Monday SEO's - We’re Back! How to Outrank Big Brands. EXPLAINED

Hello again,

It’s been a few weeks, but now that I have returned from my honeymoon, Monday SEO's is back and ready to be better than ever before. There are a few things I have missed in the headlines since I went away, so here’s a condensed version of the news that grabbed my eye:

- Google is starting to translate SERPs into multiple languages.

- Open AI was hacked.

- Donald Trump has been unbanned from Meta platforms.

But here is what has interested me the most. I saw a clip on YouTube of Gary Illyes speaking at the recent SERP Conference in Bulgaria earlier this year. For those who don’t know, Gary Illyes is a leading search analyst at Google and has been for over 10 years now.

The question put to him was:

since Reddit and big publishers dominate the SERPs for many keywords, what can smaller brands and businesses do besides targeting long-tail keywords?

This is a question I have been asked many times before in my role and I believe it to be quite relevant to the majority of my newsletter subscribers.

How You Can Outrank Big Brands… and Reddit. Explained

Touched upon in previous newsletter editions, Reddit’s recent deal with Google has led to a massive influx of Reddit posts ranking strongly within the SERPs ever since. This is controversial for many due to the fact that Reddit is built on UGC (user generated content) and is clearly outranking the more knowledgeable expert content that is out there.

Google is still hesitant to admit any superiority of Reddit within the SERPs; however, users are seeing this daily for all types of searches.

This has raised the question for small businesses: how am I supposed to compete against big brand names and Reddit, who already dominate the search space?

You can watch the video of the conference yourself [here] if you’re not a fan of reading. However, if you weren't a fan of reading, why would you subscribe to a newsletter?

Gary’s Take

Gary refers back to his days as an SEO himself and narrows down the answer into two simple routes you can take to combat these giants of Google:

1. Wait for somebody else to establish how to outrank them and copy their methodology.

2. Lead the way and find a way yourself.

Thanks for the insight, Gary. Very informative.

The Good Stuff

If you are looking to outrank the big brand names, there are no quick routes or shortcuts. If there were, everybody would be doing it. Instead, you want to look at aspects of your SEO strategy that need doubling down on. Here are my recommendations that can give you a cut-through:

- Don’t diss the long-tail keywords - establish relevance before targeting the main keywords like the big brands do.

Long-tail keywords are a must for small business owners looking to garner traffic through more niche searches.

I have explained long-tail keywords in a previous newsletter, so I won’t embellish too much. However, to put the definition in short: long-tail keywords are more niche and specific searches made for example ' organic coffee shops near me'. By targeting these niche terms, you can gain traffic from more specific audiences which usually carry higher search intent.

- Content is king - creating high-quality long-form content that backs up searcher intent will always remain king in the SEO world. If your content is of higher quality and clearly answers searcher's intent, then you’re onto a winner.

Ensure that your content is unique, high-quality, and relevant to the searches you are looking to target. This is something that big brands do well, as they will have a team of SEO content specialists that spend hours writing informative, unique content for Google to rank them for.

Long-form content performs better because it is more comprehensive and provides more value to searchers. Just ensure when creating this content, you don't just create it to appease Google. Focus on the audience you are speaking to and the information they will be looking to find. Keep your sights aimed at the people, not just the Google crawlers.

- Stay consistent - big businesses mean bigger decisions to make. I have often seen that being fast-acting in your approach can allow you to beat the bigger brands, which will probably have 3 or 4 checks first before any content can be published to their site.

This is your opportunity to strike whilst the iron is hot. Always keep a keen eye on search terms that are rising in popularity and ensure you have original content on your website to drive that traffic towards you. If your content is readily available before anybody else's this is an opportune moment to garner traffic before the big brands have time to react. Stay up to date with recent trends and search patterns as often as you can.

Rounding Off

If you’re a small business and you want to take on big names, you have to understand that Google is a learning machine. You need to establish authority through your content and technical efforts for Google to recognise you. Taking on big brand names/ competitors will take time and great attention to detail but it's far from impossible.

We would know. we've done it ourselves many times before.

If this has left you scratching your head, not knowing where to start, contact me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn with any questions you have.

Until next week,

Oliver Eardley - Principal Consultant