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How to compete with huge sites?
Most of my experience has been with agencies and big budgets, but my friend has asked me for help and I’m a bit stuck. It’s like playing a game on a much harder difficulty.
After being laid off from a job, they decided to start an online tech store — monitors, printers, smart items etc. The problem is, if you google any of those terms, the serps are always dominated by huge brands (either brick and mortar or the likes of Amazon).
My natural tendency is to go towards longtail keywords but nearly anything I can find has competition from these sites as well. Whoever does their SEO, has clearly done that research before me. Going super narrow (eg a specific printer model) runs into similar problems.
The other issue is budget. There’s no way to outgun these competitors. My friend, among other expenses, only has capacity for one well-written blog post a month.
What’s the play here?
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1 Reply
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The answer is you can’t. You don’t have the budget to out rank these sites. Instead of optimizing the website, it would be better to put your items on Amazon and Google store and optimize their product pages. I’ve seen some success with really specific hardware usually like replacement parts or someone might be typing in a model number. not only are you going against the big guys but you’re also going against a million other people with the exact same ideas you populating their websites with the exact same product, descriptions, and model numbers as you.
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What about trargeting local
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Unfortunately, someone’s gonna have to put in the time and effort. If your friend can’t afford to pay for more than one blog post a month and they can’t do ads, then your friend is going to probably have to do some writing themselves and nothing is going to happen overnight.
Here’s what I’d do, pick one of the lower competition keyword products and make sure that page is excellently optimized. Then, I’d write brief (but comprehensive) blog pieces on every FAQ you can find for that model of product that has search volume. So something I just made up, “How to reboot an X85T hp printer.” Then, make sure you link back to your main product page from there. There may be 10 appropriate questions or 100. But since their site probably has no authority, they can supplement that somewhat with this type of expertise content.
Then, I’d move on to the next product, rinse and repeat. Finding links during this time would also help speed up the process.
There are some things that may not apply, for instance, if they house products themselves they could sell on Amazon to get some sales faster. If they have a physical business or do deliveries, having a Google Business Profile will give them visibility in their area.
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We just grabbed #1 in a competitive sector with a 15 page site.
SEO is not “wordpress and blog once a week”… those agencies with the same playbook can suck my d*ck.
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Have you considered using AI to help pump out more content? It’s done amazing for others.
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Budget for one blog per month? Walk away. I wouldn’t take on a local handyman with that garbage of a budget.
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my suggestion is to put local city name and focus on selling locally near your items or use ebay.com something. otherwise you cant beat them. lol common, 2002 now this whole online become capitalism just like offline. it’s not like before penguin era which was heaven to all regular users like us.
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That’s nice is saturated. They need a new idea. Even with a huge budget it would be difficult.
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First you need to reset your thinking. You are not competing with Amazon, your competition is one page on Amazon’s site. That one page probably has less than 20 backlinks. You can beat that page with a well-tuned, relevant page.
Every time. And in under three months.
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