It may seem like an impossible uphill battle to compete with big sites in the SERPs, but there are benefits to running a smaller site that can make a tremendous difference to your SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how small businesses and websites can target opportunities the big sites can't, in spite of their natural advantages.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how you, as a small site, could compete against big sites.
Big site advantages
- Domain authority
- Quantity and diversity of the links that are coming to them, which bias engines to generally rank their content higher than they ordinarily might if it were on a brand-new site or a smaller site that they didn't recognize.
- Trustworthiness. They've built brand associations in the space through advertising and through their size and scale and their reputation over time and over years that means that people have these biases towards trusting that brand, liking that brand, buying from that brand.
- Financial resources that likely you are not going to have as a small website. If we're talking about Expedia here versus randstravels.com, they have tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that they can put towards their web marketing efforts and their SEO efforts, and I have, well, my bad self.
- Ability to invest if and usually not just if, but if and when, if and when something is a major priority. If it's not the case that something is a major priority, then Expedia is probably not going to invest in that, and this is where a lot of your advantages come from.
Small site advantages
- Nimbleness. You can choose to say, "Here are all the things we could be investing in right now, and you know what, this is the highest priority right now," and a week later decide this is no longer the highest priority. We're going to change direction and go pursue this instead. You don't have to check with a manager or a team or a boss. You don't have three layers of management that you have to run that approval process through. You can be extremely nimble. Small teams can get remarkable amounts done in small amounts of time compared to much larger teams.
- Creativity. You are allowed to go outside the boundaries of what's been set. If you have an idea, you can execute on it. If you have an idea at Expedia, you need to get a lot of approval before you can go after it, and you better make sure that all of the rest of your work is done, too.
- Focus. As a small business, you can choose to focus your web marketing efforts on one specific thing. So if you know that SEO is where all of your opportunity lies, you can ignore your other web marketing channels, you can ignore retargeting for a few weeks, you can ignore your PPC accounts for a few weeks and simply focus on SEO. At Expedia, a marketing manager is going to have a long list of things that they need to do that they are responsible for, and they can't simply ignore all their duties to focus on something new.
- Niche appeal. So yes, Expedia built up their brand around travel, and they have associations around hotels and flights and bookings and all this kind of stuff. But you can choose to take a small slice of those for your particular business and say, "We're going to focus exclusively on this, and we're going to become the authority in this particular niche," which gives you a bunch of advantages that we'll talk about.
- Authenticity on your side. So a big brand will often have big brand associations. A smaller brand can build very strong positive associations with, granted, a smaller audience, but you don't need to monetize as many or as fast or as directly as a big brand needs to. You can concentrate on building your brand's appeal to your very specific niche. If you monetize them well enough over time, you can build a great business, a small business but a great small business.
5 ways to compete
So, five ways to compete.
1. Target keywords the big sites are unwilling, unable, or so far aren't trying to compete on.
First off let's talk about keywords. So in the SEO keyword universe, there are going to be keywords that a big brand, like in this example Expedia, is unwilling, unable, or has chosen not to target yet because they have an indirect path to ROI or legal issues or PR issues. Those can be things like:
- Long-tail keywords. So maybe Expedia is definitely targeting something like "Istanbul city guide," but they are definitely not targeting something like "best shops to visit in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar." By the way, I looked that up, and I could not find a great list. So if someone wants to make a list of those, that would be real handy because the Grand Bazaar, very hard to find things.
- Comparison keywords. So Expedia can't go after their competitors' brand names, and they certainly wouldn't choose generally to compare themselves to another brand. So Venere flights versus Expedia flights, they're just not going to have a page on that. But you can have a page on that, and you can compare those things to each other. That's an advantage that a small website is going to have over a larger one.
- Editorial keywords. So Expedia has business relationships with a lot of different hotels. Therefore, it is not in their interest to rank hotels in a particular locale from 1 to 10 or from 1 to 100. As a small website, you don't have that constraint, and you can go after those types of keywords that your bigger competitors bias against doing, and that can be very powerful as well.
2. Aim for authority and brand association in a very specific niche
So like we talked about, Expedia is focused on travel. But Rand's Travels can focus on city-specific itineraries or ranking travel destinations or some other thin slice of a niche that Expedia can't build that same brand equity in.
