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
-
Is it possible to have organization markup schema for sub domain ? and how should it look like ?
Can we have organization markup schema for subdomain ? For example if my main domain is xyz.com and subdomain is sub.xyz.com If i plan to have organization markup schema for subdomain how should it look like ? Should the markup schema must have main domain url or sub domain url in markup schema ? Should it be like this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
One site two languages - what to do with urls?
Hi, We are working with a client who has a Spanish site which is in English and Spanish, what is the best url structure to go for? www.domain.es and en.domain.es or www.domain.es and www.domain.es/en or none of the above?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Jump to Navigation in SERPs?
To make 'jump to' navigation work, does the href or anchor need to contain descriptive text? For example, I know this is best: Install with Wubi But, would the below work just as well? Install with Wubi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Effect SERP's internal 301 redirects?
I'm considering installing Wordpress for my website. So I have to change the static URL's from /webpage.html to /webpage/. Yet I don't want to lose in the SERP's. What should I expect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz1 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks ZCJDa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2 -
My site dropped in serp and backlinks ranked higher than it.
appliance-repair-ny.com I recently got some new good page rank backlinks (4-5) to my site. After a nice increase in rankings i left it for a couple of day (holiday) when i came back i found out that my rankings dropped dramatically for many different keywords when in some cases the backlinks are listed higher than me for the keyword. Any suggestions? should i keep on building links in the same paste, or slow down a little? UPDATE: I now noticed that the seomoz app has a warning that my homepage is missing title tag and meta tag. I'm using wordpress and headspace plugin. I recently updated wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atohad0 -
What is your best one sentence definition for SEO?
I have recently come across several bloggers that have been trying to formulate the best concise definition of SEO. What one sentence definitions have you used / seen? Avoid run-ons. Tweetable, even better.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gyi0