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.
source https://neilpatel.com/blog/outrank-competition/
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