The SEO Colony Hack That Ranks Money Pages Without Backlinks

0:00episode 1,100 of the podcast and I'm re-sharing one of my favorite recent posts from Reddit, but I'm going to relate it to how you can immediately rank pages using what I've talked about as the colonies strategy. This such a good post is about topical authority and then yeah, we're going to use this explanation to understand how to direct authority throughout your site so you can rank pages faster and easier. This post is called a few things that finally clicked about authority topics and how Google actually ranks pages by legitimate salary. It says, "This is just pattern matching from what people here and this is on the SEO subreddit

0:41consistently repeat especially around topical authority, PageRank, and why Google behaves the way it does." PageRank, by the way, is basically Google's term for authority. You want your pages to have more, especially topical authority. You want your pages have more topical authority when they're seen as more authoritative, they rank a lot easier, especially if they're relevant. The post continues, "One thing that finally clicked for me is that every keyword you enter puts you into a topical space and every keyphrase you

1:13get clicks for is topical authority. That's the whole definition. It doesn't require a mystical map. Google sees clicks in a topic, you gain credibility in that topic. You expand the topic footprint, meaning you expand the authority footprint. It's all mechanical. Another big thing is how page level everything is. PageRank isn't a domain system, it's a page system. Pages accumulate their own authority, their own relevancy, their own graph of

1:41signals. That's why canonicals exist. That's also why cannibalization exists. Multiple pages from one domain can claim the same keyword and block each other. There is no domain ranks for X, the domain only provides a baseline, the page competes. Something else that shifted my thinking is the idea of topical bridges. Not everything sits in clean silos. Topics overlap in odd directions. If you publish inside one topic and start getting clicks, you can stretch into adjacent ones by linking and writing in the direction you want to expand. The web isn't a neat taxonomy, it's closer to overlapping circles. If people who search one query also commonly search another, there is a

2:27bridge there whether you acknowledge it or not. There's also a practical point about metrics that get over romanticized. People obsess over backlink counts and domain rating or domain authority, but these behave in non-linear ways. Losing a bunch of backlinks while shipping content within a tight topical band can still send traffic estimates up and even move domain authority. These metrics are just reflections of what the tools believe your authority might be. If a tool sees your traffic rise within a topic, it may interpret that as an authority gain even if your backlink graph shrinks. It's all an approximation of PageRank, relevancy, and behavioral hints. The thing I've

3:08come to appreciate most is why Google isn't and can't be a content appreciation engine. It's not designed to read content like a human and award points for craftsmanship. That would be philosophically appealing, but operationally pointless. Search isn't an art competition. Google's job is to rank pages by utility, not by literary quality. Utility is measured by external

3:32signals, not internal admiration. YouTube is a perfect example. Google doesn't watch videos to decide which are good, it pays attention to user behavior because that is the only scalable, cost-effective, real-world indicator of usefulness. It can't hand score the internet, so it relies on the traces left by humans. This is also why backlinks still matter. They're not decorations. They are real-world endorsements. They are proof that someone somewhere pointed at your page and said, "This is worth directing others to." And clicks behave the same way. A click is a vote with time and attention attached. That's so good. When you combine those two, you get a workable proxy for trust. Not perfect,

4:17not philosophically pure, but functional. So the engine doesn't reward content quality in isolation, it rewards the echo of that quality. Links, clicks, repeat interactions, things that only appear when a piece of work has actual utility. That's probably why SEO still reduces to the boring fundamentals. Be relevant, publish consistently within your topical space, and build or earn the kind of links that show someone else found the work valuable. I'm sharing this mostly as thanks to everyone here who breaks things down without the usual noise. There's a lot of mythology around SEO, but when you strip it down, the system is far simpler and more mechanical than people assume. And

5:00that's good. Mechanical systems can be reasoned about. They don't require faith, just observation. God, I love that so much. So when you have a page that is getting clicks, it is generating its own authority. Because, as this post says, a click is a vote with time and attention attached. Similar to a link. And where a link says, "This is worth directing others to." Both increase PageRank. Both increase topical authority. And so the colony strategy is you target a bunch of really easy, non-competitive keywords that still get

5:34some traffic within your space. Non-competitive means there's not other websites taking these keywords and putting the keywords in their page title, URL slug, H1, beginning of the first sentence. Those are the most important places to put the keyword, especially the page title and URL slug. An easy way to find these keywords is to just use the people also ask trick. Go to alsoask.com, put in your niche, and you will get actual people also ask questions from Google. Then give the questions to Perplexity, use the prompt write around 120-word plain text answers for each question returned inside a single code block with no citations. Edit for your

