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Over the years I’ve been outranking
- big businesses
- well known brands
- and major news media.
I’ve been successfully competing with whole agency and in-house teams.
I’ve even managed to surpass spammers in some cases.
Your competition on the Web is more overwhelming than ever these days.
Some SEO pundits already advise you to give up and try to offer something different than the big guys.
I don’t. There are still ways to compete with big business on Google and beyond. How? Using social SEO!
Corporations suck – you can use it against them
The only true free market business is small business.
Big business is often just about monopolies and market dominance. Just think big tech like
- Microsoft
- Apple
They always try to own a certain market and kill off the competition!
They are often using
- proprietary technology
- law enforcement
- and media hype.
Of course once they own the market they can dictate the prices.
In SEO we deal with a similar situation!
You can’t spend the same amount of time and money on SEO as a corporation or news media outlet can.
Many brands fail at SEO from the technical point of view yet
Google favors large brands over no name small businesses.
Your site can
- be technically better equipped
- have more helpful content
- and be more dedicated to customers
and you will still lose against the giants of the Web.
Yet corporations suck for many reasons.
They are slow, there are competing interests and “stakeholders” within (I call it them mistakeholders) and there is group think.
You can use that against them!
Social SEO can be the winning factor.
What weaknesses do corporations have?
Corporations commit corporate crime on a seemingly daily basis yet the people have no choice but to stay with them.
- Google might breach your privacy
- Apple might make their workers commit suicide
- and Microsoft might abuse their monopoly.
Nonetheless most people will still buy and use their products and services.
The same is true with major media:
- they copy stories
- spread lies or fake news
- and distribute propaganda
and get away with it.
Yet some downsides of corporations can get used against them!
Speed
Corporations are too big to move quickly.
I’ve worked for corporations myself. You can’t do anything by yourself.
You have to ask several bosses above you, you might not even know who they are so you can’t ask them at all.
In other cases you might have to wrestle with several departments, every one o them throwing their guidelines on you.
Until you move several days, weeks or months might go by without any significant change.
Care
Corporations do not care about anything or anybody!
They are just looking at their bottom line. It’s people behind profits and planet behind profits.
Even though sensible individuals work for them they are not allowed to follow their human instincts.
They have to maximize profits and stick to corporate rules.
In many cases they are not even allowed to mention their competitors or link out to them.
At the same time each corporation has at least several websites if not dozens or hundreds of them so they are heavily interlinked.
Rebel with a cause
When there is a righteous cause like attacking a corporate criminal people can get angry and act together.
The era of “smart mobs” has finally arrived with the Anonymous phenomenon.
A “group” of people from all over the world congregating virtually to perform an action on behalf of a common goal.
Their most apparent action was the long term support of Wikileaks.
Their most feared tactic is the hacking of websites by entities the group perceives as the target of their wrath.
Even before Anonymous people on the Web have used similar techniques to exert pressure on the powerful.
In the SEO industry the most well known of these tactics was Google bombing.
While Google has tried to limit the success of this technique you can still band together to push a website in the search results.
Sometimes it just takes a few dedicated bloggers and social media users to push a certain topic or post to the top of search results.
The more abusive an entity the easier it is to make people contribute to such a campaign.
I did that a few years back for a very spammy medical term after I got spammed too often by spammers selling it.
Thus I put up a post that warned consumers of the side effects for it and many bloggers joined in after I asked them.
I ranked at #1/top 10 for years.
Be faster
When Samsung introduced its first iPhone competitor to the German market I happened to be the first person to report about it.
Google then ranked me on #1 as the original source for months.
I even outranked Samsung itself who were awfully slow to put up a webpage about the particular smartphone.
They learned their SEO lessons ever since but still this SEO episode shows how a fast blogger can take advantage of the corporate dinosaurs.
Be generous
Have you ever seen CNN link out the BBC or to Al Jazeera?
They rarely do. Big media either try not to link out at all or they limit themselves to sources.
Sometimes they just “forget” to mention the source or the mention it without a link.
Here comes the blogger who does not have to abide by corporate no link policies.
When you provide a resource with links to several news media outlets you will rank highly in Google as a hub.
Linking out worked for a site like Drudge Report which ranked for years on top for [news] in the US.
I once ranked at #4 to #6 for [motorola xoom test] (a popular smartphone at the time) in Germany.
Did I test it? No. I just provided links to articles from big media outlets who do.
Being the only resource where readers can get a quick overview of most test results.
Of course the major media outlets do not link out to other test results.
I got just one authority link for that post so it wasn’t really difficult.
This way I outranked some of the biggest publishing German publishing houses.
You can still do it!
You see you don’t have to give up yet.
You need a blog though obviously and you have to band together with like minded individuals.
It might not be activism but it’s certainly a just cause to survive in the face of competition by huge corporate conglomerates.
* Anonymous kid vs. Troy Collins, US national middleweight sumo champion. Image by John Watson.