#1 on Google in Denver: How We Built the Rankings

Getting a website to rank well for competitive searches isn’t about finding one secret Google trick and flipping a switch. I know that because I’ve spent more than 20 years working on Big Orange Planet, and I’ve watched search change over and over again. We’ve ranked at or near the top of Google for competitive Denver searches around web design, SEO and related services, and those rankings didn’t appear because of one clever optimization or one lucky break. They came from years of building, changing, fixing, expanding and paying attention to what was happening with the site. That’s really the story.

If you’re looking at a ranking and trying to figure out how a website got there, it’s tempting to look for the one thing you can copy. Maybe it was the backlinks. Maybe it was the content. Maybe it was site speed. Maybe there was some magical technical SEO trick involved. Usually, there isn’t. Search is a much bigger system than that, and our own site is a pretty good example of how all those pieces eventually start working together. We’ve written more about the bigger ranking picture in How Google Actually Ranks Websites.

We Didn’t Start With an SEO Strategy

Big Orange Planet has been online for more than two decades. That doesn’t mean an old domain automatically outranks a new one. It doesn’t. A new business can build a very strong search presence without having 20 years behind it. What we do have is a long accumulation of things that are difficult to manufacture quickly: content, links, business history, technical improvements, relationships, local relevance and a website that has been continually worked on. We’ve also had plenty of time to make mistakes, discover that something didn’t work, fix it and try something else. That’s an advantage, but it’s also a responsibility. An old website doesn’t get a free pass from Google. If anything, there’s more stuff to clean up.

What I think is more useful about our history is the accumulation itself. Google has to figure out what a website is about, which pages are relevant to a search, how useful those pages are, how the pages relate to one another and what other evidence exists around the business and its content. Our rankings didn’t come from one of those things. They came from the combination, and that combination has been built over a very long period of time.

The Website Has to Be Built Properly

One of the things I see all the time is SEO being treated as something you bolt onto a website after the website is finished. We don’t see it that way. The website itself is part of the SEO strategy. Site structure matters. Page relationships matter. Internal linking matters. Crawlability matters. Performance matters. Mobile usability matters. Even the way information is organized across the site can make a difference in how easily both people and search engines understand it.

We’ve spent a lot of time working on those things at Big Orange Planet. We’ve dealt with performance, page structure, responsive behavior, redirects, indexing, images, internal links and plenty of other behind-the-scenes details that visitors may never notice. That’s why I think technical SEO gets overcomplicated. It isn’t really about getting every little box checked in an SEO software report. It’s about making sure the website can be crawled, understood and used. Our Technical SEO Basics Every Business Should Know article goes deeper into that side of it.

And yes, speed matters. We’ve spent a lot of time improving our own performance, including caching, image optimization and code-related work. But I wouldn’t tell somebody that getting a perfect PageSpeed score is going to suddenly launch a website to number one. It won’t. A fast website can have terrible content. A technically clean website can have no authority. A beautiful website can answer the wrong question. Technical SEO gives you a foundation, but it doesn’t build the entire house.

Hosting Is Part of the Foundation Too

Hosting is another one of those things nobody thinks about until there’s a problem. Your hosting environment affects things like server response, uptime and available resources. A website that is constantly struggling to deliver pages has a problem before you even get to the SEO discussion.

That doesn’t mean you need the most expensive hosting plan you can find. We’ve changed hosting arrangements over the years, including using VPS environments, because our requirements have changed as the site has grown. What makes sense for one website may be completely unnecessary for another. The point is simpler: don’t treat your website’s infrastructure as an afterthought. If the site is slow, overloaded, unreliable or poorly configured, writing another thousand-word blog post isn’t going to solve the underlying problem.

Then There Is the Content

We’ve published a lot of content on Big Orange Planet. But I don’t think the lesson is “publish as much as possible.” Quantity by itself isn’t a strategy. The more interesting question is whether all of that content adds up to something. Does the website demonstrate that the business actually understands the subjects it talks about? Do the articles support one another? Do they connect to the services the business provides? Does a visitor who arrives looking for one answer have somewhere useful to go next?

That’s where topical depth comes in. If we publish something about internal linking, another article about technical SEO, another about local search, another about site structure and another about how Google evaluates websites, those aren’t five completely unrelated articles. They’re pieces of a larger subject. They can reference each other, lead into service pages and answer different questions. Over time, they create a much more substantial resource than a collection of disconnected posts written simply because a keyword tool showed some search volume.

That’s the direction we’ve been taking with the Denver SEO services content and the broader Big Orange Planet Journal. The goal isn’t to keep feeding the blog. The goal is to build a website that actually has something to say.

Internal Linking Is One of the Big Ones

This is probably one of the clearest lessons I’ve learned from working on our own site. You can have a really good page and still have it sitting there like an island. That’s where internal linking comes in. When related pages are connected intelligently, visitors can move through the subject instead of hitting a dead end. Search engines can also see relationships between the different pieces of the site. A technical SEO article can connect to site structure. A site-structure article can connect to internal linking. Local SEO content can connect to Denver service pages. A web-design article can explain how design decisions affect SEO.