3. Pursue indirect/harder-to-monetize content
So Expedia knows that they're generally pursuing not just keywords, but content that helps people buy directly from Expedia, and they're going to be looking at that path to conversion. But you might say, "I don't care if it takes three visits or four visits or five visits for someone to convert. I want to build trust. I want to build authority in my niche. Therefore, I can go after content that Expedia would not go after." They might be hotels, flights, cars, and cities. You might be recommended websites and travel education and news and tactics and tips and neighborhoods.
4. Go deeper and provide more value with content than what your big competition can afford to scale
You can invest more in a single piece of content than Expedia or a big brand ever could. So when you take your small niche and you say this keyword or this set of keywords is extremely important to me. This search intent is extremely important. I'm going to create 10x content. I'm going to put 10 times more effort and energy and resources into building that than what my big brand competitor can do. If they are a two-star resource, I'm going to be a five-star resource.
5. Build relationships 1-on-1 that big competition will never invest in
In addition to that element of building better content, you can also build better, more direct relationships with the people you need those relationships with. So Expedia goes through their PR team, and they have their teams of folks that do their relationships. But you can go direct. You can say, "I'm Rand's Travels. I'm going to go meet with people in Istanbul while I'm there and forge those relationships personally and build those relationships up on social media and have conversations and leave blog comments, and that will reinforce my authenticity and my niche appeal."
That's a huge advantage as well, and that can help to amplify the reach of your content and to get you visibility on these keywords and this content that your competitors simply can't touch because they're too big. They need to do this stuff at scale. When you need to do things at scale, you simply can't focus in the same way, and that's where your big advantages come from as a small website.
Now, looking forward to our comments and hearing more from you about how you've been able to compete against the big guys, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Thanks for checking out WB Friday this week. My questions for discussion:
With regards to #2, a few that I've seen recently in my searches include "Madagascar destinations" (where several niche sites are beating out TripAdvisor, Wikitravel, NationalGeographic, and others) and "SaaS metric benchmarks" (where relative newcomer/startup Baremetrics is outranking a number of powerhouses in the field with a surprisingly conversion-focused page).
Hi Rand!
I like very much the topic of the WB today and I agree with the 5 tactics.
Answering your questions:
That's the "power" of the third parties blogs in general. :)
What do you think?
Thanks Rubén - good point about reviews. I usually think of big sites as having more ability to get them, but often they go through legal and other processes that water them down or prevent big sites from using the authenticity and personal power of reviews/testimonials.
Beating out 1and1 - not too shabby; congrats!
Hey Rand, firstly thanks for speaking on behalf of us (small business guy). All the five tactics are very new and looks effective, will surely go for it.
What you think about social media strategies to compete with big businesses, as I feel it can also be good way?
Thanks again Rand, great post.
1. One thing I've been working on is finding the major challenge or pain point the customers have and target keywords associate with it. I was working with a men's fitness wear brand and their apparel wax EXTREMELY comfortable so much of our content was aimed at 'comfortable men's fitness wear' and focused on specific exercises they were performing EG: shorts for deep squats. Do you think this tactic could work?
2. I still like the glitter bomb example of the guy that hacked the media to pump his rankings to #1 in probably the fastest time I've ever seen.
Fantastic topic Rand. Thank you. I have used your "Comparison keywords" example in this space. I also find going for the smaller volume keywords with lower difficulty does help tremendously to start to get some traffic while you build your DA.
Una vez más Rand me sorprende con la claridad y lucidez con la que explica Como hacer SEO para competir con los grandes sitios. Aunque los factores que da son importantes y muy buenos puntos de vista, me parece que el solo hecho de contar con un gran presupuesto para generar PR, Blog post, Interacciones de Social media usando CM y otros aspectos que requieren dinero y que muy a mi pesar muchas veces terminan siendo factores mas relevantes para Google. No digo que tarde o temprano lo que aquí nos dice Rand pueda cumplirse, por ahora me parece que es mas facil ganar en Google para criterios competitivos si eres un sitio grande, con historia, autoridad y enlaces entrantes.
