Another great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled "Startup Competitive Advantages that Work." It's definitely worth a read, even if you're not at a startup.
As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn't help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we're in - domination of the organic search results - can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it.
The core of Jason's post is below:
The first step is admitting you have a problem.
Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven't already.
To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don't have an "edge" just because you're passionate, hard-working, or "lean."
The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought.
Like what?
And he's got a number of terrific answers, but SEO, and more broadly, phenomenal organic web marketing, isn't among them. Before I tackle why I think it belongs there, let me explain the difference between "good" SEO and defensible, "competitive advantage" style SEO.
"Good" SEO means
- You have a solid quantity of unique, quality content that users and customers will find useful.
- Your pages and links are crawlable, indexable and generally search friendly.
- You've done your homework with keyword research and update it regularly (monthly - quarterly) as new terms/phrases rise/fall in demand.
- You've engaged in some decent link acquisition campaigns, garnering links from a few authorities in your industry, some blogs, maybe a few article sites, press releases, link exchanges and the like to the point where you have similar metrics to your competition.
- You've engaged in social media and have profiles on the major sites, have a few tweets every week that point to your site and a few hundred fans on Facebook.
In other words, you've followed best practices, done the "right" things and while an SEO audit might reveal some missed opportunities and an error here or there, you'd generally come away with an "A" on your SEO report card.
"Competitive Advantage" SEO means
- Your site produces content people love to visit and love to share in a scalable, hard-to-replicate way
- Your on-site SEO is "best of breed." Note: This isn't much different than good SEO - on-page/on-site optimization is unlikely to ever be a competitive advantage.
- Your keyword research is baked into the content generation process. The material your site produces fulfills keyword demand just as, or even before it exists by tapping into the subconscious of the web and the culture of ideas/questions in your industry/niche.
- Website owners and content creators have a powerful psychological incentive to link to your work frequently, just as those who participate/contribute to the social web are incented to share via their network of choice.
Some Examples of "Competitive Advantage" SEO Sites:
- StackOverflow
- Yelp
- Wikipedia
- Mashable
- Last.fm
- NY Magazine
- Amazon
- Cheezburger Network
- Wordpress
- AllRecipes
- SmashingMagazine
All of these have content pouring out of them, generated rapidly, scalable, and in time with query demand. They have broad networks of patrons and participants that incent the spreading and sharing of their content through links and social networks. They employ content+SEO+sharing in a high-return equation that's nearly impossible for competitors to match. I'll illustrate:
That's not to say they can't be beaten, but runner B (a new competitor) is going to have to go dramatically faster than runner A (the market leader) if they want to catch up before runner A sees them coming and turns up the jets.
SEO Can Be a Competitive Advantage
This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages.
- It's massively hard to duplicate
- It's prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines)
- It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so)
It's certainly not the only option, but it can have a dramatic impact. If you're starting a company, starting an SEO campaign or just want to renew your vision for how your site will go from ranking for a few keywords to becoming a dominant market player, it's, at the least, a strategy worthy of consideration.
p.s. If you're interested in some more practical SEO advice this morning, my slide deck from the Blueglass LA conference - Strategic SEO Link Analysis - may be able to scratch that itch.
WOW Rand - this post strikes a strong cord with me.
And we thought our passion and drive was our competitive advantage - never thought I'd be taking a second look there so quickly... but you're right (and so is Jason Cohen).
I've heard the characteristics of a "competitive advantage" before, but never applied them to owning the SERPs - even though we pretty much sell on that fact to clients (in so many words).
Here is a question - what do you do when your client is new to the web (but does great work in your geographical area)? .. That is, we are Runner B right now, and it's proving to not be easy to beat Runner A. I guess we need to up our strategic link building efforts huh?
One more thing: I would put SEOmoz on that list -- producing quality content that is shared and has a sick following.. pretty sure it fits the bill!
Thanks for a great post - I'm sharing it with my business partner :)
Spot on with adding SEOmoz to Rand's list of "Competitive Advantage" SEO Sites.
"Business tactics" posts are one of the my favs, maybe because I am an entrepreneur in the SEO/Web Marketing field, therefore I look forward to any info and ideas about how to improve my business.
Another reason is that lately in Italy are emerging many Internet related Start Ups, and some of them are contacting me in order to boost they relevance online and make their start up idea become a winner one.
And relevance seems to be the Keyword that make the big difference between "Good" SEO and "Competitive Advantage" SEO, using your definitions.
