How Can Small Websites Compete With The Big Ones in SEO

15 Nov How Can Small Websites Compete With The Big Ones in SEO

When you start optimising your website for a search engine you always have in mind a big site. This is your ultimate goal, to reach the top of the stair in the Google rankings. But overtaking big websites in SEO can be tricky and extremely difficult task. Do not despair though. Today we will see the advantages of being a small vs a big website.

Big Website Advantages

1. Domain: Having a good and old domain is crucial. Search engines pay much attention to a domain’s past and reputation.
2. External Links: Many diverse links coming to a website bias the search engines to rank better the site.This is particularly easy to achieve if you have a big website as more and more people link your content elsewhere.
3. Trustworthiness: An old site has built a better reputation towards its viewers by advertising and building a solid brand. This makes people trust that particular brand and engaging more with that brand.
4. Money: Money, as always, can be a decisive factor to ranking better. Not because you can “buy” trust and links to your site but because you can hire a team that manages your SEO to the last bit and you can invest in popular keywords without going bankrupt.

Small Website Advantages

1. Flexibility: Being able to change your campaign focus every time there is a new trend or shift in people’s attention is a major advantage. The same process in a big company could take months and will involve twelve people in three different layers in the chain of command. This gives a significant advantage to the small teams.
2. Creativity: You can choose to ignore the norm and go for something brand new and cool that you think (based on research) that can succeed. Small projects that don’t convert immediately have the tendency to be ignored by big companies who are often not willing to change their revenue stream.
3. Focus: Small businesses have the privilege to focus on a specific thing. For example if you think that because of an event the #random keyword will be trending for the next few days, you can choose to ignore all your other channels of your marketing in order to focus on that. For example during an AMA by Barrack Obama four years ago Reddit’s popularity had skyrocket. Many marketers chose to focus on that and drove huge amounts of views to their site.
4. Niche Specification: As a small website you can target keywords that are not interesting to the big guys. Keywords with low competition that can bring immense amount of views to your site that simply cannot be targeted by big companies.
5. Authenticity: Building a brand that appeals to a smaller audience and has built a really strong relationship with certain people. For example, even though Zara is a huge clothing company, Etsy’s John Doe is far more popular to people that want to buy a wooden necklace.