(edit from Rand, hope you don't mind, but I'm including the English translation below):
Again Rand surprises me with clarity and lucidity with which explains how to do SEO to compete with the larger sites. Although the factors given are important and very good views, I think that the mere fact of having a big budget to generate PR, Blog post, Interactions Social media using CM and other aspects that require money and much to my Although often they end up being more relevant to Google factors. I'm not saying that sooner or later what Rand says here we can be satisfied, for now I think it's easier to win at Google for competitive criteria if you're a large site, with history, authority and inbound links.
Thanks Cristian (and hope you don't mind my translation inclusion). I hadn't considered it much, but I think I agree that social media can be an advantage for SMBs because of the authenticity, responsiveness, and quality you can provide on social vs. a bigco constrained by what they can say/share.
Amazing topic Rand!
Here is my take and a personal example of the proportions to which this can be taken.
#2 I've personally seen countless of examples where focus and niche appeal can outrank massively large brands- take for example service and product reviews... it's almost always the small guys that surface between position 1-5.
One of my sites, for example, outranks WebMD for the phrase "Insanity workout review" 40,000 plus searches per month back in the day (though they've now conquered the zero position by appearing within the featured snippet).
This ranking alone- which we managed to keep for more than 3 years- encouraged us to pursue similar keywords and phrases and understand user demand in the fitness industry way better (600+ comments, and countless e-mails have arrived for that piece of content alone). In revenue terms it has brought the larger percent of a mid 5 figure, though with diminishing popularity recently it is now bringing way way way less, lots of e-mail subscribers, as well as given us a growth opportunity which we were working on for the last year- creating our own workout platform including video, customized programs run by a smart algorithm, nutrition algorithms and recipe databases etc. We are launching in one month so wish us luck :)
My point is this- it can go way past the obvious "rank higher" mindset, and actually build a business out of organic traffic that later evolves into something else entirely!
Another great example of a smaller business content outranking massively large companies is WaitButBwhy's Fermi paradox. Scientific American, Space.com, Gizmodo, and SETI all line up behind Tim's detailed and authentic writing.
A segment of this topic which is not tied directly to Google, but YouTube instead is even more convincing. Just see how many solo-entrepreneurs rank organically in YouTube, and outrank massive brands. If you search fitness related phrases, there is almost never a Nike, or an Equinox or a BeachBody listing there... Instead, we see Cassey Ho, and the Buff Brothers (the coolest guys ever). The content is way more authentic, way more niche, and goes into insane detail. This helps them to transition to other business models aside of video as well- the Buff Brothers for example have opened a branded clothing and accessory shop, and created a massive brand as well. Some transition to blogs, podcasts, and create top of the funnel content that spans across many verticals.
Amazing topic for discussion. There are so many opportunities, and this is a really motivational and reassuring video that sets the perfect tone. I wish it was there back when I started.
Awesome examples Slavko and congrats on the progress with your workout site! That's damn impressive sir.
Thanks Rand, great WBF!
Question 1 - I think humorous content could be a good way to get an upper hand on a big competitor. A lot of big companies might be afraid to upset potential clients, but if you understand your audience, you can take calculated risks that a big established company would avoid.
Can you help me with more tips for the real estate sector? We use the keywords real estate + our area or city but our work area its very hard and competitive and we need more tips for improve our results.
In Spain this is an open sector, and not have any regulation, so many people who wants open a new real estate, they create a website easily. So the competition for some keywords its to high.
Do you know another strategies?
Thank you so much
I would recommend some keyword research.
Just because "everyone" is targeting a specific set of keywords, it doesn't mean that there are no other relevant keywords with viable amounts of traffic that the competition has left out. Start with those first.
The key in your case is not so much having a lot of traffic - as much as that is nice in its own right......it's "potential clients"
You want serious people with serious intentions to buy to see your website....
What terms will those people use when searching?
Extremely useful WBF. I have seen that the corner of opportunity for small businesses to compete against the giants is to increase relevance. If you are extremely relevant for a particular query against a big brand which is not so relevant you are very likely to be ranked above them.
In the early part of my career , I have optimized several websites of small hotels having 30 to 50 rooms that had to compete against big travel agencies operating nationwide. I made sure that they had good content and photographs depicting the local area that they were located in and provided a lot of information that was being searched by people interested in visiting that area.
