Like most entrepreneurs, you want to crush your competition. And in today’s digital landscape, that starts with the website.
How does one build a better website than the “other guys?” Do you hire a better designer? Publish more blogs? Buy more pay-per-click ads?
Surprisingly, spending more on a website does not ensure it will outperform your competition. Being more strategic, on the other hand, sets you up to win.
Here’s how you will do it.
Don’t Cheap Out
We understand that you’re trying to get the most from an entrepreneur-sized budget. We understand if you can’t afford to hire an SEO firm or pay for an Adobe Images account. However, going with a free website builder and host is not OK.
Go with an affordable option and build a WordPress website instead of a freebee site builder like Wix.
When it comes to building your site, “free” can be very expensive. These free site builders are slow, difficult to optimize, and even harder to monetize.
If your competition is currently using a “Built by Wix” site, you have a great chance of overtaking them in a hurry.
Define What Better Means
How will you measure success? Too many companies can’t really answer this question.
If your blog is more successful than the competition, does that mean it:
- Has more social shares?
- Ranks higher for certain keywords?
- Earns more traffic?
- Gets more sales leads?
Any of these things can be a win, but you don’t want to chase all of them at once. For example, it is very difficult to craft a blog that earns both social shares and sales leads. Those are two very different goals and the blogs should have two very different voices. You can have multiple goals as a company, but a single piece of content (blog, landing page, whitepaper) can only serve one goal.
It’s far better to have clear goals (Pick one of the above. 2 at the most) so you can focus in on reaching it, without spreading your efforts too thin. Trying to accomplish everything means you will get nothing done.
Be Faster
Speed has always been an important part of search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization (CRO) and user experience (UX).
It’s even more important now that we’re living in a mobile-first indexing world. Google’s speed update makes your site’s mobile speed a huge factor in assessing and ranking you. This means site speed is now a competitive advantage.
About half of your visitors will leave your site if it takes 5 seconds to load. Guess where they will go next? That’s right, your competitor’s site. You want to make sure nobody is leaving your site because it’s too slow. Set yourself up to steal some traffic and leads if your competition happens to have a slow website.
As you can see, you don’t necessarily have to outspend your competition to outperform them. You simply have to invest a little bit of money in the right website builder and host, while you’re mindful of your website’s goals and speeds.
Doing these things will not cause you to overtake your competition overnight. But, it can happen a lot quicker than you think!
