Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries | Part 2

In part one of this talk, Peter covered why many agencies choose to specialise in particular industries and discussed Harvard Professor Michael Porter’s competitive strategies. In this part, he focuses more on how Porter’s strategies work and how you can develop an SEO strategy.

How do these strategies work? It’s possibly best to show you examples of companies adopting each of the strategies so you can better visualise:

The four companies I’ve just identified have a clear strategy, so developing an SEO strategy to support this is relatively simple. However, in the real world, for many of us, our clients are small to mid-market companies competing in markets. Many of these don’t have a marketing strategy or have objectives and ambitions that don’t match their resources. They rarely come to us with a carefully thought-out marketing strategy, with a detailed brief of our involvement in implementing this.

When we at Zelst take on a new client, if they don’t have a clear marketing strategy, we look to develop one with them for their search and digital marketing, which typically drives most of their business.

• Step 1: Get to Know the Business

This is not quick or easy. We fully immerse ourselves in their business, objectives, challenges, their products or services, pricing, current and past marketing and promotion, people, processes, target markets, competitors, and branding.

• Step 2: Get to Know the Target Audience

If the client has not defined its target markets, we start by analysing its existing site traffic and demographics and customer demographics to understand where it is currently most successful.

We also talk with the organisation to understand which markets they believe they are and/or should be most successful in. This might be a region, demographic, or particular product/service range.

From this analysis, we recommend their market, niche or area of focus and accept there will often be resistance, but as the saying goes, if you’re targeting everyone, you’re targeting no one.

• Step 3: Analyse Search

We can then work out how to best achieve dominance within that focus or niche. We work out how that demographic behaves, where they live online, what they search for, the language they use, etc. We can then clearly define the keyword terms we target and the content we need to produce to engage with that audience.

Although many clients will often believe we are too narrowly defining their market and limiting their potential, crucially in SEO, once you develop a foothold and start to rank for your initial target terms, you can start to target slightly broader or more challenging terms.

As an example, when we took on our wig client in the UK, it was in a very competitive market dominated by a number of big players. The company was ambitious but, at the time, had hardly any organic search traffic.

The company sold mainly ladies’ wigs, hairpieces, and accessories; its market was primarily people who needed a wig for medical reasons, such as sufferers of alopecia or cancer. It sold branded wigs, as opposed to cheap, imported, Chinese generic wigs, of which there are many.

The company's primary goal was to rank for ‘ladies wigs’, but we realised that would be very difficult at that time, so we proposed a different strategy.

Unfortunately, in search, there are few search terms for which there is no competition unless they are terms that no one searches for. However, there are SERPs for which there are not as many rivals competing.

Rather than going for a term for which all the main players were competing, we looked at areas where the competitors were weak. In this case, we targeted a number of informational searches where we could build visibility and also start linking from these pages to our target transactional and navigational terms. We also targeted brand category pages, as we saw that these were key pages in the transactional process but where competition was weak.

We created a list of short-term, medium-term and longer-term targets that we could share with the client so that they would know what to expect. SEO is all about momentum - once you start to rank for a few terms, it’s a lot easier to rank for other terms, and I knew that as we started to build our presence, we’d be able to compete for more and more difficult terms.

And that’s just what happened. Here’s a graph of what this looked like:

As we built ranks and traffic, we were able to compete for ever more challenging, higher search volume terms, eventually achieving their desire to rank #1 for ‘ladies wigs’, and ultimately ranking #1 for the term wigs.

In addition to delivering a strong strategy to achieve domination in its market, the company has over 2,500 top-three ranking positions and a Semrush search visibility of over 50%. This strategy also delivers early quick wins, which is often essential in earning stakeholder buy-in with any SEO project.

And, just like in targeting terms within a market niche, once you have gained momentum, you can start to target other markets. For instance, with our wig client, as well as the focus on wigs for medical reasons, they have moved into fashion wigs, wigs for men, headwear, and a few other areas.

You can view the slides for the Tactics vs Strategy: Why SEOs Shouldn’t Focus on Industries BrightonSEO talk here

If Peter’s talk has inspired you to improve your current SEO strategy, please feel free to get in touch with us. Our team at Zelst can assist you through our broad selection of services, from technical optimisation and keyword research to local SEO.

If you can’t get enough of our San Diego insights, read our Head of PPC Phoebe’s talk, Paid Strategies Shouldn’t be Flat-Packed.