In this way I was able to increase the visitors by a great extent. In some cases by over 300%. (I have detailed two such cases in case studies on my website)
Yeah - the amount of effort you can put into a single page targeting a single keyword (or small, similar group) is one of the big advantages I think. And agree that relevance can play a role in that. Bigcos have to appeal to multiple audiences; small companies can choose to serve one group really, really well.
mr. rand, spot on; as if you were an expert ;) the only example from us that isn't exactly like you explained, would similar to keyword bidding, but bidding on pla campaigns with lower prices. I've found big brands to be slow to react on this or not at all. I've also found our customers to be smart enough to find out. -brooke
Interesting to hear your experience. I would have assumed bigcos would jump all over new ad opportunities and throw plenty of dollars at them, too, but product listing ads having openings is fascinating.
Hello Rand,
Great WB Friday this week.
One example for small site which outrank big brands is Backlinko by Brain Dean.
Im a big fan of Backlinko. Great content for newbies like myself. 17 untapped backlink sources is my starting point for SEO
Hello Rand,
Thank you for the video. It was informative and straight to the point. The information you provided is very helpful indeed!
As far as What I would add to the discussion - other than the wealth of knowledge that's already been shared -
1- I would say that running a "small" website allows for more room for a "personal" description meta tag. Big companies/websites often have a very impersonal, "catch all," generic descriptions in SERPS.
2- The Term "Bali Villa" - which has quite a bit of traffic - has small websites ranking higher than TripAdvisor
I don't know about the rest of you guys but I am more inclined to click on links that feel more"personal."
I am curious what advice you guys would have for someone trying to build a website featuring a single real estate property. All the SERPs for all the keywords I am targeting are dominated by poorly-optimized local real estate agent websites that have mediocre speed performance.
Most of their domain names are at least older than 10 years and most of their websites have tons and tons of listings.
It seems like the exact issue you address in the this very informative video.
Edit:
I'd also like to add that speed is a great advantage for smaller websites - unless we are talking about the ability to pay a lot for enterprise-grade hosting. If you are targeting a very specific set of visitors, then there is no need to have a lot of very fancy extras on your website. You can run a very lite website and still make it look great while serving all of your visitors needs.
Optimizing for speed is a much easier thing to do when you only need a handful of functions to make your small website run the way you want it.
Also, presuming that big corporations mostly serve dynamic pages to first time visitors - mostly due to the sheer number of webpages they have - I can say that the ability to serve static pages - as opposed to dynamically generated ones - to first time visitors is a big plus for small websites.
Hi Rand
We are in the same market as Expedia so i found this article very interesting, anyway we decided to provide a backpacking guide for people coming to Australia, we wanted to provide 10 x content and some more. in the end we wrote a 15,000 word article, available in every language, broken down in weather, climate, distances, safety, embassy, emergency contact number and social shares. You name it and it was written, it was even donwloadable to pdf for backpackers heading over here.
We were so surprised to overtake the likes of trip advisor in a matter of a couple of weeks, we are now ranking number 2 in Australia for the keyword Backpacking Advice Australia and ranking globally very very well. It just goes to show that providing something that no one else like expedia can come near too simply works.
not saying who we are as i am not promoting our travel comparison website, but if you are curious you can google the above keyword just to prove a point.
So to all you small businesses out there like us, try everything Rand said and then go that extra mile to provide quality content to your users.
Congrats! That's a great example, and very impressive stuff. I'll link to the SERP here: https://www.google.com/search?q=Backpacking+Advice...
Hello Rand
For your 2nd discussion point, my blog is going to be an example very soon. ;)
Rand thanks for your advice and recommendations. I would add to your list to collaborate with other small businesses, conjunos organizing events (sports, workshops ...), writing articles for the blog, etc.
The "Competitor 1 vs Competitor 2 vs Us" is a great traffic grabber. I did this for a client and within weeks the page started pulling quite a bit of traffic. It was a local car resto site so we're not talking tens of thousands of visits, but the page worked as a great leadgen for the guy... so much so that he once shared that most of the shop expenses get covered with business he gets from this one single blog post.
Best thing for me of having your own business / site is that you will always be able to update and try anything you want and check the results. So Optimizing your site can always be a priority and therefore you can see how weel or bad the performance goes and do the neccesary changes.
Whereas in a big company sometimes only changing some colours requires a long decision chain which slows things down...
