Is it possible for one man to go against industry leaders in serps?
-
Hi,
Is it possible for an individual to go against the big boys in a industry sector?
Lets say flowers in the UK, all the massive flower companies go for 2 keywords:
'flowers delivered' (30,000 ems) and 'flowers by post' (30,000 ems)
Would it be possible to start a new site and within 6 months (July) be up in the top 5?
Scrap any exact match domains as there gone, I'm talking about creating a brand such as flowerpower.co.uk picking a term and going for it.
Is this possible?
-
I was able to single handed start my business in my back bedroom with a dell PC and £400 in a business bank account. I took my company site to the Top 5 for Internet marketing in the UK in competition with companies with thousands of investment.
I think you have to look at the positives a single guy or smaller team has over a larger organisation. You can act right away without waiting for a boards decision or internal decisions on budgets.
In the longterm you will learn that as EGOL mentioned you need to start building a team where people can cover different skills.
No one person can cover all areas or has expertise in all.
-
I really like this question!
If you are a content area expert and your competitors are not making that type of investment in their sites then a one or two man shop could effectively compete against huge corporations in an information niche.
Huge corporations usually produce chest-thumping content but you will produce altruistic, evergreen, informative content - that will have enormous appeal to the people who are using the web in your niche.
Most people can't do that.
On top of that.... you need one or two people who have (in addition to the content expertise) an ability to do all of the SEO, development, photography, video, research, etc... superbly well.
This constellation of content expertise, presentation ability, SEO savvy and usability skills rarely occurs in one person, or even a small team or even in most large web-savvy companies.
So, that is my answer to the question in your title.... in your post you say that you are in the retail "flowers" industry.
To that, my answer is...... if you have everything that I described above.. you better have it in awesome proportions because you are going up against some very savvy, aggressive, hungry, well-established, brilliant, well-funded, and very powerful Goliaths.
You better practice with your sling, have a really strong arm, and pick up some really good rocks.
You might be able to carve out a city niche... maybe... I am not betting.
-
Hi Activity. Your question is interesting in that the two search terms you presented suggest two different types of business - or perhaps one business offering two types of service.
"Flowers delivered" suggests search results would produce florists specializing in delivery (who knows some of these businesses may not even take walk-in business). "Flowers by post" obviously suggests this business would mail them to you before they wilt and turn brown.
Alan's keyword "florist London" suggests to me I would find a florist in London that I could walk or drive to and buy some flowers on the way home from work.
Perhaps the first question is not whether you can conquer the giants, but what is the business model you or your client intend to pursue?
Once you've identified what kind of business you intend to run, do your keyword research for your niche/approach and build it from there. Giants were babies once too.
Unless a person has a boatload of cash to spend on PPC, then felling the giants or taking some of their business will be challenging in the timeframe you suggest.
Include in your research a little work in Google Insights after you've identified your business model. You may get some good keyword ideas for localizing your SEO at startup.
Finally, check out this thread on creating the perfect website: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-list-for-creating-the-perfect-website.
-
Possible yes, probable no.
I would look at the quality of the big boys, big companies do not always have good SEO, some are very spammy.
Just me maybe, but If i was looking for flowers, i would use a term like "Florist London"
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to Avoid Improper Special Characters from Being Pulled into SERPs
If you Google "Progressive careers," for the Progressive.com result you'll see a result where Google pulls in content from the page outside of the meta description (not uncommon) and also pulls in an in-page carrot that indicates a link. This character displays as a square on desktop / Android devices. The site includes this character as an accessibility best practice to indicate a link from a heading for screen readers. On iPhones, that square shows up as a soccer ball emoji even though the entity code is different than our character's entity code (our entity code= , soccer ball entity code is ⚽). Clearly, not the best experience. I know we cannot control what piece of the page is pulled in as the meta description, but does anyone have any tips to hide or help avoid pulling in that special character?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | P-C-A0 -
Does Google Delay or Graduate SERP Changes?
You can request re-indexing of a single page via Google Search Console. It would seem to me you could use this feature to experiment with on-page changes to see the rank change to determine which changes have the most effect. For the sake of this thread, lets temporarily forget that the relative importance on various on-page factors has already been reverse engineered to a degree so we already have a general idea to som extent. It would seem to me if I were Google, I would introduce either a random delay period, or, temper rank change after reindexing. What I mean by that latter point is say a reindex takes a page from position 20 to 10. If it is 'tempered' so to speak on Day 2 after reindexing it might be at 18, day 5 it's at 16, day 7 it's at 16 until it reaches the actual "real" rank. Both the delay and or the tempering of rank change would make it difficult more difficult to reverse engineer relative importance of on-page factors. OR, does Google realize there are large SEO firms doing SEO over several years for many sites that can examine aggregate data to determine these factors so Google doesn't delay (aka sandbox) or temper rank changes due to manual re-indexing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Semush0 -
Google displaying SERP link in Japanese
A chamber of commerce site near me has Google displaying their link in japanese characters when they search for them by name. If you google Eastern monmouth chamber of commerce, you will see this. The site is emacc.org. Can anyone tell me what might cause this or how to resolve?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
DA dropped 7 pts in one week as well as our competitors. Is something going on?
We have consistently had a 70 in DA and now all of the sudden we are at a 63 as well as seeing the same considerable drop among our competitors. This was odd as I have not seen this type of drop in DA since being with the company. Any ideas are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeaverMike0 -
Page title and slug as complements to one another?
When creating a page, is it ever worthwhile to ensure that there's minimal duplication in the keywords in the page title vs. the slug? Or is it more like the title is more like a sentence description of the page and the slug is a scannable set of keywords that describes the page, and duplication doesn't really matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Redirecting non-www pages to www ones
Hello:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
I'm trying to consolidate all the link juice and see that some of my pages are linked to by using both www.mysite.com/whatever.html and mysite.com/whatever.html.
Is there a safe re-write rule that not just redirects non-www(s) to www(s), but designates the redirect as 301, so link juice will be transfered as well. If not RewriteRule, are there any other ways to accoplishe this? And the last question: can this be solved by simply setting Preffered domain in google webmaster tools to display www URL? Any help will be appreciated.0 -
Microsite campaign good or bad idea for SERP
I have a group of microsites for renters insurance, mostly geo long-tails. I wrote some content and have a GREAT back-end through Kemper. First 4 weeks they all did great. It looks like Panda went through on June 25 and by the 27'th they got moved totally out of the SERP. I have 67 microsites. All have unique contact (about us, why us, benefits...). I post to them often; not all of them but i put up about 10 new posts / week. Havent done much SEO, no link building or anything that could be spammy or causeing trouble. I have them in webmaster tools and no messages about problems. If i've been penalized or if something is seriously wrong i'd like to know. I know that Google can see 67 websites all on 1 ip but i'm not trying to fool or trick Gbot so not interested in using proxies or specialty hosts with many ip's.If there is no critical flaw, next i'm just going to continue writing content, buy traffic, and build quality backlinks. Your comments are appreciated. Not one site is in top 1000 as far as i can see, and all were in top 30 by week 4. Banned on week 5, today is week 12.http://onlinerentersinsurance.orgIf you want to see the other 66, click on the 'renters insurance' link on the right. Its a random link through the micronetwork.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lifequotes0 -
Google+ Pages on Google SERP
Do you think that a Google+ Page (not profile) could appear on the Google SERP as a Rich Snippet Author? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | overalia0