Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries | Part 1

At BrightonSEO San Diego 2024, our CEO offered some smart insights from which every business looking to improve their search engine optimisation can learn. Below, you can read the first part of Peter’s talk, ‘Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries’, which covers why many SEOs and agencies decide to specialise in particular industries.

If you'd like to see the accompanying slides, you can find them here.

Let’s jump right in!

I’m Peter Van Zelst. I am the founder and CEO of Zelst, an SEO and PPC agency based in the UK. We have a team of skilled specialists based in our office in Harrogate, Yorkshire. We provide white-label SEO and PPC management services to US and UK agencies and direct-to-client SEO and PPC management in the UK.

My talk here today, Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries, is probably going to be a little contentious.

I know many of you/many agencies focus on particular verticals or specific industries, such as tech, pharma, medical, realtors, law, etc., and I get that. It allows you to scale. You get to understand the industry, the players, the challenges and pain points, the seasonality, the regulations, and so on. It allows your team to fully understand the issues they’re facing and allows them to transfer that knowledge and those skills to the next client. It allows you to get to know the key influencers, journalists and authorities in that market and utilise that link knowledge across multiple clients.

It allows you to market yourself at industry events and in industry publications for laser-sharp targeting. It means that CMOs can move from company to company in that market and take you with them. There are so many advantages, and you can make so much more money, so what’s wrong with focusing on a specific industry or niche?

As that’s what my talk is about, I guess I need to tell you. Before we go there, let's look at tactics and strategy and what we mean by them.

Strategy

A strategy is a plan for achieving long-term goals, and it defines the "what" and "why" and where you are heading. Strategies are formulated and crafted. They are premeditated and involve anticipating the actions of others.

Tactics

Tactics are the specific actions taken to carry out a strategy, and they focus on the "how". Tactics are usually immediate and focused on short-term outcomes. They are often centred around using available resources efficiently.

Here’s a couple of quotes from my old friend Sun Tzu:

Or, to paraphrase, most people can see the tactics that achieve results, but few see the strategy behind them that allows you to win.

When I founded Zelst in 2006, I felt it was only ethical to work with one business in a sector to avoid conflicts of interest. Even back in those days, the vast majority of clicks on a SERP went to the top three positions, so how could you work on getting client A to the top of the page while also promising to do the same for clients B and C?

Fundamentally, SEO is a zero-sum game. If I take a rank from you, I gain visibility and traffic, and you lose it. If you want to position your client as the market leader, you need to develop a strategy that will take rankings from the sites currently at the top.

While I get why companies might seek agencies with experience in their industry and believe this is great for things like web design and build, how can it work for SEO and PPC agencies?

When I did my MBA back in the early 2000s, Michael Porter’s work on competitive strategy and his three generic competitive strategies resonated with me. Key to this was the concept that the most profitable companies were also the leaders who dominated their industry, market segment or niche. Industry profitability was significantly affected when there was a high level of competition and no dominant players.

As our agency grew and we got more clients to dominate their vertical, we saw for real Porter's theories in action. The companies at the top of the Google SERP dominated the vertical, got the most sales, dominated the market, were able to charge higher prices, achieved the most efficiencies, and so on.

When you’re developing your agency, you want to achieve great results and develop successful and profitable clients. We also saw the reverse, where prospects would talk to us who weren’t highly visible in search and were struggling for sales, and profits were suffering.

So that’s business, but what’s Harvard Professor Michael Porter and competitive strategy got to do with SEO?

If you just want to ‘do’ SEO and follow a generic, tick-box approach, i.e., focus on the tactics, it has absolutely nothing to do with it. But if you want to develop an SEO strategy which will position your brand as the leader within its market and deliver superior profitability, then it's fundamental. An SEO strategy without a strategy is just SEO.

And, going back to the theme of my talk, Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries, if you do focus on industries as an SEO, then doing the tactics very well will be absolutely fine. It will deliver good SEO for your clients and probably achieve great ROI.

Industry specialists who deliver great tactics will achieve great results. However, SEO specialists who develop and implement a great strategy will deliver market leadership.

Let’s go back to Porter. Porter says that for companies to be successful, they need to adopt one of three strategies:

Now, I know this matrix has four strategies, but you’ll notice that the two bottom options are the same as the top. The difference is that you’re just slicing the market more finely to a segment or niche where you adopt one of those strategies. If you don’t, you risk being stuck in the middle and generally perform poorly.

That’s a wrap on the first part of Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries, now be sure to give part two a read. Peter will cover examples of Porter’s strategies in action and explain how you can develop an SEO strategy.

Have a question about Peter’s talk or SEO strategies in general? Please don’t hesitate to contact us. We can guide you through a range of services, from keyword research and local SEO to technical optimisation.

If you want to discover even more insights from San Diego, be sure to check out our Head of PPC Phoebe’s talk, Paid Strategies Shouldn’t be Flat-Packed.