Thanks for sharing!
David
to do this takes a lot of time and concentration, thanks to share your
Hey Rand!
All your 5 tactics look very effective for small business to compete against bigger. will surely go for it.
Effectively we are a small web/company and we hope we could gain positions, mostly beating great e-commerce, following your advising and focusing on actions they don't go for them. That's the key. Thanks for your article!
Hello Rand,
Good tips, but I do feel that we are increasingly getting to a position where money plays a big role in search rankings. You need to invest a lot of money and time to rank well. While nimbleness and creativity is a strength that small companies might have, let us not underestimate professionals who work for large companies.
Yes Niche and Focus are definite strong points for smaller players and one should use them to the hilt.
Google SERPs are increasingly getting geared toward the richer players who can spend money and dominate keyword rankings through heavy content and adword marketing.
I hear you, but I think this thread and all the examples folks have shared show that there's still opportunity for the smaller players, even when they're outgunned by a lot of money.
Speaking of Adwords - can it be confirmed whether or not AdWords has an impact (direct or indirect) on the SERPs? Sure, the channels that consumers go through to end up to a conversion can be a mix of paid, direct and organic traffic. But what about the SERPs themselves?
Best,
I love that this article takes the position that the vast majority of businesses find themselves in: David vs Goliath. How can they compete or win?
Just about two years ago we worked with a SMB women-owned brick & mortar business that competes online for RFQs against many much larger businesses. We knew we couldn't compete in the SEO space on the generic keywords that drive that business, so instead we looked for targeted queries and optimized for them [case study]
SMB need to look inward to create strategies that enable them to compete. And like you said, they need to look around the edges and be nimble to accomplish their goals.
This is what I really need. What can be the process of SEO in running a small business. Thank you for sharing Rands!
Hi Rand,
thank you, again a great article - big fan of your videos.
I'm not sure in which basket I should put my eggs? It's also more a guess than it comes from own experience.
How about to forecast, to foresee something. Like Monsoon times in India. It's not really difficult to forecast this situation and you could go for something like: 5 Traveling tips to India in the Monsoon time (Nov.-Dec.)
I'm sure that would be really interesting for backpackers who are plaining their trip by this time.
My question to you: Would it be better for the success of such an article and to receive more viewers (from SEO point), if it would be launched at that particular time or doesn't make it any difference?
Regards
Andre
Hey Rand,
Great WB! This is the first time jumping in on the discussion. We are a small DIY closet company and were getting really bad results targeting and competing with the big stores for the classic closet organization content. After realizing the flexibility we have as a small company, we actually built a really DIY project and posted on many forums. We saw a huge traffic spike! (huge is relative of course) I'm not so sure big companies would take the time to actually physically tackle such a project as opposed to researching and curating content of HOW to do it.
Just to point out another advantage small companies have. . We have the best marketer in the world looking out for us and constantly giving us tips! Thank you Mr. Rand Fishkin !
This article is right up my alley. Instead of travel, my website focuses on real estate. We have our work cut out for us trying to hold our own against powerhouses like zillow, trulia, realtordotcom, and many others. Our advantage is providing more accurate local data on homes for sale because the info these website pull from is entered by realtors directly. Knowing the limitation of the software realtors use allows us to only upload accurate data on things like square footage, room dimensions, and appraisal value. Thanks for the info Rand!
For the Italian audience, here is the Italian transcription of this great Whitebaord Friday.
First of all great topic and detailed explanation Rand…
Usually I work with startups to achieve their online goals.
#4: Niche Appeal always works for me, I'll try other strategies as well. I am sure, it will help me to figure out my strategy in different direction.
Have just started work for brand new ecommerce store which has direct competition with some big brands like ebay, amazon etc... I got first order on 2nd day.
Thanks again and waiting for your next whiteboard...
Hi Rand - Great read! I have a topical question. A competitor in a niche travel destination sits at Google first page - position 3-5 for the niche travel's top keywords ( beating out much larger rivals in the space). In doing some research I discovered that they only have 10 backlinks on a 20 year old site and little-to-no social media activity. The backlinks are from a DA94 site ( web site design-hosting-SEO ) and the links are directory links ( listing a Caribbean villa company in ME!). The content is not unique - since it's shared on many rental web sites. The site is not mobile friendly ( not a bit ). They aren't using httpS. Images don't have good file names-tags-descriptions. It doesn't make any sense to me. But I'm sure there are some learning opportunities in figuring out "why".
