The big boys and girls in your industry; you know who they are. You know they have a huge traffic base that come back time and time again. You know they have years of content and thousands, if not millions, of prized inbound links. But, SEO is not a volume game anymore. Your SEO marketing can actually compete with the giants of your profession or industry.
You just need to do a few things…
Go small and then go long…
The most competitive way to take advantage of your larger rivals is to get small and scale down on your expertise. Don’t try and be everything to everyone. If you are a contractor, you can’t be everything like Lowe’s. So, find a niche and work those keywords. Working a small stable of keywords will, eventually, pay off with higher SEO effectiveness and SERP ranks than the big guys in your arena.
Next is to stop focusing your SEO on small keywords that everyone is using. Find those less popular words and extend them out into actual search phrases or long tail keyword phrases. These will have a huge effect on your rankings. Google focuses big on these long tail phrases as their SEO rules are now leaning more toward how people actually search.
Be where you are and be an expert…
The way to beat the your bigger competitors is to stay as local as you can. Your SEO marketing strategy must be aimed at dominating local search. You need to get out into your local community and region and get known. Encourage great reviews at such sites as Yelp because Google’s Pigeon update has give strong reviews a huge priority over sites and businesses that are receiving negative reviews. Get specific and highly local with your search words and especially with your content. Be relevant, be the giant right where you are.
Get as personal as you can out on social media. Let everyone know that there are people behind your company and that you can reach out to them anytime. The more personal you get the stronger your brand and your image gets and the stronger the separation from your larger rivals. Finally, become a true leader and expert in what you do. Every piece of content that goes out there must reflect your unquestioned authority in your field.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
