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
-
Google Adding Incorrect Location to the end of Title Tags in SERPs
I have an issue with the way Google is adding to a client’s Title Tag. Since we relaunched the website a few months ago, Google has been adding an indiscriminate “– London” to the end of title tags. That would be fine if the company was solely London based but we have stores outside London too, and it’s adding “– London” to the end of those individual store title tags there too. So, if you do a search for “location widget” our page title is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrewDaviesLondon
“location widget | Brand name”
but then Google pops in:
“location widget | Brand name - London”
Which isn’t great if the location is in Scotland! We are adding structured data to the store pages to try and combat this, the store pages are all well optimised for the location (and ranking well), but I’m wondering if I’ve missed anything obvious? I thought it might lesson as the new site became more trusted in Google, but the rogue “London” seems to be increasing... Thanks for your help!0 -
Negative News in SERP results?
Hey guys, We did reputation management back in March 2017. We basically built high quality links to online assets such as linkedin, twitter, facebook, positive PR articles and other web properties in order to rank them higher then negative PR. However there was 0 change (the link building was solid). And the negative PR remains in the top 10 with also positive new articles about the site. At this point, i believe that Google is keeping the negative PR in the top 10 to keep balanced SERP results. Does anyone know if this is something Google does to balance positive and negative results? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Disavow Experts: Here's one for ya ....
Not sure how to handle this one. Simply because there are SO MANY .... I want to be careful not to do something stupid ... Just a quick 3 minute video explanation: https://youtu.be/bVHUWTGH21E I'm interested in several opinions so if someone replies - please still chime in. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk0 -
Crawl efficiency - Page indexed after one minute!
Hey Guys,A site that has 5+ million pages indexed and 300 new pages a day.I hear a lot that sites at this level its all about efficient crawlabitliy.The pages of this site gets indexed one minute after the page is online.1) Does this mean that the site is already crawling efficient and there is not much else to do about it?2) By increasing crawlability efficiency, should I expect gogole to crawl my site less (less bandwith google takes from my site for the same amount of crawl)or to crawl my site more often?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.bfz0 -
How many inner links on one page?
I have seen Matt Cutts video about links per page and know that too many links "may" harm the flow of link juice. But what should e-commerce sites do? We have category pages with more than a few thousands products in each of them. So linking to each of them dilutes the PR flow? We could use pagination, but doesn't it give a disadvantage in user experience when he needs to go 10 links deep to reach a product? And Google robots won't update the information frequently because it will be on the lowest part of our site? Now our goal is to make all our products appear like Facebook scroll down page. We know that Google doesn't use Ajax to see more links so robots and all the users that don't have JavaScript could see the paginated results. Is it a good way to put all products and links like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas1 -
301 Re-direct Implementation & Its Possible Aftermaths
Hi all, I'm currently working on a domain that seems to be 'unofficially' blacklisted by Google. The reason behind my belief are, Ranking process of KW became stagnant. Current crawling and indexing rate has been decreased. Site performance deteriorate after every Search engine update or major data refreshes. And few major indications pointing out that search engines might started doubting its authority. The site is live n running for about 10+ yr and consists of 6000+ pages out of which 5000+ pages are indexed. The site also have some serious issues like, The site has been 2 times penalized by Google. The link ratio & inbound link quality of the site is quite unnatural (mostly directory links, links form spammy sites, bad-neighborhood links etc. ) The site is in flat file and not CMS, thus making it extremely difficult to maintain and update it. Due to the above reasons I was thinking of implementing 301 re-direction. I would like to redirect this poor performing existing domain to a new fresh one keeping the URL structure and files same and maintaining 1:1 redirection rules. I've read an awesome article by Danny Dover on 301 Re direction of a site here in SEOMOZ. It seems that if any one follow the steps mentioned there can actually get benefited by the overall re direction process. Now I'd like know your suggestion about following points: 1. Considering the factors that I've stated, do you think that it would be good to go with this re direction idea? 2. If 301 is implemented then what can be its immediate effects on current rankings and site performance? 3. Assuming that the ranks drowned or gets completely vanished from SERP, after what approx time period can be regain back? 4. Any other suggestion that might help me out to better understand the situation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed. Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6. Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates. I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change? Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
From Number 4 in SERP to NA in SERP
Keyword : speed reading classes URL : hhtp://www.speedreadingclasses.org/ Earlier the keyword position was # 4 in Google.com Did a 301 to this from a different PR4 site. I was expecting position 2 or 3 but it went to 9 on last Wednesday. On Thursday It went to # 10 and today it is not even in the SERP. What might have gone wrong? Is there any way to know about this? Please help. Regards Ray
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0