Every business active online aspires to the highest search engine positions for the most popular and relevant terms – whether those are ‘health food’, ‘estate agents’, ‘country house hotel’ or something else entirely.
But of course, only a limited number of organisations can achieve first-page results for certain terms at any one time – in much the same way as not every company can afford to have a store on London’s Oxford Street or New York’s Madison Avenue. There’s just too much competition, which pushes the cost of that sought-after space to stratospheric levels.
It’s a similar story when it comes to the most competitive keywords online. It’s the very biggest companies that tend to occupy the loftiest positions, as those are the ones that can plough eye-watering sums into their SEO and PR budgets.
So, is there any way around this?
If, like the vast majority of online firms, you aren’t an Apple, Facebook or Coca-Cola, there has long been a widely accepted wisdom that you can’t expect to compete against the heavyweights – or at least, not by trying to play the game the same way they are.
There are, though, quite a few strategies that could deliver you success – even on a par with much better-established and well-known brands than your own.
One of these has long been to aim to rank well for less popular keywords which, when taken together, could give you search traffic similar to what you could achieve from ranking well for a single, more popular search term.
You’re likely to have a much better chance of attaining good rankings for ‘coffee shop in Camberwell’, for example, than ‘coffee shop in London’ or even ‘coffee shop in south London’.
But it doesn’t stop there…
You see, there are always examples that you can find of brands emerging seemingly from nowhere, having only been founded a few years ago, but somehow rising quickly to give many of the big boys a bloody nose.
Consider a brand like Fashion Nova, for instance, which has been noted for its ability to sometimes rank highly for competitive single-word keywords like ‘fashion’, despite its ecommerce site having launched as recently as 2013.
Sites like these put often much wealthier competitors in the shade through a variety of strategies, but often by targeting demographics and requirements that the bigger names ignore – such as, in the case of Fashion Nova, the underserved minority and plus-size markets.
These comparative minnows’ successes indicate that you should never be too fatalistic about your chances of competing with bigger names in your field. There may be all manner of neglected audiences that you could target, which is why you should also be looking to the social channels where those audiences are likely to be active.
Then, of course, there is the difference that a suitably comprehensive search engine optimisation and marketing package from a trusted web marketing agency can make – and there are quite a few such plans that we can offer you here at Piranha Designs.
Ask us today about our Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum SEO packages encompassing all of the elements – including keyword research, page optimisation, guest blogging and more – that could empower you to deal some serious blows to much bigger names in your industry.
