As a business owner, you must be always wondering how a small business is ranking better than a business which is investing lot on their marketing, technology and at the strategy level? Yes, this is the most common question that many business owners have, meanwhile the solution is something known and if you are not able to understand or relate how exactly small websites rank better I am going to brief you on that.

Small websites rank better on search engines? Is this True?

Yes, it’s true in many cases where competition is very high and also the couple of conditions are met.

Note: small websites rank only for a specific set of targeted webpages and they don’t perform globally, just as a local player they do good.

Search engines permit your website rank on top or surpass your competitor only when your website have got better numbers on the following over your competitors:

1. Crawl stats
2. CTR
3. User engagement (Interactive, Engaging, Influencing, tactical, convenient)

Dealing with Crawl Stats:

Achieving the crawl stats is possible to any player by building a couple of backlinks, internal links or updating a content frequently on the webpages and in fact, this becomes much easier for small websites when they have to focus only those few web pages.

Is this possible with the big companies as well?

May or may not be, frequent content updates needs a system to be build in such way where the user generated content or the custom content is easily updatable on to the web pages, but unfortunately both won’t happen. I will explaining in the later part of the article why it doesn’t happen.

For now, let’s assume, the crawl stats are great for small and large websites. If your website craw stats are not good you website would not appear on Google first page.

Dealing with the CTR:

CTR is a click through rate, it’s a response from users against the number of users seeing your website on search results,

For example: 100 have seen but only 10 clicked on your link, so CTR is 10/100 = 10%

A user tempting to click on your website link depends on the following,

What he sees against what he searches, when he sees exactly the same thing what he searches he tends to click on it

Brand value / word of mouth

Attractiveness or catchy statements in the title and description, E.g: 100% money back, 30% off, and more likewise.

Attractive or catchy elements such as rating, reviews count, product availability or out of stock, event snippets, featured snippets and more.

Somehow every company with the marketing teams are able to come up with all of the above except for the brand value, where brand values will be different in each case.

In Fact, the bigger companies may have the advantage over this.

The third thing- The lost thing. (Interactive, Engaging, Influencing, & tactical)

Almost everybody (Small and large companies) lag this, but that one who does it better competitively wins over the other on search engines.

Not only on search engines but also in terms of leads, revenue and business.

Let’s discuss each of these factor that plays a crucial role:

Interactive, Engaging, Influencing, & tactical aspects on the webpage make them the real performer and this is what makes them to move to the top, and retain their ranking in top positions.

Interactive:

Don’t take it wrongly, you having too much of content in the form of description of FAQ’s or other modes of presentation doesn’t make it interactive.

When the user is exploring on the page he should be able to interact, E.G: user request show me the date and system should be able to respond and serve the dates.

Likewise, there can be a lot of requests for various types of information/content based on the purpose of his visit. In case if these interactions are reduced for the user the experience factor increases by several folds, as he is kept engaging while not diverting him from the other information sections.

Engaging:

Enganing is an ability to hold back the user,

• By serving the information in priorities that exact demand user priorities.
• Alternatively guiding them throughout the content/page

For example, a user who has come to the webpage is looking for product features and your serving the price in the first place instead of serving the price details will be the wrong priority.

The priorities usually will be based on the keywords targeted for the web page, and based on the targeted keywords the priorities vary. In case if you prefer to perform for a set of keywords you are targeting you have to make sure that you have respective priorities or content preferences or served.

Many websites lag this from the design point of view, and unfortunately when the designers cannot understand the keyword intentions and understand only fonts, font colours, font faces, and few other thumb rules the outcome would not serve the purpose of anyone except the look and never a great feeling or satisfaction of consuming the right information to the user.

Influencing:

Does a plain information to your customer really helps you to convert them, engage them when you cannot really influence them by showing the real cases such as demo, review videos, samples, and images portraying or depicting the facts and playing role in boosting or enhancing your information further?

Your user/audience will not take any action until you influence them, make sure your webpages don’t lag this.

Tactical Marketing:

When the competition is huge in the market and when everybody else are offering the same product or service with no difference or minor difference and you have already given a lot of value and competitor too so, in those cases how can you still make sure they respond to you, they prefer purchasing the product from you? That’s when the tactical marketing plays a role.

If we have to gauge the above three metrics by some score, the outcome will be as follows.

There are a couple of other information or details, which play a crucial role in making your page have a better use experience and many organizations regardless of the size of the company fail and bigger organization fail more as compared to small one for the following reasons:

Bigger organization with bigger marketing teams, better funds, good designers, good developers do still fail?