So ... why is Google favoring this web site over others?
Thanks for the talk, Rand. I really like what you said about the way small businesses can go deeper and add more value in their content. The bigger brands have to approach content marketing like a numbers game, but it's different with small businesses. There's a world of difference between an article written by a writer who never heard of the topic till five minutes ago and one written by a business owner who spends huge amounts of time working on it!
I agree with many of your points but Suppose I am having an website on which I am giving packers & movers service in an particular city then in this case jazab98.ir what can be the niche and how can I compete with big website.
Very interesting topic and you succeed in clearing doubts about this topic. According to me some of the small companies also ranked in the top position because of SEO.
Great WBF, Rand!
On the topic of long-tail keywords... I find that the best opportunities often lie in keywords you are ALREADY ranking for (even if you're not getting any visitors). These are keywords in positions 20, 30, 50+.
In many cases it only takes a few tweaks to the existing content and a couple of strategically-placed internal links to get the URL on Page 1 for long-tail queries.
To find these keyword opportunities, the best source is probably Google Search Console, which gives data on impressions, positions and clicks. If you have hard time using GSC's interface, use a tool such as Search Console Helper (https://searchconsolehelper.com/), which works with GSC data but offers better experience and more powerful filtering features.
Hello,
very interesting. I really think that's your process. If you are a small structure, you need to be organized, to go b you workflow and you'll achieve. You'll reach your goal. Just keep in mind the feasibility and interest. Be optimist but realistic!
Great post!
Great video.
I use some of the techiques you mencioned
Hey Rand!
At the moment, after the Penguin 4.0 real-time update especially, I'm focusing on building authority via backlinks from guest blogging. Also, I write niche content using long tail keywords. The ever-changing scope of the Internet and marketing urges all of us to be up-to-date and most importantly adapt to the changes in a way that benefits us.
I'll bookmark some your handy tips.
Rand, I am always impressed by the content and quality of Moz's videos. Thanks so much for providing such valuable content to marketers like me! I am looking to create videos in the future for the company I work for in the human resources industry, and I'm curious if you would share what kind of video camera you are using to produce your content. Thanks so much!
Its Great article. I agree with you many small businesses can fight the big guys especially these days with Social Media and the internet. We had used these Technics for our client hotel site with their brand Fairfield Inn Marriott.
Hi Rand! Another great WBF!
I have too much to say about this, but I'll trying to be concise.
There's a mexican businessman called Enrique Gomez Gordillo. I appreaciate him too much. One of the things he say and you, Rand, took the same concept in this WBF is about advantages that small websites has. He says as metaphor that small business have to be localized in the parts where the giant's paw prints are not. For example, as you said, be specialized in our niche. The ecosystems are different. While a small enterprise (site) can specialize in client's attention, specific products, etc. bigger enterprises cannot, unless they become nimbleness, but is more difficult for them.
I encourage my clients to think as business people. If they study veterinary, medicine, etc. they have to think to businessman in this new world. World has changed, is not the same as it was when our parents had our ages or less. Marketing is also changing and competition is more aggressive. Thank you for this post Rand. Is just about, like Porter said, competitive advantage :)
A Hug. :)
P.s. I almost forgot. Answering your first question. I use to interchange with my clients their opinion in my website or facebook for a little price for them. That way they let other people now that the service is good and another people trust the site. :)
Remember: there are more interested people than good people. I mean, people always want to do something when they know that they will receive something. People don't act just for nothing.
Hey Rand,
Just awesome points you have mentioned. And, i would like to add two more to your five points.
1. Passion Drive: Whenever passion driven individuals start a small site or business on any niche, they always target the highest point. And, there is no doubt about "Aim the highest to achieve the most". That passion also keeps the self motivation level sustained and the competitors get in trouble to be outranked. What do you say ?
Afraz
My advice to small business owners would be to persevere.
Not particularly helpful, I know, but it's important to bear in mind that the big players are not necessarily doing anything "special" with their SEO which others are not capable of doing. The only advantage they do have is the budget to pump money into staff who can put a lot of man-hours into SEO within a shorter time frame.
