I Outrank CNET, Consumer Reports, TheWireCutter, Business Insider, & Engadget

bynathaniell

101.5K followers

6 years ago

When you start your first website, or even your second, third, and fourth one, it's very easy to give too much credit to the "big guys" in your industry. It can seem nearly imposible to outrank big sites.

They have a lot on you.

They have more money. More staff. More domain authority. More trust. Bigger social media. EVERYTHING. How could you possible, ever, outrank them for anything?

Well, it's possible.

I have a two-word phrase (not even a long tail keyword), which outranks many large websites. It's a "brand review" style keyword, meaning it's something like:

• iPhone review
• Playstation review
• Traeger review

Outranking bigger websites not only possible, it happens all the time, and there are two super obvious reasons for this.

How You Can Outrank Bigger, Older, Wealthier Websites

1. You know more about your topic, and more about specific things related to your niche.

Big websites have a big budget, but they are paying non-experts to write their content. I see this all the time in the craft beer industry. Articles on Forbes or Business insider will write stuff about how IPAs are terrible, or how homebrewing is a fad.

Even Anthony Bourdain once said that "real beer" should be yellow and fizzy.

Obviously Anthony has never drunk beer in Belgium, which has hundreds of years of history brewing sour, fruity, thick, and funky beers. Obviously Anthony has never had an Oktoberfest in Germany, or cask ale in England.

And I'm defintely sure that the writers at Forbes doesn't know jack **** about craft beer. He's just being paid $50 to churn out an article, then he moves on to the next thing for the day. Strollers? Financial markets? Doesn't matter. He's not a beer expert.

As you become an expert in your niche, your POWER INCREASES. You have more power to write more interesting articles, which people in your industry will want to read. It may take time to build that knowledge and authority, but it will come.

2. You Know More About Simple SEO

I'm pretty confident that if those big websites actually had an SEO team monitoring their article output they could outrank me, for this specific keyword I mentioned above. My website I'm talking about is not very "authoritative" at all. It ranks for stuff, but only in low competition areas (usually). I'm not at all one of the top websites in the niche.

In fact, I only get about 100,000 pageviews per month, while the top sites get tens of millions.

Those are just the niche specific sites. All the sites I listed in the title of this article obvioulsy have tens of millions of views PER DAY. These specific websites actually did pay someone to test and review this product, and have a similar title, like "ProductX Review". Yes, they're not ranking as well as my website.

How did I outrank them? I did my basic SEO properly. Exactly what Kyle and Jay teach here in Wealthy Affiliate. I didn't do any outreach for backlinks. I didn't buy into any PBN.

I checked out those competitor websites, and they didn't do simple things like match the URL to the title for the keyword, or include a keyword-optimized image. They wrote fine articles, but they were just not optimized properly.

The Big Guys Don't Own The SERPs

Ranking takes time. SEO and ranking isn't always easy. The point of me writing this is just to say that the "big guys" don't own the SERPs. There are a lot of opportutnies to rank for high traffic, money-generating keywords, and there's only going to be more in the future.

The internet is growing. More people are getting online access. More people are getting their first credit card. More people are shopping online for the first time. More businesses are starting to sell their products online. More online businesses are starting to leverage affiliate programs.

Affiliate websites are a GROWTH INDUSTRY, and you are part of it. Get excited!