Hello everybody, welcome to Surge. This week we will talk about five tricks that big brands use to dominate search results.
Number one is relevant weekly content. Number two, online PR and backlinking. Number three, product buying guides. Number four, a multichannel approach to displaying your eCommerce products. And number five is strategic relationships.
We get these strategies and questions a lot. Our job as Optimum7, as a marketing agency, is to guide our clients in the right direction in terms of how they can compete with big brands. Let’s break this down.
1. Content Marketing: Publish Relevant Content Consistently
Number one: relevant weekly content and relevant blog posts. What are we talking about here?
We’re talking about creating quality content on your site. The content will then, in turn, give you a chance to be visible for those specific search terms on Google.
Small businesses don’t always have a tremendous budget for an ad campaign to appear on the top page of Google. Relevant content allows them to now put in sweat equity into a piece of content that could then potentially rank organically on page one.
Let’s say I sell CBD products, specifically oil. What type of content can I write? This space is already very saturated.
It’s extremely competitive. Type in the search term that you think is the most valuable for your business. Whether it would be natural CBD or CBD for pets, depending on your product offer or service. Look at the first five page results.
What type of content are they creating? Is it a blog post or a buying guide? Does that content have videos or infographics? Answer all of these questions.
Identifying what those top five winners are doing. You need to emulate their strategies and make sure that your content is 10 times better than theirs.
2. Link Building for the Big Boys: Online PR, Backlinks, and Media Mentions
Let’s talk about online PR. We say online PR, but we’re really talking about guest blog posts, backlinks, media mentions.
Why is this so important for SEO?
This allows you to acquire backlinks. These will, in turn, increase your domain authority. Larger brands have high domain authority. Either they’ve been around for a very long time or they’ve had the money and the resources to acquire high-quality backlinks.
From a small business standpoint, online PR still needs to get done. You just may not be able to do it at the same pace. However, there are multiple resources that you can use to acquire guest posts and backlinking and online PR. It’s just a matter of how many resources you can apply to it on a monthly basis.
Instead of focusing on thousands of terms, like big companies, you really focus on three to five pages. Work on those first, do a strategy for a few months or maybe 45 days. Nail that down and then go to the next batch of keyword universes.
Product buying guides. We say this a lot. We’ve been saying this for years. Why is this so important?
There are tons of websites out there selling the same exact product. How do you now differentiate your product on your site from someone else’s site that’s selling the same exact product? A lot of these product descriptions and specifications are coming from the manufacturer themselves.
A product buying guide allows you to take that content, elaborate and make it a lot more interesting. Whatever you need to do to kind of sell that product, it now gives you just a whole other resource. You may even develop a whole other platform to promote that product. With product buying guides, you’re guiding the buyer in the right direction. Then they will always convert better.
3. Long-Term Multichannel Marketing Strategies: Maximizing Touchpoints
Number four: the multi-channel approach, talk to us about that. What do we mean by multichannel?
The multichannel approach means you need to be focusing on each and every touchpoint online. These include Google organic, content and backlinking to Google Ads, Google Shopping or YouTube, All of these are multiple channels that you can utilize to showcase your brand and potentially increase your overall visibility online.
Back in the day, you could have gotten away with just focusing on one channel alone to grow your business. However, now in 2020 that is not the case. You need to have an omnichannel approach. You need to be on each and every one of these platforms if you want to truly increase your online visibility.
When you’re talking about a Google search for any term, you’re looking at the organic search, the Google search results, Google Local, Google News, YouTube videos, and Google Shopping. Your products will show up on potentially any of these pages.
Only targeting these channels, you can actually have multiple results on the first page, thus increasing your possibility of getting a click-through rate and a conversion. This is what big brands do all the time. Search for any home appliance. You’re going to see Amazon on ads, Amazon on Google Shopping.
Consider Amazon with their product listings. You might say, “Hey, how am I going to compete with Amazon?”
Remember, you need to specialize. Identify those really unique keywords that you want to rank for and the targeted keyword universes where you need visibility Even though it won’t have a large amount of search volume, like the terms that Amazon is targeting, you’re going to get some traffic. In addition, you will have a higher click-through rate and conversion rate.
5. Forming Strategic Relationships with Non Competitive Partners
The last trick is strategic relationships. What do we mean by that?
Big brands collaborate with other non competitive partners. Small businesses can do the same. We have multiple clients of ours who have done strategic partnerships with other companies of similar stature that will compliment their brand. It could either be through selling their products on their site or it could be coming together with an adjoined budget for advertising that they would then, push across both of their platforms.
There are multiple ways that you can do this from a partnership standpoint as a small business.
For example, if you go to Google and type top CBD oils or top CBD oils for pets, you’re going to see some blog posts.
Some of these blog posts are not offering products and they don’t sell products. They just do content. It would make sense if you sell CBD oil for pets to reach out to these blog posts and say, “Hey, how can I be featured in this article that’s on page one of Google?”
These relationships will allow you to get targeted traffic without even ranking for the term with your own site. Then you are leveraging these strategic relationships.
Those are the five tricks to compete with big brands on organic search results. If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We’ll talk to you next week.
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