“How come my competitors’ sites are ranked high without SEO or even backlinks?”

This is a question that bothers a lot of website owners, and is one of the most commonly asked questions from customers of search engine optimization Dubai industry. 

To answer the question, there are essentially a lot of factors that give them the rank boost even without adequate optimization. 

CTR or Click-through Rate:

Google’s algorithm gives enough importance to click-through rates that it influences the ranking of a site. Each click your website receives from visitors searching for that phrase you rank for makes up the CTR. The algorithm calculates it as a percentage. 

Higher the percentage, greater the rewards from search engines. If your CTR is higher than your competitors’, your site will go up in search engine ranks. However, the algorithm will also be checking the bounce rates before deciding to raise your website’s rank. This is because many users still try to deceive search engines through misleading title tags and meta descriptions, just to attract traffic. 

If visitors to your website immediately leaves the website after visiting, it becomes apparent to Google that your website and its contents are irrelevant. You need low bounce rate and high CTR to get rewarded by search engines.

Age:

This could be the most common reason why certain pages rank high – they could be a couple of years old. Such sites could have been running for a long time publishing a lot of content. They would have earned a lot of backlinks as well. New websites won’t have an easy time overcoming aged sites in the ranks, even if they keep posting content and adding to their backlinks. 

This is why experts say that SEO is a long process that normally cannot give immediate results. The only option for the new sites is to wait it out while doing their best to maintain their websites. Eventually, the websites will start climbing the ladder and earn more traffic. If they are maintained for about 5 years or more, they will get the age factor advantage over new ones.

Backlinks:

The number of backlinks your website has doesn’t matter. What matters is their relevancy and authority. Many non-optimized websites get high ranks because they have high quality backlinks directing users to the right pages. Links from ‘.edu’ and ‘.gov’ extensions actually give a huge boost in rankings.

Cross-linking:

Cross-linking the pages in the website can get the site good ranks even if it lacks on-page SEO and backlinks. The best method is to interlink contents in the website. But the flip side of this is that some pages still rank well even if there is no cross-linking, while others don’t. It indicates that you should focus on distributing link juice and authority throughout the website. 

Content quality:

Google can effectively evaluate content quality now thanks to its Panda update. This could be the reason why some sites still rank high without proper optimization – with high quality content. If the content quality in your website is higher than that of your competitors, you can outrank them. 

Growth rate:

What people normally do to rank high for a specific keyword involves building a lot of backlinks, relevant ones at that, and posting a lot of high quality content. Although this can be somewhat effective, some webmasters tend to grow the links too fast, which will be noticed by Google and branded as a ‘manufactured’ growth. 

Unnatural increase in backlinks sends bad vibes to Google. The search engine, instead, raises the ranks of older websites (similar to yours) that grew their links naturally over time. The key is to grow links naturally and give it time to go up in ranks.

Conclusion

There are still more reasons why a website that isn’t optimized ranks high on Google. The ones mentioned above are just the most important ones. If you still need help figuring it all out, reaching out to reliable SEO consultants Dubai is a good idea. 

Search engine optimization is a lengthy process. It takes time, focus and effort. The focus should be more on your own website rather than your competitors, because ranks can change. A low ranking site may go up top, while those in the top might come down.