Yes,

Before we get into the understanding of “how small websites are winning”, lets understand what’s happening with bigger companies or companies those think they have great marketing teams, technology and design team and also understand how is that turning out to be real barrier for the organization and its growth.

Here are the main reasons, Bigger organizations Vs. Smaller Organizations:

Universal Design/Presentation:

The same design or presentation of content across doesn’t work due to varying competition, varying user mindset, varying user preferences, varying needs, and more. Unfortunately, the bigger organization to maintain uniformity follow the same across and fail.

Small Companies:

Where as are coming to the small businesses they change their product pages/web pages considering the user experience specific to that product, market competition, and more.

Different Tracks:

Marketers and marketing heads have to be on the same tracks in order to understand the keywords, their intentions, the strategies to handle it and the priorities.

SEO is not just about keyword optimization or just about tons of text on the webpages. There is lot of engineering, marketing and human behaviour understanding and the same has to resonate in selling the product to the user.

Small Companies:

Very few or only one and he/she can execute whatever they find it to be appropriate based on their marketing knowledge, user understanding on research, competition understanding and more.

Opinion Conflicts:

People in the team will be of different experience levels, few the real marketers, few the real readers of marketing content on internet, few their own way of understanding the things,  few needs everyone to be blinding following them or accepting them and considering the conflict of opinions between all these can a real and better product emerge on time? The real marketers lose hope, lose trust and it’s an utter loss. Sadly this is how it works in a bigger organization with more people.

Small Organization:

Not to many opinions, one single opinion an appropriate one mostly and they executive it immediately without delays.

Wrong illusions:

Every person will have an assumption, their own way of understanding the things, their observation and they feel it all need to be executed accordingly. Does that execution alone works?

Definitely no, which may be needed but that’s not the only thing needed!  

E.G Uploading only images to the webpages, or updating a specific type of content on the webpage and more like that.

People need to have that understanding that one single thing at any time doesn’t work, it is a combination of things that make it strong, that make it work, that bring in success.

We need to cultivate that culture where everyone ideas and advices and considered, the marketing knowledge is consider and finally the products have to be built.

Hierarchies:

Hierarchies are the biggest barriers in organizations where the right ideas, right suggestions, and right approaches, most of the times reach the wrong people or the people who have their own set of implementation strategies, who may be correct or may not be and the actual things never get executed. The priorities change and finally the results may not be as executed.

Small organization:

Mostly flat, quicker decisions, quicker discussions with the involvement of every one and hence they will be able to implement all the appropriate starategies as per the need.

The UI/UX thumb rules:

UI/UX designers will have thumb rules and it’s great to see such people around, but meanwhile, these people need to have that understanding of user expectations, the thumb rules doesn’t work across all categories/industries. The old school thumb rules doesn’t work, the web and web technologies have evolved significantly big and there should a space to opinions or thoughts that come from the people who can understand the user behaviour. UI/UX designers have to understand the user expectations not just the user experience in terms of fonts , colors, and font faces.

UI/UX Teams Version Of Knowledge:

Creating a great experience in terms of font styles, faces, colors, positions, borders, page length etc are not only the things to be take care of, there needs to be an importance given for presenting all the valuable information, the type of presentation for each type of information or content based on their priorities is very important. If designers lag this eventually the options or features are going to be really limited with the same knowledge transfer passing to developing teams.

Poor content presentation:

Due to limited features of the builders of UI/UX requirements, the content cannot be presented properly and the properly presented content doesn’t win over competitors better presentation.

Dumb project managers:

A product manager suppose to meet all teams, gather requirements from various different teams, and considering requirements from all the teams and the best of the product has to be built with all the possible features to support the implementation and also one need to foresee the features/requirements needed and tries to get a flexible system. Unfortunately, these people don’t do it this way, they just gather requirements from a single individual based on the need or emergency for that moment.

Finally, none of these make the things happen the way they supposed to be happening and finally they lose to small players.

Here is how the small companies are winning:

Open source and Flexible backend:

Most of the small companies use a well developed open source CMS, which will have a lot of features needed to present the content as per the expectations.

Great UI/UX Builders:

Well developed UI/UX builder will have all the features available and help design the pages as per the need and hence they make it, meanwhile bigger organization custom and poorly built system or wrong requirements from the products managers make it a big bane.

Single Decision and Decision by Marketers:

This enables digital marketers to implement the right strategies at the right time with the right platforms or system availability.

Conclusion:

Small companies have the real marketers driving it and also very less number of restrictions by using the flexible and great open source CMS and builders to build and present their content as per the demand of the market. These are companies who can quickly change with the flexible system, also small companies have an opportunity to execute the new ideas/suggestions and meanwhile bigger organizations doesn’t allow this and ultimately lose to small players.