Written by Jose Vicente
Índice
Aleyda Solis is an international SEO consultant and speaker. He offers his consulting services through his company Orainti. Aleyda combines her profession with training, giving lectures on online marketing in different countries.
How to position yourself in competitive sectors
In many occasions we start working with new online brands that compete against big brands that get many of the top positions because of their great reputation. Big brands have big advantages because of their size and reputation, but this can present weaknesses.
SEO is no longer about rankings but about improving visibility and maximizing conversion within our website. Maps, social graphs, apps, etc. have appeared and with these tools we have to develop our SEO strategy in order not to compete with big competitors in positions.
Large companies have great resources and high authority but are slow, inflexible, very generic and not localized. In small companies we must play with speed, flexibility and localization. We must focus on query variants with less competition but that connect more with our users. In the meantime, we must develop our popularity strategy with links that will help us to shorten the distance with our competition.
If we do not have the resources, we should always consider the possibility of using automatic tools in favor of speed in order to position ourselves before our competitors. This is due to the fact that in large companies, tasks must go through more phases that slow down any process.
Localize our presence, analyze whether we can compete in lines of business that our competitors are not so strongly committed to.
Relevance
Tricks for executing this type of strategy:
- Focus on KWs with less competition but that connect with our business and increase our visibility.
- It can also be interesting to identify terms that are not being used by the competition and are a business opportunity for us.
- Identify the devices used by users for each type of query, verify mobile relevance.
We should ask ourselves what terms we should prioritize to gain more visibility in the short term and what kind of functionalities can give us visibility: videos, images, maps, etc. Although some informational terms may seem less attractive than transactional terms, we must keep in mind that these also play a role in conversion and are usually easier to position. Another interesting analysis is to check whether the competition is positioned by relevance or popularity. In this type of analysis we can find weaknesses in the competition where we can position ourselves.
Popularity
As in any other project, we must not neglect popularity. Even if we can’t initially get the popularity level of our competitors, we must analyze their link profile to know where they get their strategy from. Based on this we can establish a link building strategy focused on shortening distances.
Automation of processes in our SEO campaigns
The use of tools that automate the tracking and processing of our site’s data will allow us to react in a more agile way than our big players. Although the quality of automated tasks may not be as high as if they were done manually, the benefit of speed may outweigh the loss of quality due to automation. The positioning improvement process must be very agile, with very short iterations, verifying in each one of them the data offered by the tools we use. We must be agile, as opposed to the slowness of processes in large companies.
If we have apps, we can start indexing their content to maximize our visibility. If we have flexibility, we can even use alternative platforms to diversify our presence.
Local / international
Local search can also be competitive and is full of aggregators, we must maximize our visibility in the local ecosystem. Working on the on page focused on local can help us in this sense. Remember that aggregators cannot be in Google Local and we can benefit from it.
In conclusion, with consistency in strategy and effective execution, users arrive.
