Search engine optimization (SEO) is a king among digital marketing strategies, but its value comes with a massive downside: competition. If you have tough competitors in your space, they may already occupy the highest rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), making them seemingly impossible to dethrone.
Even confident, experienced optimizers are forced to ask: is it even worth trying to challenge them?
The short answer is yes, but you’ll need some alternative strategies to do it. Below are three of the best.
1: Go Local (or Find a Noncompetitive Niche)
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Your first option is to go local, optimizing for keywords and phrases that are only relevant to one geographic location. The goal here is to find an area where your biggest competitors aren’t active – so you can avoid the competition rather than facing them head on.
Targeting a local area may reduce your total reach; it should make sense to you that Fort Wayne SEO is smaller and more localized than national SEO. But you’ll have a much easier time reaching the top of the SERPs for local search results (especially if you don’t have major competitors practicing local SEO). On top of that, you’ll have an opportunity to create and promote much more relevant content for local audiences.
Practicing local SEO is very similar to practicing SEO on a national level. You’ll still need an abundance of high-quality, onsite content, offsite link building practices, and an intelligent keyword targeting strategy. The only real differences are that you’ll need to focus on locally relevant terms (like “hot dog restaurant Atlanta” rather than “hot dog restaurant”) and that you’ll need to optimize your local listings and citations. Your Google Business Profile is the best place to start here.
Similarly, you could try to fill any specific niche that your competitors aren’t currently touching. Again, the tradeoff is reduced volume and reach in exchange for greater relevance and less competition. Is there a demographic underserved by your competition? Can you launch a new product or service? Can you optimize for hyper-specific, long-tail phrases?
2: Siphon Traffic With Branded Terms
Another option is to siphon traffic by using your competitors’ branded keyword terms against them. Ordinarily, targeting the branded keywords of a competitor’s website is a fool’s errand. Branded keywords are some of the most powerful assets held by a given domain; when a customer searches for McDonald’s, it’s inevitable that McDonald’s will show up at the top of the SERPs, as this is clearly the company that the user is searching for.
You can’t hope to dethrone a competitor from rank one for their own branded keywords – but what you can do is earn second place with a piece of compelling content. The goal is to siphon traffic away from your competitors in a territory where they expect to be universally dominant – and if you create strong enough content, you can make a huge impact.
Let’s say you make and sell natural cleaning products. Your top competitor is a company called “CleanItAllNow.” Naturally, they dominate the SERPs for practically all phrases that include the term “CleanItAllNow.” But you can write a piece of content along the lines of “Read This Before You Use CleanItAllNow Products” or “Are CleanItAllNow Products Really as Good as They Claim to Be?”
If you can optimize it sufficiently, you can reach rank two – and everyone searching for CleanItAllNow is going to want to hear what you have to say about them.
Granted, this is a relatively narrow strategy, but it can help you compete in a space where you’d otherwise have little hope of achieving visibility.
3: Beat Them With Brute Force
The final option isn’t going to be accessible to every business, because it takes significant time and money. But if you have the resources and the will to do so, you can beat all but the toughest competitors with brute force.
Strategy is essential here, no matter how much money you have to spend. You need to understand where and how your competitors are dominant, then find a way to one-up them. For example, they may have a landmark piece of content optimized for a commonly searched keyword phrase in your niche; how do you produce one that’s even better? They may have an expansive backlink profile that has taken years to build; how do you mimic all the links they currently have, then build even more?
Since this is such a challenging and intensive approach, you’re going to need help. Working with an SEO agency or building out an internal team of SEO experts are your best bets.
Don’t be discouraged if there’s a cluster of tough competitors at the top of SERPs for keywords relevant to your industry. With some careful planning and some willingness to think outside the box, you might just be able to depose them.