Can Your SEO Blog Posts Outrank Gigantic Sites? (2024 Guide)

Valentin

May 23, 2024 • 6 min read

When you start doing SEO, there is no justice depending on the niche you’re operating in.

Some niches are easy to rank while others are a complete battle. Yet, from time to time you’ll find some unknown players beating larger players such as Amazon, Microsoft or Canva.

But how did they do it?

Well, this is what we’re going to look at in this SEOwl article.

Who is this article for?

This article is destined to both B2C and B2B businesses that want to generate more qualified inbound leads. If you’re an agency, startup or e-commerce, you’re in the right place.

1°) How do young websites usually outrank gigantic sites?

There are not 142 techniques to rank a young website against massive traffic websites. It’s usually a mix of maximizing quality SEO backlinks over quantity as well as doing what these mega sites are not.

Technique 0: they have an excellent website structure

I called this technique 0 because it’s something that you need to take care about BEFORE anything else if you want to have the chance to rank against big sites like Apple or other.

To learn how to structure your website, a simple Google search is enough to answer all your questions. The basics are very simple, you just need to follow them.

Here's a list of basic SEO rules to ensure your website has a great structure:

Use a Logical URL Structure: URLs should be easy to understand for both users and search engines, reflecting the site hierarchy.
Include a Sitemap: A sitemap helps search engines easily navigate and index your website's content.
Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Each page should have a unique title and description that accurately reflects its content.
Utilize Header Tags Properly: Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content clearly and logically.
Ensure Fast Page Load Speeds: Optimize images and scripts to ensure your website loads quickly, as speed is a ranking factor.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly: With mobile-first indexing, having a responsive design is essential for SEO.
Avoid Duplicate Content: Ensure all pages have unique content to avoid penalties for duplicate content.
Implement Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): Use HTTPS to secure your site, as security is a ranking factor.
Avoid Orphan Pages: Ensure every page is linked to from at least one other page on your site to avoid orphan pages.
Optimize Internal Linking: Use descriptive anchor text and link to relevant content within your site to help users and search engines find related content.
Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich URLs: Include relevant keywords in your URLs, but avoid stuffing them.
Incorporate Social Sharing Buttons: Make it easy for users to share your content on social media, which can help with visibility and link building.
Optimize Images: Use descriptive file names and alt attributes for all images to help them rank in image searches.
Regularly Update Content: Keep your site fresh and relevant by regularly updating existing content and adding new content. Resources like Authority Hacker offer comprehensive guidance on enhancing your skills in this area.
Create a Robust Backlink Profile: Earn backlinks from reputable sites within your industry to boost your site’s authority.
Use Schema Markup: Implement structured data to help search engines understand your content and provide rich snippets in search results.

By following these basic SEO rules, you can significantly improve your website's structure, making it more appealing to both users and search engines.

Technique 1: they niche down

Young websites that want to outperform big ones are niching down.

Indeed, big websites usually cover tons of different topics. For example Amazon covers every types of goods, but you can only focus on one type of goods (eg. carpets). But carpets is still a very broad world, so you can have a specialized website for oriental rugs.

Posting on social media is underrated.

If you build a personal brand on socials, you will attract followers and people related to your product or service.

As they get familiar with your offering or become customers, they will consume your content, spread it on socials which can bring traffic to your pages and help them get the initial boost they need for Google to A/B test you in the rankings.

Socials are also a great way to get free SEO backlinks as people will discover your brand and plug it on their own websites and even sometimes invite you to podcasts which also lead to strong quality links.

Technique 3: the maximize quality backlinks on few articles

Gigantic websites have a freaking huge website domain authority (also known as DR). But they usually have so many pages that they simply can’t focus on all of them.

Most of the times, they have tons of SEO backlinks on their main domain (ie. homepage) but they don’t have that much on specific pages.

This is where you can shine by getting quality links for authority articles.

Technique 4: they create free tools or industry reports

Creating free tools or industry reports are great ways to attract customers to your website. People will share these resources on socials and in their blogs which will give you more SEO juice over time. Some examples are AI email writer assistants for example.

2°) Examples of blog posts that outranked gigantic sites

Alright, let’s talk about some real life examples of young businesses who outshined their billion dollar competitors!

Example 1: Breakcold sales CRM

Breakcold is a sales CRM software for agencies, consultants and startups. Like most sales CRMs, it provides features like sales pipeline management, CRM reminders but also helps their users by providing them with proper guides and templates to succeed.

Breakcold is operating in the most competitive SEO niche in B2B SaaS: CRMs.

The biggest SaaS in the world is Salesforce ($30B+ in revenues), another in the top 10 is Hubspot ($2B+ in revenues). Yet, Breakcold is managing to rank against these juggernauts.

If we analyze Breakcold website, we can clearly see that they made a clear choice of niching down. Obviously they can’t be a horizontal CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce, so they picked a niche in order to chase some big keywords like sales pipeline software.

This favors them when battling for some keywords related to LinkedIn (eg. LinkedIn inbox) or cold emailing from our research.

Example 2: TeleCRM - Real Estate CRM

TeleCRM - Real Estate CRM has outperformed the big whales like Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho and more with their strategy on building authority around their landing pages.

This strategy not only helps them rank their targeted landing page, it also helps them create content for all stages of custom journey.

Covering TOFU, MOFU and BOFU content across many industries.

Example 3: Veed video editor

This website is older but it’s a startup that managed to impose itself against gigantic competitors such as Adobe.

A SEO agency named Minuttia did a fantastic case study on their SEO structure which is impeccable.

The strategy of Veed lies in free tools with keywords such as:

Add Subtitles to Video
Add Audio to Video
Add Emojis to Videos
Add Emojis to Videos

These are valuable “money pages” and they’re putting all their soul into getting backlinks for these pages.

We can observe that Veed has a blog but is not leveraging it massively to get millions of visits per month.

Example 34 E-commerce stores (the case of dropshipping sites)

E-commerce shops, specifically dropshipping websites are extremely good at outperforming Amazon and niched competitors in their industry.

Why?

Because they’re specialists at hyper niching their shop.

For example, on the French market, if you type “boheme robe” (bohemian robe), the first 2 websites will be specialized drop shipping businesses and number 3, 4 and 5 will be Zara or other fashion brands.

Zara can’t build a whole internal link building strategy around bohemian robes, but they can.

That way, without barely any backlinks in the beginning, these sites trusted purchase intent keywords with 30,000+ per month searches.

Conclusion: Yes, it is possible to outrank gigantic sites with your blog posts

It’s totally possible to outrank gigantic sites with your blog posts if you follow SEO best practices (1), niche down your site (2) and use creative ways to get quality backlinks on your dreamed number 1 spot pages (3).