Infact, the "Good" SEO doesn't necessarily sees in Relevance its main focus, even though you have to build relevant content and relevant links in order to rank well.
But if you want to use Competitive Advantage SEO, then Relevance is coming first (I use the capital letter intentionally).
The problem is: what is Relevance?
IMHO Relevance is a killer mix of:
PD: thanks for the slides!
All great points Gianluca. I would add one more item to "relevance".
Meets a Need. Using Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" it could meet anything from the basic "need food and water" to "need safety" to "need love and belonging" to "need esteem".
spot on goodnewscowboy. Infact a content which doesn't satisfy the needs of the target audience will not help in conversions and so has no commercial value no matter how original or best of the web it may be.
Good point, and I would have reminded it in my comment. Somehow I left it as implied, as the Need is something that should be considered even before the same Competitive Advantage SEO enters in stage, when the Start Up itself is "invented".
Is not the key, as ever, original thought. Seeing what everyone sees, and thinking what no one has thought? Great, original ideas and content (backed up with best in class SEO) gives you a viral coefficient of >1, which means your ideas spread rather than die. Take the recent Old Spice guy campaign - great idea, great writing and competent technical execution have produced a hit. https://j.mp/ahzT1O I'm not so sure about the recent "Shave Sexy" campaign by King of Shaves, which trades on titilation, rather than any true innovation or wit. I might be wrong, but I think this is an example of a campaign with a viral coefficient less than 1. https://j.mp/bdkjvQ
Jeremy
Very interesting view.
Good post, I agree with the fact that great scalable SEO is a great advantage.
What I wanted to point out though are the in my opinion awesome slides on Strategic Seo Link Analysis that Rand posted. Especially slides 29-31, which compare what you should look for in links to
(a) rank highly for an individual page,
(b) to increase your domain authority,
(c) to achieve greater indexation.
It might not be totally new information but it's certainly the first time I saw it in a graphical way like this. Thanks!
The first thing that comes to mind is a big thank you for giving us all permission to be obessive about this topic as well as arm us with more information to help our clients.
I also appreciate you explaning the differences between "standard" SEO and what I might refer to as exceptional SEO. Applying the primary SEO components is always important but it opens my eyes and certainly the eyes of my clients and prospects when you can understand and apply SEO tactics that accelerate everyone's efforts. It makes for awesome testimonials and very loyal clients and a following.
All the example you give of sites with this competitive advantage are sites we all know, all support and more to the point, all help advance. This is the target I try to construct in the minds of all my inbound marketing clients.
Another part of this blog post confirms that all my hard work and persistance is the right method to build success. You can't pay someone else to this in your place.
Thats almost getting into the theoretical and conceptual parts of what search engines are looking for: the psychological incentive for people to share with friends and/or family. This is competetive advantage online or offline. Very hard to achieve though.
p.s. I freakin love this draggable comment window. Does anyone know if you can get this for wordpress?
Great topic, excellent comments.
@Goodnews - I totally agree and think "Meets a Need" is king, because Meets a Need actually in the back of the brain of the searcher to begin with! They "need" to find something. If content and SEO meet the need, and is crisply, clearly articulated in a way the target wants to understand it, voila! Qualified leads please sign here :) Thanks Rand for another outstanding discussion lead!
I love the concept of Seth's Godin Purple Cow. I think that Runners A are Purple Cows and are truly remarkable. They create products and content so great that it stands out on top of everyone. I really recommend reading Purple Cow book by Seth Godin to everyone.
Also I think that it takes a lot of hard work and time to become Runner A and I think that everyone is a Runner B at least for a while. Watching video at https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-history-of-seomoz makes me think that seomoz was runner B for a while. Well may be there was noone to catch up to because SEO was not so popular but it was uphill battle.
I think Jason's point in his first post was not that SEO cannot be an advantage, but rather that many people who claim to have the advantage in SEO in fact don't.
There's not much point in claiming to be better at SEO than your competition, unless you're an SEO firm, and even then it would be better to demonstrate it than just to claim it. Just saying "we're better at SEO" is not an advantage.
Be better at it. That's definitely an advantage.
IMO these days that mostly means having a better link building strategy (and possibly better information architecture), because everything else is indeed pretty easy to copy. Back in the day you could compete by being clever with alt tags and anchor text, but now pretty much everybody does that stuff and it matters less anyway.
