase?