How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget

There’s a formula to SEO and as long as you follow it, you’ll get rankings.

So, what’s this formula?

Well, you write amazing content, optimize your code, create a great user experience, and you mix in some backlinks.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, the formula isn’t too complicated, but it does require hard work and patience.

Now what makes SEO challenging isn’t the formula, or the time, or the patience. It has more to do with how you beat people who have more money than you because, in theory, they can do more of everything, which should cause them to outrank you.

But you know what? I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I love SEO because it’s the one channel where you can beat big companies even if you can’t outspend them.

How? Well, let’s go over that.

Let’s first start with the two mental shifts you’ll have to make.

Mental shift #1: Speed is everything

What most people won’t tell you is big companies need to spend more to get the same results that you can for pennies on the dollar. They have way too many employees and layers in their organization to move fast and nimble.

In other words, everything moves slowly.

So, what do they do? They spend money in hopes that it makes them move faster. But the reality is, spending more doesn’t necessarily get them faster results.

If you want to beat them, the first thing you’ll have to do is focus on execution. If you can’t move fast, you won’t win.

This is your biggest advantage.

The reason I have gotten to where I am today is due to my execution speed. And now that we keep growing in size, things are moving slower.

For example, because my business has continually been growing, we now prioritize based on what makes us the most revenue and I bet you SEO isn’t as high on that priority list as it used to be. Not just for me, but for all companies my size and bigger.

You have to remember, we have multiple offices, hundreds of employees… we have to focus on what pays the bills.

So how do we compensate? We spend more money in hopes that it fixes it. Just like how I write less content these days, and I spend money on things like Ubersuggest and Backlinks in hopes that it helps.

But that won’t fix everything.

The point is, if you can move fast, it will give you a huge advantage.

Mental shift #2: Scrappiness beats money

Alright, let’s recap the formula to SEO…

Content + SEO friendly code + user experience + backlinks = rankings.

I know Google has over 200 ranking factors, but the formula above encompasses the majority of it.

Now you are probably thinking that if you want to write content or build links you have to spend money, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

With my previous marketing blog, Quick Sprout, I grew it by partnering with other writers.

I wasn’t as well known in the marketing world back then, but I hit up people like Brian Dean and co-authored guides like this one on link building with him.

That guide is over 20,000 words. And Brian did the majority of the work and for free.

I also did something similar with Ritika Puri and we created a guide on marketing psychology.

And every time I partnered with other writers and marketers to create these in-depth guides my traffic skyrocketed.

The first time I published one, my traffic went up by 117% in 2 months.

Now, that’s something that you can still do to this day to see great results.

Another way you can boost your SEO traffic is to get people to contribute content to your site for free.

I did this with the KISSmetrics blog before I acquired it. During its peak, it generated 1,260,681 unique visitors a month.

We grew the KISSmetrics traffic through one simple approach… we hit up tons of writers in our space and asked them to contribute articles.

At first, we had to pay a few because the blog wasn’t known and we barely had any visitors. But once we paid a handful of well-known writers who were guest contributors on competing sites, we now had a great foundation.

We still didn’t have much traffic, but having those writers publish content was enough to convince other writers to submit content for free.

It’s a simple approach that still works to this day.

There are many ways you can be scrappy, you just have to think outside the box. Don’t think you need tons of money to solve your marketing problems. Being scrappy in most cases is more effective.

Now that we’ve covered the two mental shifts you need to make, let’s focus on the 4 quick wins that will yield the biggest results in the least amount of time.

Yes, many of these “quick wins” are well known, but less than 1% of SEOs focus on them. I know this because I have an ad agency that works with large Fortune 100 companies… and it doesn’t stop there, most companies no matter what size they are, don’t focus on these quick wins.

Quick win #1: Land and expand

They say the more content you create the more traffic you will get.

Do you want to know what the big issue with this strategy is?

Writing more content doesn’t guarantee more traffic.

Content marketing has changed. Writing no longer guarantees you more traffic because there are over 1 billion blogs.

With people cranking out so much content on a daily basis, Google now has the choice of what content to rank and what not to rank.

Similar to me, your top 10 pages are going to make up a lot of your traffic… and probably more than me.

The top 10 pages on my site make up 29.23% of my traffic. That’s crazy considering I have 5,171 blog posts.

With your site, your top 10 pages will probably make up over 40% of your traffic as you probably don’t have as much content as me.

So instead of spending the majority of your time writing new content, why not get more traffic out of the content you have.

I call this the land and expand method. In other words, you already have pages that are getting search traffic and rank on Google, might as well adjust them so you can 2 or 3 times more search traffic to those pages.

Best of all, this method gets results within 1 month for most sites and within 2 months if your site doesn’t have as much authority.

If you want to leverage this technique, follow “step 2” in this article where I break down how to land and expand step by step.

Quick win #2: Optimize for revenue, not traffic

Your goal is to increase your search traffic, right?

Well, if you are reading this blog it is.

But as you get more search traffic, what’s happened to your revenue?

Actually, let’s rephrase the question… as my traffic climbed, can you guess what happened to my revenue?

That traffic according to SEMrush is worth $1.2 million.

But here is the thing: as my search traffic grew by 123%, my revenue only grew by 12.5%… not a good deal.

Yes, you want to optimize your site for Google so you can rank higher. But what’s the point if it doesn’t increase your revenue?

You need to look at the pages on your site that are responsible for revenue generation activities and first optimize those so they rank higher on Google. You can do this by setting up goal tracking within Google Analytics.

Once you set up goal tracking, you’ll now know what pages to focus your attention on so that those extra visitors you in bring will turn into revenue. You can then take that extra revenue and reinvest it in your marketing initiatives.

Quick win #3: Optimize for clicks, not rankings

Question for you…

If everyone did a Google search and clicked on the second results instead of the first result, what do you think will happen?

Well, it would tell Google that people prefer the second listing and it would move that ranking to the number 1 spot.

To prove this theory, Rand Fishkin told all of his Twitter followers to search for the phrase “best grilled steak” and click on the 4th listing instead of the 1st.

And within 70 minutes the 4th listing jumped up to the top spot.

It was so effective that the listing Rand Fishkin told everyone to clicked on skyrocketed to the top of Google for the phrase “grilled steak”.

If you want to boost your rankings, it isn’t just about the content you are creating or the links you are building. If people don’t want to click on your listing, you’ll find that your rankings will continually tank.

And if people click on yours more than the competitors, than your rankings will skyrocket even if you don’t build as many links.

So how do you increase your click-through-rate?

Well you don’t want to tell your friends to click on your listing as that is a temporary effect and your rankings will only climb for a short period of time. You want to optimize your title tag and meta description to encourage people to click on your listings over the competition.

This will cause your rankings to climb slower, but they will stick once you reach the top.

I won’t bore you with the details in this article on optimizing click-through-rates as I have already blogged on it… just head over to this post and follow hack number 1.

Quick win #4: Update your old content

Have you noticed over time that your rankings fluctuate? No matter how good you are at SEO and no matter how much money you have, there is no guarantee you’ll be at the top spot.

Do you want to know why your rankings drop?

Most people assume that it’s a penalty. But Google is very friendly (believe it or not), and their goal isn’t to penalize sites. Their goal is to rank the best sites at the top.

You know… the sites that users love the most.

Just think of it this way, if Google hypothetically penalized BMW for building backlinks and removed them from the index, what do you think would happen when people search for “BMW”?

People would be pissed that BMW isn’t showing up.

And they wouldn’t be pissed at BMW, they would be pissed at Google and they may not use Google again.

Google’s goal isn’t to penalize your site or be mean to you or tank your rankings. Their goal is simple… always put the site that is best for the end user at the top.

When your rankings tank, it’s typically because someone else created a page that provides a better experience for the term you were ranking for.

The way you fix this, maintain your rankings, and even climb higher is to continually update your old content.

If you have content that is old, outdated, or if your rankings drop, read this. It breaks down what to do step by step, and it will help you outrank your competition because I bet they aren’t updating their old content.

This is so effective I currently have 3 full-time people updating my old content.

You don’t have to get as crazy as me, but you should update your old content.

Conclusion

Money isn’t stopping you from beating your competition. The only thing standing in your way is you.

That’s ok though. We can fix that.

With a few mindset shifts and some quick wins, things are about to change.

I’ve never let my competition get in my way. I don’t care if they have more money than me or that they have been at this longer.

If I started my journey cleaning restrooms and picking up trash and eventually got here… you can too.

There is nothing really stopping you from winning.

So what do you think, are you ready to beat your competition?

The post How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget appeared first on Neil Patel.

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5 Signs That Web Design Is Reaching Its Own Industrial Age

The Internet as a concept, and as a community, is much like a teenager: it’s struggling to establish its identity, everyone is trying to tell it what to do, and it tends to lash out at both people who deserve it as well as those who don’t. It does so at random, and you’re not its real dad, anyway.

The practice of designing websites, however, has gone right past the teenage years and blown past the whole human-life-span metaphor entirely. Web design is, in my opinion, reaching an industrial age, of sorts. You know, the era of smokestacks and Charles Dickens’ really depressing novels.

Let’s see how:

Increased DIY Capability

The sewing machine was invented in 1755, about five years before the “official beginning” of the industrial age. This machine, and others like it, heralded the beginning of that age and the massive machines that would come after, but they also drastically expanded the production capabilities of individuals working at home, or in their place of business.

It started with software like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, and now we’ve got Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Duda, Webflow, and a host of other options. They’re all designed to enhance the output of the individual, the hobbyist, the business owner, and the freelancing professional. Work that once might have taken a very long time for one person, or a reasonable amount of time for ten people, is all being done by one person, in a lot less time.

And if you’re a purist, you can always sew the buttons onto your web page by hand.

Increased Automation At The Professional-Level

Think of the massive looms in old factories. Now it’s not particularly easy to automate creative visual work, as such. Most of the automation in web design is done at the coding stage, in both front and back end. But even with such simple tools as Symbols in Sketch or Affinity Designer can drastically reduce the work required to produce a large number of designs.

Or at least something like a large number of buttons. It’s not a perfect analogy to the factories of old, but the tools we have are making it consistently easier to produce designs of consistent quality, even if they also have pretty uh… “consistent” layouts and aesthetic styles. This sort of drastically increased output is the very definition of industry.

Expansion Of The Digital Middle Class

Increased DIY capability and automation in the industrial age led to a dramatic expansion in what people could afford. The increased amount of work in general meant that more people could afford that stuff, and thus, the middle class was born.

The same thing is happening in web design. For the hobbyist or professional building sites on the cheap, shared hosting can cost as little as a few dollars a month, and code editors are free. For less code-focused hobbyists and business owners alike, code-free website builders are attractive and largely affordable options, too. Plenty of platforms offer a straight-up free plan.

Getting a web presence of some kind has literally never been easier, and it’s going to keep getting easier.

Outsourcing And Subcontracting

Then, of course, there’s outsourcing and sub-contracting. These come in two major forms: software as a service, and labor. SaaS in particular has become exceedingly popular as a way to build a product that constantly pays for itself, leaving you to focus on maintenance, and improvements. The train engineers of old wish they could have worked on their trains while they were still running.

While few websites are, I think, built by orphans trapped in smoke-filled factories, we should not ignore the fact that there is a lot of cheap labor out there. And you know what? A lot of them are actually really good, and are only cheap because of the economic disparity between nations. This actually leads me to my next point…

Poor Enforcement Of Industry Standards

One of the downsides of industrial ages as they happen all over the world is this: the constant push for progress sometimes leaves much to be desired in the way we treat our fellow humans. Of course, this isn’t happening to web designers in a bubble. The “gig economy” is often used as an excuse not to provide benefits for employees. Cheap labor is often taken advantage of in the worst ways. Overworking people to near-death is accomplished not with whips, but with Instagram and Twitter feeds praising the eighty-hour work week.

And the actual standards meant to ensure the quality of the product are often ignored. The W3C does a lot of good work, but they don’t actually have the power to enforce HTML validation. Well… that’s probably for the best, all things considered, but as we’ve seen, governments are also poorly equipped to provide QA for the Internet as a whole.

However, I should note that I greatly appreciate some of the government-led work done in the field of accessibility, particularly in countries that require WCAG compliance.

Fear Of Obsolescence

The proliferation of industry created a lot of jobs, and killed a lot of others. Design, however, is still a creative discipline, and thus there will always be room for good designers. Even so, automation and code-free design tools have people worried, and I can understand why. That said, lots of people will actually hire you to use Wix for them, so… shrug.

People outsourcing relatively easy tasks might save us, yet.

It’s Not All Doom And Gloom…

We call hand-crafted websites… well… that. Sometimes “bespoke”. Perhaps a better word would be “artisanal”, and we should just get used to being hipsters. I’m only mostly kidding.

In every industrial age we’ve witnessed, things got bad, and then they got better. We haven’t gotten rid of all the smoke stacks yet, but the world is in most ways a much better place than it was, and the Internet is developing faster than the rest of the world. It may be an industrial age now, but imagine what it will be like when they invent computers.

Wait…

 

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3 Essential Design Trends, May 2019

Sometimes designs are of an acquired taste. That’s our theme for this month.

Each of the projects and trends featured here are things that you’ll probably either love…or hate. But wait to judge these projects until you navigate through them; most of them seem to grow on you the more you dive into the content. Here’s what’s trending in design this month:

Chaos by Design

Have you ever looked at a design and wondered “what were they thinking?”

But then … “that is actually pretty nice.”

It seems like there are plenty of designs out there right now that feature a structure of chaos. These projects are identifiable by an aesthetic that seems to be all over the place, but the more you dig into it, the more it seems to come together.

Common themes include:

• Lack of an obvious grid
• Lots of motion or animation across multiple elements
• Website elements with the same visual weight
• “Too many” fonts or colors
• Oversized elements that make you think about content
• “Trendy” word breaks without hyphenation
• Peeking elements from the edges of the canvas

If these things sound like they could make a mess out of the design, you are totally right. But what’s happening with these projects – and the super talented design teams behind them – is that they break all the rules and work.

You will want to keep scrolling through these designs to see what comes next. Each of the examples below incorporates some of these themes and they are stunning.

Oversized Lettering

Big, bold typography has been a trend in website design for some time (we’ve explored that here on multiple occasions.) But there’s been a common theme until now: Most oversized type has been of the sans serif variety.

Now the trend is shifting to an even bolder display above the scroll: Oversized lettering and script fonts.

Each of the examples below uses this trend in a different way:

Kota uses a subtle gradient-color animation in a minimal style design. The letters KOTA are the brand of the website and have a memorable design. While the main logo of the site uses a simple square mark with a sans serif, the funky lettering style is carried through the design in the form of call to action links/buttons.

Feral also features its name in the center of the screen with a handwriting style font, but the bright yellow letters are on top of a dark image and behind a simple tagline for the company. The rest of the design is brighter and more minimal, but hints of the funky font carry through in surprising details.

Alt is a little less big than the other featured trending designs, but it is just as bold. What’s nice about the handwriting-style font here is that it is sleek and has a retro feel. As a center-screen element, it draws the eye in among multiple smaller photos and helps create a sense of cohesion among elements. The font and bright blue color combination do a great job of setting the mood for this website design. (Pay attention to the animation as well. The words don’t move while the image pop around it, some behind and some in front.)

The common theme among all three projects is that this style of typography works best with a single word or short phrase. This style of type can be a challenge in terms of readability, so sticking to a simple use is the best option.

Poster-Style Hero Images

Creating a poster-style hero image or homepage screen might be the least controversial trend in the roundup this month, but it can be equally challenging when it comes to design. With multiple layered elements and bold elements, getting the visuals to collapse (or expand) to different responsive viewports can take some work.

There are so many different ways to create a design that follows this trend. The commonality is that the first screen is an immersive visual experience. It’s not a about how much to read or three places to click; it’s about setting the scene for interactions to come.

What often makes this design style work is a combination of amazing imagery – each of the examples below start with stunning images – impactful text and enough of a curiosity tease to get users to explore the design more. (It’s also interesting that all three examples are from design studios; that’s where many envelope-pushing trends show up first.)

Deep Blue does this with an amazing visual. You might not know exactly what the website is about at first glance, but it’s so pretty that you’ll probably scroll to learn more. If you do, the design has done its job.

Chaptr Studio uses a striking image in a different way. It grabs your attention with a tiny, animated cursor that expands on clickable elements. Users hardly have to try to understand that there’s much more to this design.

Alber Graphics tugs at your curiosity with a stunning image and visual theme that is reminiscent of “Through the Looking Glass.” The visual presentation is so strong that users want to know what’s next; can you feel yourself wanting to engage with the CTA just to see how they respond?

Conclusion

How many of this month’s trends could you see as part of future design projects?

Working with super trendy elements, especially ones that break common design rules or contrast with principles of design theory, can be a challenge. But if you get it right, there’s a huge upside. That’s what you get with each of the projects above; these risky design concepts are well worth the time and are a lot of fun to explore.

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Popular Design News of the Week: April 22, 2019 – April 28, 2019

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

UI Design Inspiration – Apr 2019

 

New Logo and Identity for Nike by You

 

Are You Making these UX Errors?

 

The Ugly Truth Why your Website is Slow

 

Color Designer – Simple Color Palette Generator

 

Top 5 Design Tools for Getting Striking Visual Content

 

What Does Unsplash Cost in 2019?

 

How to Protect the Admin Area of your WordPress Site

 

Nord Design System

 

LinkedIn Redesign UI/UX Concept

 

Tips on Using Colors in UI Design

 

Open-source Illustrations for Every Project You Can Imagine and Create

 

Three – Free Semi Condensed Typeface with Four Weights

 

Accenture Sued Over Website Redesign so Bad it Hertz

 

The Story Behind the Redesigned Game of Thrones Title Sequence

 

Choose the Right Navigation for your Mobile App

 

Two Words that Have Made Millions

 

Instagram Hides like Counts in Leaked Design Prototype

 

Site Design: Museum of Digital Art

 

Greater than Avatars

 

What Creative Visionaries do that Most People Overlook

 

Ikonate: Fully Customisable & Accessible Vector Icons

 

Gangster Grotesk: A Sharp Typeface Free for Personal and Commercial Use

 

Will these UX Trends Stick or Fade Away?

 

The Art of Simplicity in Product Design

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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