I think before a company decides to engage in SEO, whether a startup or already-established company, they need to clearly define goals. There is a fine line between performing what I call "physical" SEO and "fundamental" SEO. The difference is that "physical" SEO has only the intention of performing onsite/offsite SEO until the site is completely optimized for search engines, and ahead of those sites which are not. Fundamental SEO has the intention of creating content that is made with all aspects of SEO in mind. The companies participting in fundametnal SEO generally will have a large department (in relation to the amount of employees) in charge of overseeing and performing SEO, and every employee involved in the creation of the site will know at least the fundamentals of SEO.
I really don't know how you do it Rand. You've talked about your blog reading schedule and I just don't know where you find the time.
Take Jason Cohen for example. I followed the link and read not only the post you were referring to, but it's prior post by Jason. It was a full 30 minutes later before I came back!
Anyway, I digress. There's a missing item to your Competitive Advantages for sites. While it isn't "SEO" per se, it most definitely can add to a sites competitive advantage: Usability (this would include Conversion Optimization and Analytics)
IMHO two most important factors which can add to a sites competitive advantage are Subject Matter Expertise and Network (of fans, members, subscribers, potential linking partners, target audience, patrons etc). Both factors are hard to replicate but both make a website truly authoritative. For e.g. seomoz blog has subject matter expertise (SME) in all things related to SEO and it also has large fan/subscribers/member base who vouch for its expertise. All these factors make this blog a world class blog.
i'm 100% agree with you that a pure and intelligent SEO never let you down, if you aquire it over a long peroid of time, that was real competitive adavntage,
Nice post but I would love to read something specifically written for runner B in the above diagram as that is where I usually tend to be
Yes it is a big advantage, I agree wiith your sentiment. A site can benefeit by having a fundamental and topmost SEO pratices applied to it.
This is one of my favourite articles on how SEO fits within the Digital Marketing industry. I wished all departments and marketers working with other channels (even without understanding the daily processes of SEO) would have a grasp of the challenges that SEO (as an ambiguous and not written-on-stone industry), has to overcome. Maybe then, more recognition would be given to every SEO specialist that actually does a good job. Thanks Rand.
Good point! Fresh idea, great help for me.
Thx for the post
Good point! Fresh idea, great help for me.
Thx for the post
Love the post, thanks Rand :)
Any more tips on baking your SEO strategy into your content strategy?
Good list summing up SEO as a competitive advantage. However, you don't seem to really mention "Staying ahead of the curve." SEO in 2010 is nothing like SEO in 2005. To a degree, it's really different from 2009. What determines great SEO changes constantly, as algorithms change and the competitive landscape changes too.You may have "competitive advantage" SEO today, but if inertia, or a feeling of "mission accomplished" exists you are just fooling yourself. To truly have "competitive advantage" SEO you have to be a student of SEO and consider your SEO practices as something that can grow and improve over time. Follow industry thought leaders, analyze and experiment, keep up with all the latest trends (be it Twitter search for real-time data, QR/barcode scanners for products, changes in SERPs, mobile searches, location based queries, etc.)
I Loooooove the "Runner Graph" -- with a few modifications/additions it would make a great logo for a new SEO company. ...it's so true, when 'competitive SEO' is "happening" - life is good :-) -- Thanks Jason and Rand ------- Andy :-)
I agree, but I think good SEO can be a huge competitive advantage. I even wrote an article about SEO as a Secret Weapon in Nov. 2009 https://www.torontoseofirm.com/the-truth-about-in-house-seo-it-is-a-secret-weapon/
SEO is one kind of marketing which is most affordable, even a small business man can market his business through online...so there is no substitue for SEO marketing.
Rand,
Thank you for a great post that I found very exciting. Competition keeps people awake at night, and this is some fantastic information to think about and use. I appreciated reading Jason Cohen's first two installments in his "5 Lessons From 150 Startup Pitches," and look forward to the rest.
You said we need to make sure our "on-site SEO is 'best of breed.'" That sums it up for me. I find this post inspirational.
Yes, I completely agree that strong SEO can be a great competitive advantage for companies, and I think many executives and business managers don't understand how valuable SEO can be. According to a Slingshot SEO whitepaper, they estimate that a first page ranking in Google for "Health Insurance" has a 5-year net present value of almost 100 million! https://www.marketingtechblog.com/search-engine-marketing-seo/when-is-seo-worth-100-million/