Looking sideways at SEO

How do you compete online when your competitors are much bigger, and much better established than you - when they have your essential search terms all sown up?

We get asked this a lot, unfortunately there are very few industries which do not have a few big sites that are hogging the limelight and it makes it difficult for small businesses new to the internet so we thought we would share some of our thoughts on best practices to achieve a good result in search engines. Many of these also apply to larger businesses and traditional methods are still valid - these are simply supplemental to your normal SEO efforts to try and get results faster.

Go for the long tail of search

One of the most important thing you can do to get search traffic to your site is to go for the long tail of search, using one of our recent clients as an example - Jill Herdsman's excellent independentdebtsolutions.com - she was trying to compete for some very difficult search terms - "debt assistance" and some related terms. Initially it would be a monumental task to muscle in on the results for these terms so we suggested a different tactic. Aim for volume of long tail search results: instead of "debt assistance" try to win "debt assistance for sole trader businesses" and "debt assistance for homeowners" - these are still tough but much more achievable.

Blog blog blog!

The tricky part is making sure you get as many as possible and your efforts need to take this into account, a good content strategy is essential. Blogging is a great idea as you will eventually start to cover many of the long tail searches but you need to ensure the posts are very high quality resources and build as many links to them as possible (as you should with all of your website - though linking to pages other than your home site is called "deep linking" and has it's own special rewards). You could also try something more interesting such as an "ask to answer" section or guide articles and resources - the same principle applies and you will start to pick up more unique search traffic - and of course your normal SEO efforts still fit into this method.