That doesn’t mean putting links everywhere. In fact, I think that’s where people often get it wrong. Internal linking isn’t about stuffing five blue links into every paragraph because somebody told you that internal links are good for SEO. The link should have a reason to exist. We’ve put considerably more thought into this over time, and our article Internal Linking for SEO: Why Most Sites Get It Wrong goes into the subject in much more detail.

Backlinks Help, But They Aren’t the Whole Story

Yes, inbound links matter. They’ve been part of SEO for a very long time, and our own experience with Big Orange Planet reflects that. But “get more backlinks” isn’t much of a strategy. A relevant link from a legitimate website can provide useful external evidence about a business or a piece of content. A pile of unrelated links collected simply because somebody is selling a package of 500 backlinks is something else entirely.

We’ve built links and relationships around Big Orange Planet over many years. Those links are part of the overall picture, but they aren’t the entire explanation for the rankings. You can have backlinks and still have a lousy website. You can have backlinks and still fail to answer the searcher’s question. You can have backlinks and still have confusing site architecture. You can have backlinks and still have a website that doesn’t turn visitors into customers. The link is important, but the link is not the strategy.

Local Search Changes the Equation

Our experience is also interesting because we’re competing in a very specific market. “Denver web design” isn’t the same kind of search as a broad informational query that could be answered by a website anywhere in the country. Local relevance enters the picture. Google has to understand the subject of the website, but it also has to understand the relationship between the business and the place where it operates. That’s where the website, business information, local references, service pages, external mentions and other local signals become important.

We’ve been a Denver company for a long time. We also work with businesses throughout Colorado and beyond. That local identity isn’t something we created because we wanted a Denver keyword on a page. It’s part of the actual business. That’s an important distinction for a local company. Don’t manufacture a fake local identity because you think Google wants one. Build the real thing. Talk about the market you actually serve. Create useful local information. Develop relationships in that market. Make sure the business information is accurate and consistent. Build service pages that explain what you actually do. Then let the website reflect the business.

And Then Google Changes Something

Here’s the frustrating part: even after you do all of this, rankings can move. We’ve seen it happen on our own site. Sometimes a page moves even though we haven’t done anything dramatic to it. That’s because search isn’t static. Your website isn’t competing against an empty results page. It’s competing against other websites that are changing too.

Google changes its systems. Competitors publish new material. Existing pages get better or worse. Search behavior changes. Google can interpret a query differently. New businesses enter the market. So ranking isn’t something you win once and then put in a trophy case. We’ve been watching this particularly closely during the recent period of Google volatility, which is why we’ve written Why Google Rankings Are Moving Daily and What’s Actually Changing in Google Right Now.

That experience has also changed how I look at ranking drops. A keyword moving a couple of positions isn’t automatically a crisis. I’d rather look at groups of related searches, the pages involved, competitors, impressions, clicks and the overall pattern before deciding that something is actually wrong. Sometimes the best SEO move is to stop changing things long enough to figure out what is happening.

So What Actually Got Us There?

If I strip the Big Orange Planet experience down to its essentials, there isn’t a sexy answer. We built the website properly. We kept improving it. We created useful content. We developed depth around subjects we actually work in. We connected that content through internal links. We built external relationships over many years. We maintained a real local business presence. We paid attention to technical SEO. We watched what Google was doing.

And we kept going. That last part may be the most important one. There wasn’t a six-week SEO campaign followed by six years of ignoring the website. Big Orange Planet has changed continuously. Some changes were smart. Some weren’t. Some probably made very little difference. But the site didn’t sit still. That’s what I think businesses sometimes miss about SEO. You aren’t really buying a ranking. You’re building an asset.

What I’d Do If I Were Starting From Scratch

If I were launching a brand-new business website today, I wouldn’t try to recreate Big Orange Planet’s 20-year history. You can’t manufacture two decades of history, and you shouldn’t try. I’d concentrate on the things that can actually be controlled.

I’d build a clean, technically sound website. I’d make the business and its services obvious. I’d create strong core service pages before worrying about publishing endless blog posts. I’d build useful supporting content around subjects the business actually knows. I’d connect those pages with intentional internal links and establish the business properly in its local market. I’d also work toward legitimate external mentions and links, keep an eye on technical performance, and continue improving the site after launch.

Because launch day isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting point. That’s really what the Big Orange Planet experience has taught me. SEO isn’t about tricking Google into believing a business is authoritative. It’s about building something substantial enough that search engines have plenty of evidence to understand what the business does, who it serves, what it knows and where its website fits.

We’ve been doing that with Big Orange Planet for more than 20 years, and we’re still doing it.

This article was written by Ally Lennon, Big Orange Planet’s SEO legend—call him directly! Phone: 720-272-0770.