They are not unlocking some kind of higher level SEO with their money. They can just do a lot more of it.
There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone matching the creativity, intellect and ingenuity these big companies use in their SEO. And indeed, it's certainly possible to exceed them. For example, one well written piece of content, which touches on a particular need, could generate far more natural backlinks than months of effort from a big player. Having a lot of money to spend on time, and being smart about SEO, do not necessarily go hand in hand.
I suppose the most important point is to not look at these big companies and give up before you've even started. Time must be used wisely, but rankings are not like an on/off switch. Any progress you make, even if it doesn't necessarily grab the most competitive rankings for now, will always generate a degree of long tail traffic which can convert well.
Just keep going. You might be surprised at what you can achieve even when the odds seem stacked against you.
Hey Rand, love this topic.
While watching I was thinking a franchise business model (or even a chain like Whole Foods that has local & national marketing) can get the benefit of both large and small (if done right):
Sure, there's lot of challenges with websites and local seo vs national seo with these business models, but if done right it's the best of both worlds.
Yeah - if they give the freedom and power to the individual locations to execute in their market without too much process, I agree it can be a great mix of both worlds. Pretty unusual though.
Hi Rand,
Great article. I agree many small businesses can fight the big guys especially these days with Social Media and the internet.
You touch on one of the core reasons for me when you talk about agility and innovation.
I find that smaller clients can be more effective with internet advertising (ie: Adwords in particular but also Facebook ads) because the "big, dumb businesses" they compete against just throw money at it. Usually it's passed over to someone in marketing who really doesn't know what they are doing.
A savvy small business owner who's taken the time to learn how this advertising works will beat them every time.
(removed link to website)
I believe a small player can beat the biggest player in the market from my own experience. I started my SEO consulting services - WebsiteFix only 3 months back and I wanted to rank for "SEO services Brisbane" one of the top Keywords all the top agencies are targeting. Within 3 months I'm on top of page 1 in Google for this keywords in Brisbane.
I followed every single thing in the SEO rule book and strong back links using white hat SEO techniques and was able to do it. I didn't even choose low competition keywords. However, I've to accept one thing that something I need to focus on is to get more links from similar niche as that was the only thing missing from my campaign.
Hi Rand
Very useful topic you are talking about this week.I have relevant experience about this Challenge.
I worked on some new small Online Markets about a year challenging against Big malls with high domain Authorities.
Our Da was about 10 at first and their Da was 52
We used high quality pictures and nice videos about each product in our Website.Moreover we added our price to big popular websites that keeps price of all IT products. We wroted nice Articles in some social networks like Linkedin and got huge traffics from there.
We tried long tail keywords and that was a great experience having too much visits and After 6 months we got better DA and alexa rank too.
Please Talk about these Challenging Topics more next week and about nice Linkbuilding examples that would be useful for small websites.
Thank you so much Rand for this really inspiring & useful video. I'm trying to establish two niche sites. Whenever I search on google, I see lots of big brands are already there on SERP with few niche sites. Now I understood how to proceed more smartly. This video boost up my confidence level. Thanks a million :)
Yeah - go for it! It's not impossible; just hard. Remember that the first 6 months may not show much progress. SEO is a long-term play.
Hi Rand,
Thank you for sharing your insights! I've actually been able to outrank the largest bodybuilding community in the world, Bodybuilding.com on the terms "Omega-3 in bodybuilding". For more than a year, my page: https://www.omega3movement.com/omega3-bodybuilding.... was #1 in SERP while Bodybuilding.com was #2, 3 and 4!! They have several articles about this topic.
The reason I've been able to outrank them was because of the tactics you've mentioned. I had put a lot more effort into promoting that one page. I'm sure Bodybuilding.com would not promote one page a few weeks or even months in a row.
Thank you for the insights. It's good to know that you could select a few key words that are really valable to you, create 10x content for them and spend more effort on promoting it.
Fascinating topic Rand.
This is something that is becoming more and more important for smaller sites. Just as smaller publishers can carve out a space for themselves online, so can smaller businesses. But, it does take hard work, and some of the margins are constantly being squeezed.
