High Ranking site with very low amount of texts, HOW?

[BeytzNet]

Hi All,

As I was surfing the net, I recently encountered a beautiful and well known site - indochino.com

An e-commerce site that sells custom made suits and shirts.
They do not have a brick and mortar store, just the site and built an amazing reputation in about two years (maybe less).

The question is....
HOW do they rank high in competitive niches like suits with practically no texts in the website? 
Is it "ONLY" because of the amazing UI and Links?
(I thought texts is the king...)

There is no blog or any other visible content area besides for the product pages and a couple of explanatory sections which are also with not that much texts...

Thanks!

[Schwaab]

I've done a little SERP analysis recently to help figure out how much content I really needed to rank well.  What I found was that for the queries I researched sites that were ranking in the top ten either had a low PA/DA and a ton of text (2k + words on the page) or a high PA/DA and a low amount of text (~300 words).  Obviously sites that had a high PA/DA and a ton of text crushed it in the SERPs.  This all goes back to classic correlation does not equal causation.

There seemed to be a point where a page with low PA/DA could still rank well if you had enough content, and vice versa.  I would think if the site you are referring to has minimal text on the page its backlink metrics are pushing it to the top of the SERPs.  Also, good UX will improve time on site which may help it surface to the top of the SERPs.

Again, correlation does not equal causation.  This is just something I've seen for a sample of keywords I am targeting.  I've used this to determine which landing pages on my site have low PA and have worked on adding some relevant text to those pages.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

The indochino site has is a high authority site and has built up a brand.  Content on a site is only one part of the equation and, like many equations, if you increase one part of the equation, you can decrease another and get the same results.  For example, 2 x 6 = 12, but so does 1 x 12.  I've seen sites, especially decently branded sites, that had no readable content on their website but were ranking very well for competitive phrases in their niche.  It's because their site authority and brand were strong enough to over come the lack of content.  I'd say the same thing is happening in regards to your question.

[BeytzNet]

Thanks Kurt.

If that's the case, how do you build authority with no content...?
I think that it is practically impossible

[Schwaab]

High Domain Authority.  Quality back links.  Good user engagement.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Good question BeytzNet and good answer Schwaab.

High domain authority comes primarily from quality backlinks and, to some extent social likes and sharing (I think the strength of the social signals will continue to grow more important as time goes on).  So, the question really is, how do you build links and get social shares with a site that has no text on the site?

First, you don't need text for people to have something they think is compelling and worth sharing a linking to.  There are plenty of other forms of content that people link to.

Beyond that, there are really 3 ways to build links to a site:

1. Create content that is valuable to people and post it on your site.  You can get social shares by posting things on other sites (Facebook, Google+, etc.), but that usually doesn't lead to links to your site.  As noted above, the content posted to your site doesn't have to be text based.
2. Do an awesome job doing whatever you website/company does.  As an extreme example, Apple doesn't need to put out any content to get links at this point.  People link to them because they like the Apple products.  When they release a new iphone, even if they just put a product product page for it on their site and they would get tens of thousands, if not millions of links.  This works for smaller companies, too, though usually on a smaller scale.  Just do a great job, offer great products, etc. and people will link to you.
3. Do link building strategies.  Most of these, if not all, are now against Google and Bing's guidelines, so these are pretty much all black hat now.  But black hat can work...at least for a while.  Personally, I recommend people stick with options 1 and 2 above because I think the risk is too great with the linking schemes.  However, I mention this because, when investigating how other sites are ranking well, this is always a possibility.