Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to outspend your competitors to outrank them in search engines.
Spending more can lead to SEO success. However, doing more is the real key. Well, more accurately, doing more of the right things. Pouring money into the wrong things won’t help your site. In fact, they can even set you back years.
To make sure you’re doing all of the right things, here are a few ways to set your site up the right way, beginning in the planning stage.
Avoid Freebies
Yes, websites can be expensive. However, there are two places where you don’t want to cut costs. The first is web hosting. Always choose reliable and respected WordPress hosting services for your site.
There are lots of cheap hosting solutions out there that promise they’re just as good and only 5 dollars a year. Yes, that IS too good to be true. This is one corner you don’t want to cut. Cheap hosts are notorious for slow speeds and sporadic performance, which can absolutely kill your SEO.
The second freebie to avoid is free website builders like Wix. These templates often come with too much coding that slows your site down, while they’re also difficult to optimize or monetize.
Out-Write Them to Outrank Them
Too many people glaze over their website copy. Their only concern is that the words on the page match the space provided.
They don’t realize that a well-written website is like a cheat code that helps you leapfrog your competition in the rankings. Your on-page headlines and UX copy need to be strong to get your visitors to click around and convert.
You can win the battle for the SERPs with better writing. If your headlines and meta descriptions are more enticing than your competition’s, you can actually earn the click even if their content is positioned higher in the SERPs.
The same can be said for pay-per-click ads. If your ad is better written or has a better offer, you can earn the click over higher-ranking ads.
Build Better Links
Your off-page SEO is actually more likely to hold you back than your on-page tactics if you’re doing shady or outdated things.
Google’s Penguin update is now hyper-focused on weeding out the companies with shady links. They want to reward the companies and marketers that are doing the hard work of building relevant and organic links back to their sites.
Just throwing an exact match link on an unrelated site is far more likely to get you flagged and punished than it is to help you in any way.
These are only a few of the things you can do to outrank your competition, particularly if you’re competing against a more established company that has a bigger budget.
If you do the right things and work harder (and smarter) than them, soon, you will have them saying “Who are these new guys and how did they catch us so quickly?”
