SEO question

At the risk of sounding trite: Either don't do what everyone else is doing, or somehow do it way better.

Depending on the skill of your competition and the maturity of your industry, it might not be that hard to outdo your competitors. I've often seen it come down to one party just getting more creative with their keyword targeting, as a result of being willing to work harder to identify good keywords.

If you go the "don't do what others are doing" route, this usually involves picking a more specific or tangential niche.

First, try to get this SEO multiplier right.

If Google were to send you 1000 non-brand organic visitors today:

• how many of these visitors would remember your brand and perform at least one brand search and click to your site in the future?
• how many of these visitors would be so impressed with your site and would preferably click to pages on your site for non-brand searches in the future?

The more visitors you turn into fans, the easier you will find it to outrank your competitors.

If out of 1000 visitors, you get just 2 to search for your brand in the future, and your competitors get 15 of 1000, then your only chance is to have much better backlinks.

Some businesses cannot naturally produce repeat/high-intent brand searches.

Example: if you sell a desktop app that solves a problem and does not need to be updated, you would find it very difficult to generate brand searches/returning visitors compared to a SAAS that is used daily.

A recent client of mine sells high-quality and cheap natural cosmetics. The site is the exclusive seller for the brand in my country. Customers love the products so much, that they buy over and over and tell their friends about it. The brand queries grow steadily, the site gets higher rankings with every update and outranks competitors with much better backlink profiles.

The products and exclusivity is the SEO multiplier here.

Another example: I've been researching gaming laptops for the last 30 days. I've been reading loads of reviews. Now when I search for a review I only click to certain sites that I know have all the information that I want. I bet Google is picking this signal and it is good for these sites' rankings.

When you get a high percentage of your traffic to love and seek your brand/site, you can easily scale with paid traffic. Everything gets easier.

If you compete in niches not dominated by brands, then you need loads of backlinks.

I would start by getting a trial for Ahrefs and getting all of my competitors' backlinks. See what they do and try to at least go to their level and then beyond.

What are your sales like now? If you have customers, ask them how they found you, talk to them and find out what exactly they did to find you. Then use their language to write content that solves their problem. You can also try comparison posts, alternatives to posts.

Don't discount video, social, side projects. SEO doesn't have to be "I gotta write a 1000 word article every week" type of deal. It can be, if that's your thing, but doesn't have to be.

Keyword research is essential to understand your target keywords, select keywords people in your product want. If you can test via PPC to find your best performers, then do so.

Always look to combine PPC / Organic / Social and other advertising forms.

In my view you outdo competitors through the context within your business, as well as the strategies and tactics you employ.

I currently beat a long list of major brands in my space in the UK by making sure we have the best content and tech and through using a variety of link tactics. Further, I have systems in place with both my team and other teams within my business that help us to maintain a best in class performance in what we consider to be key areas...which I expect is hard for competitors to replicate.

I also think it's important to have the right internal perceptions and motivations regarding SEO; it's not advertising, which is for obvious reasons a lot easier to rationalise, and struggles to justify every request as it's all part of a wider best practice driven approach to optimisations.

If your company expects ROI for a single image change or line of text amend it's going to produce a lot of friction; which in a competitive space ends up holding your efforts back.

Also, links spend is often quite a lot of money, with potentially the upside coming many weeks or months away...if ever!

I hope this helps, it's admittedly very top level so drop me an email if want examples of specific tactics we use which our competitors don't.

Good Luck

There is no unique SEO, but different strategy. Understand your path and competition, create a long term plan, and start work on it.

I think the key to the best SEO strategies is to consistently publish good content. This requires a lot of effort over time and I can guarantee you that most people will not actually do this. Either the content will not be good, or they will be inconsistent, or just give up (I've done that myself).

In the end, time and effort will be your biggest differentiator! But you shouldn't forget about low-hanging fruit like meta tags, img alts, etc.