I've worked with a couple of what I'd call mid-sized travel sites in the UK. A big part of my work with them involved looking at the content that could target the long-tail and editorial keywords through better content. I've seen some sites go to town on targeting many half-popular variations. Now, the ability to do this at scale (utilising the expertise across the business, producing something more than placeholder content etc.) is a challenge. I guess what I'm saying is I was working on doing the same thing for some of the bigger fish!
I guess it comes down to the nimbleness mentioned - if you have a narrow set of targets then you can react. Create something excellent for that audience. Relying on relevancy to trump authority is always hard though. But it can be done, and more power to the folks doing it.
Something that doesn't seem to have been mentioned already - if you are targeting just a local market, it can pay to partner with other small businesses like yours in different geographical areas.
For example, we target a particular very competitive keyword in the UK and are interested in only UK traffic. We have partnered with firms like ours in the US, Australia etc., and we mention each other in articles, blog posts and the like. That has worked well for us and has pushed us to almost the top of the SERPs (fluctuates between #1 - #3 in Google UK) for this competitive KW... and at zero cost.
We are quite happy to link to our partners in the US and elsewhere even though they do exactly what we do... because they are not in competition with us.
We keep forgetting that most of today's big company sites were small businesses before, who also had to work on their creativity and focus - which allowed them more space or liberty, let's put it that way, to try different approaches.
That diversity is what made them big today - by my opinion. BUT, once they reached their high level, they simply "filtered" their approaches and narrowed them down to the most successful ones and put their entire focus there. That, by my opinion, makes them strong, BUT at the same time weak, because they've put themselves in the safe zone and crippled themselves for exploring other approaches that will keep them in future on the same position that they are today.
The main advantage of small business sites is definitely their ability to focus on their content marketing strategy turning their web marketing efforts on one specific thing! There's no doubt about that! That right there is their 'ace in sleeve'!
This was a great topic to cover Rand!
Hey, Really fantastic article you shared. I am a new marketer. I learned few new things on internet marketing from this article. I very much appreciate your article. Thank you!!!
Another thing that small brands can have over big ones, is the human connection. When you are dealing with a brand that has a huge amount of visitors, the interaction with them can be a lot robotic, or cold.
But with a small brand, you can be very customer friendly, responding to emails personally in a beautiful way, or simply making visitors feel good that they've visited you. People wants a place where they can connect, and I believe that is the great advantage of small businesses.
For example, last year I changed my hosting provider because on the last one was very hard to get assistance and usually, their responses were like they were written by robots. The other brand that won me as a customer had such a beautiful live chat assistance, where I actually felt understood and connected, that I was instantly mesmerized by their services.
So, here is one good point to add to small businesses advantages: human connection.
Great Topic, Rand! Thanks for discussing this. All very good points. I'd like to add that smaller businesses could also get away with writing about more controversial topics, whereas a larger company may avoid the controversy for PR or legal reasons.
Hi Rand,
I agree with many of your points but Suppose I am having an website on which I am giving packers & movers service in an particular city then in this case what can be the niche and how can I compete with big website.
Locales are probably your big keyword advantage, and being in the local area means you can rank in maps results where bigcos who aren't local to the region may not necessarily be able to (and even if they do, you can use your neighborhood/regional connections to get better links/citations/mentions).
Arun,
There are probably some content marketing opportunities specific for your city, and related to moving/new arrivals. Maybe a guide for dealing with the local utility company when you need to turn off your service at one house and establish it at your new house? Or a guide to the best local flea-markets for selling the stuff you don't want to move, or best thrift stores for finding furniture for your new house? 5 restaurants you should check out when you first move to our city... The possibilities are endless.
Thanks for sharing such a useful and helpful video. I am working on a small project that sell gemstones online. There are many big brands in that niche and I am looking for such a video that help me come out of that problem. Now I can work on these tips to get more visitors to my website. I am also using social media in a similar way you mentioned in the video.
Because larger companies and brands tend to operate at scale, you can compete on personalization and quality. It will narrow your competitors and audience, as all these options tend to do, and because increased personalization and quality will drive costs higher, you should also consider combining it with one of Rand's other suggestions in order to help boost your chances of success even higher.
Hey Rand , Mohsin this side from Pakistan , met you in spice bazar and i can totally relate your long tail key words examples :p Big shops to shop in istanbul , Spice bazar lolx .... great post .. following your guidelines