Just like any other industry in the world, the SEO landscape is dominated by a couple of big players that seemingly are able to throw all kinds of weight behind any and all efforts they undertake. And while you might not be dealing with a beast of this size in your specific niche right now, you can rest assured that you’ll have to contend with one sooner or later – the world is only getting more and more connected as we go along and you will feel the encroachment before too long.
But regardless of whether or not you’re trying to shake a monster of a competitor or just want to future proof yourself a bit, there are some things you can begin to do now to make a real difference in your SEO efforts and slay Goliath, as it were.
The first and most important thing you have to realize about going up against the industry titans of the SEO world is that the web is completely and totally unbiased and favors know one
This is so critically important to your success online that believing anything else will cripple you almost instantly and regardless of how much time and money you invest you’ll fall on your face. The internet doesn’t care how much your ad budget is, how many professionals you have on your team, or how likely you are to outsource your work to drones in a different time zone – it is completely neutral to anyone and everyone’s efforts. This is important to realize for this reason – no matter what advantage the big dogs in your industry are able to bring to play there will always – ALWAYS! – be another advantage that you can press to stay right in the hunt or even surpass them. With the way the web works today it’s becoming more and more unlikely that anyone will be able to the corner the market without rapid innovation, and as you’ll see that’s one of the biggest things that most titans struggle with. They use it in the beginning to become the beast that they are but then quickly look to build fences around what works only to watch their market share get stolen by smaller and lighter weight solutions.
The second component to beating the beasts of the SEO world is doing as much research as humanly possible and living and dying by data alone
Another advantage that you need to press is the fact that you can study all of the moves that the big spenders are making and then tweak and test them to make them more effective. Big companies have a tendency to get more than a little bit lax in their testing departments, and because of the proliferation of the SEO spying tools on the market just about anyone can copy and adapt a strategy that is working. Research is going to be your magic weapon, but you need to make sure you are using it as smartly and effectively as possible.
About Joel Mayer
“Research is going to be your magic weapon” – well, I have been doing some to learn more about it. Now I hear about a new SEO phrase, “blue hat seo.”
C’mon, not only do I need to read about white seo & black seo – now blue seo! The SEO world as you put it, is going color blind! In a few yrs from now, there will be gray, yellow, red seo!