6:15brand voice, for accuracy, remove M dashes and other AI giveaways, create a subfolder, so it's like your niche and then FAQ would be the name of the subfolder for this, and each page is a question as the URL slug, and then you have the question repeated in the answer. If you want to learn more about this, my episode with David Quade, the 5-minute SEO hack, turn people also ask into instant topical authority, really

6:40good episode, episode 902 of the show. But you put up all these pages, and and people also ask questions are easy keywords. Then what happens is you start ranking and getting clicks for these pages. These pages are in your space, they are non-competitive, and as you're getting clicks, now you are generating your own authority, and so you can put up more pages, and every month you can direct this authority at a new page that you want to rank. So as an example, let's you have page A. Page A starts ranking, and you put up a new page page B, and then you internal link to page B

7:18from page A. This internal link passes authority. Page B is targeting an easy keyword, and then page B ranks. So now page B is ranking and getting clicks, that's generating its own authority. So then you put up another page page C, and then you link from page B, which is generating its own authority and getting authority from page A, and you link to page C, or you you just take page A and page B, and then link to page C. If a keyword is more competitive, as in there's more people targeting that keyword, or if there's higher authorities ranking for the keyword, you might need to direct more authority from

7:55your own pages to this new page to rank the page. But then once it's ranking and getting clicks, assuming that these clicks are sending positive user signals, now you have another new asset that's generating its own authority which you can direct to more pages. You don't just need links from outside your website, backlinks, because you are creating your own authority with which to direct to different places on your site through internal links. And it's really exciting because for a lot of people backlink acquisition can be very difficult. And this is just such an easy thing to start with to create your own topical authority. And in terms of what

8:32to write about, again from this original Reddit post, Google sees clicks in a topic, you gain credibility in that topic, you expand the authority footprint. If people who search one query also commonly search another, there is a bridge there whether you acknowledge it or not. And so finally, how does this all tie back to getting more than just traffic, but actually getting sales? You create pages that rank, that get clicks, and then you internal link these pages to pages targeting keywords that will actually bring you money. Keywords that, as I like to say, are at the bottom of the

9:07funnel, so people know what they want. They just don't know the brand that's going to give them what they want. They are searching to become a customer of something, to use something, to make a discovery call. There is real intent behind these searches, so you put up a page where you take the search term, the keyword, you put it in the page title, the URL slug, the H1, the beginning of the first sentence. And actually a lot of these keywords are non-competitive themselves, cuz there's less people at the bottom of the funnel. And so these keywords have less search volume, which means less marketers are thinking to go

9:41after them. A lot of marketers just like to go after the sexy keywords, which have more volume, the obvious keywords. And bottom of funnel keywords, they tend to have lower volume. Again, there's just less people who are looking to buy right now. And so, you could actually create these bottom of funnel SEO landing pages. You you you want to use a landing page, not a blog post, because

10:01landing pages are made for conversions. But, you could create these pages, get satisfied clicks from search, and then also use these pages, similar to the people also ask pages, to internal link to new pages. But, now you have authority and you're directing that authority to pages that are targeting keywords that will bring you money. And that's so exciting. You're just sitting at your computer doing this with your website. It is so cool. That's why I

10:27love search engine optimization so much. And you know, one more thing from this original post, "The system is far simpler and more mechanical than people assume. And that's good. Mechanical systems can be reasoned about. They don't require faith, just observation." If you would like to learn my method of finding these keywords, these high-intent keywords, and making these conversion-based SEO landing pages, and structuring your site for these pages, and building links, and a lot more, I have it all in a 13 and 1/2 hour course that I spent a year making called Compact Keywords. Actually, this is an email that I got just yesterday from

11:06Laura, who said, "Hey Edward, woohoo! It's me again, just emailing to thank you and let you know, drum roll, that I ranked number one according to Moz for couples therapy in my town. I have no idea how that happened so fast, but I just have been systematically taking as much of your advice as I could, even though a lot of it is over my head. I am literally blown away right now. The best $500 I've spent in my life. Let me know if you want me to write a review, or I could even make a video. I'm officially a super fan, geeking out listening to your podcast on the treadmill. Thank you

11:41so much. Thank you, Laura, and it'll be cool for you to hear this as you're listening to the podcast. So, if you want to have that for your business, or for your website, or for whatever, it's at compactkeywords.com. You're going to love it. I got this email 9 hours ago from Laura. Thank you again, Laura. And thank you to legitimate salary 101 who wrote this amazing Reddit post, to David Quaid, who is very clear where this Reddit user got a lot of their language from, cuz David also says that Google is not a content appreciation engine with that exact language. And David shared the people also ask trick and the

12:16colonies trick. So, links for all of this will be in the description for this episode. This is episode again, 1,100 of the show. 1,100 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye

12:38now.