Can a One Page Website Get Great SEO Rankings on Google?

In just about 100% of cases, making a one page website will not result in great SEO rankings on Google. There are however, extremely rare cases where it can work.

And I’ll explain it all. The most major reason why this simply won’t happen anymore is because SEO has grown and evolved to a point where these types of websites will just not cut it anymore.

Even if it’s optimized as best as it can be for SEO (here are 10 optimization tips), then without other pages to boost it and other factors, it won’t mean or rank for anything that would bring you traffic.

Now I may get some old school SEO people reading this article who haven’t exactly been keeping up with the updates Google has been consistently putting up for years, asking me about an old strategy that used to work for this topic and that basically came down to doing this:

• Create an EMD domain targeting a keyword.
• Create a single page targeting that keyword. 
• Sending “link juice” through the form of backlinks.

That actually had merit many years ago and believe me, many people took notice and action of that. But…

Would that work today? No. 

Here’s what would work today:

That’s already a requirement that many people “cannot” meet and this is actually a big reason why so many people who used to do SEO the simple way back then, have opted out and said it’s dead. And while that’s not true, what is true is that it’s just too difficult for them to meet these new requirements.

I honestly don’t think it’s a problem, and have evolved my efforts so I meet those demands and thus, I have succeeded in SEO as a result (ask me your questions). The fact that most people can’t do the above things, to me signals laziness and from all the excuses I’ve heard from people, it usually falls under that term. 

Now I want to clear up a point which is, if you go the single page route, you WILL actually rank, perhaps for several keywords even, but that is only a few parameters out of many that needs to be met if you wish to get better rankings and that’s what you need to understand about this subject.

What about the rare cases? What did you mean specifically?

There are 3 situations in which it is possible for this formula to “still work”, but there’s a catch to each one as you’ll see:

One of them involves doing this…

If you can somehow find one or more people who own their own authority sites and have a major following, and are willing to link back to you (or let you do a guest post for them), perhaps for money or maybe if you’re friendly, then that action can actually lead to better SEO results.

However, that strategy has a very short term success period because if you’re in this business, the only reason you’d want to rank high on Google would be for a keyword that can get you loads of traffic.

And if that’s the case, then you can bet that there will constantly be new competition you’d have to contend with and eventually, if your site doesn’t update and follow the strategies above, you WILL be overtaken and drowned out by other competitors who ARE doing the things I mentioned. It is 100% inevitable.

It’s a lost cause in the long run, and that’s considering you even make this strategy work, even for a little. 

The other thing is…

Creating a page for a keyword that isn’t popular or even known about at all. Typically this happens when you create a business and then make a domain name that is that business. 

Should the domain name be something unusual, then odds are a simple one page site WILL rank high, for the keyword which is your domain and business name, but unless that business has name recognition and popularity, it’s a safe bet that nobody will ever Google it.

Now there is an add on to consider which is if that site and business gains recognition from online and offline sources, then people will start to Google it and will find it, and in that case, you will have a successfully ranking 1 page website, but only for that keyword.

And the final thing is…

Newly popular topics and products. These come out all the time and in rare circumstances, if there aren’t people or promoters hearing about it until it’s release, you may have a small opening in time to make a one page promotion and rank for that topic or product VERY briefly before the competition comes in and overtakes your rankings.

The reason this would work at first is because if all the perfect circumstances are met (that is highly unlikely), there will literally be a few or no pages competing against you and with an open field, you’ll easily rank on Google. 

But that small time gap will ALWAYS vanish quickly if the topic or product is popular enough, because it WILL attract bloggers, promoters, and others and you will be outranked rather quickly. 

My advice is NOT to wait around for these scenarios to happen, because they are rare and even if you do manage to see an opportunity, as long as you try playing the SEO game through this limited approach, you WILL lose and very quickly.

In these 3 rare scenarios, each has their own catch.

-The first requires that you have the friendship or connections with people who have successful sites of their own, but even that formula runs dry quickly.

-The second can go both ways, in that you may start ranking for a low or 0 value keyword (a business name), but the success rate still depends on marketing that business such that it gets attention on Google, so you will STILL need to work to get to that point.

-And finally, in the last example (instance) or finding a topic that’s popular without competition, you have a very small time frame to make this work AND you also need to understand that this scenario is itself VERY rare.

So basically everything points back to the tips I said earlier about ranking well. You just can’t be lazy anymore with this subject, you need to do it right.