- All of the brands that you're going up against,
they did not build their visibility overnight.
Even if they suddenly appeared to pop out of nowhere,
the chances are they were putting in the legwork
and they're working to get their website to the stage
where eventually poof, it bursts through
into your consciousness.
In this video, we're gonna look
at how to outrank your highest authority
and biggest competitors.
(battle music)
What's up people, Tim from Exposure Ninja here.
Now, we've got a fantastic ninja
at Exposure Ninja called Joe.
Now, Joe is ex-military.
He's got a very deep voice
and I remember specifically one
of the very first calls I was on with Joe and a client.
Joe asked a great question he said,
I'm gonna try and do his voice.
So who's on your kill list?
And the clients like (laughs), kill list?
Oh Joe no, you've got us all wrong,
we're not the sort of people that have a kill list (laughs).
We're lovely (laughs), kill list, but if we did,
if we did have a kill list, it would be those
people over at big corp.
You see big corp takes all the rankings,
they dominate for everything, they've got a bigger website,
more marketing budget.
Much more market share, we're just feeding off their scraps.
If you can kill them, we will love you forever (laughs).
Who, okay that escalated quickly.
So in this video we're gonna look at how
to beat your big corp competitors,
specifically if they're much bigger than you
and you're a little minnow.
So buckle up my William Wallace's and let's fight.
All righty, these videos are definitely getting weirder,
but you seem to be loving it so in this video,
we're gonna look at how to rank your big,
high authority competitors.
Now, the first thing to keep in mind is
you're not gonna be a big,
high authority competitors ranking
for loads of stuff in every area, okay.
So if you're like, hey I've got this great idea.
It's like this e-commerce store
where you can buy everything all in one place
and we do like free delivery on the same day,
that's gonna be tough for you because remember,
that's not how these big competitors got
to where they are now.
How they got to where they are now
and how every Empire gets to where they are
is one inch at a time.
So you've got to start by identifying a specific area
that you know that you can win.
I liken it to, and apologies that the metaphors
in this video is so aggressive,
it's really not my nature, or is it?
Imagine that you're a lion out hunting for wildebeests
and you come across this huge flock of wildebeest.
Now, the huge flock of wildebeest are big corp
and every individual wildebeest is a product
or a service that big corps sells.
It's one of the pages that's ranking well on their website,
Now, if you're a savvy lion, you don't go
for the whole flock all in one go.
We're gonna dominate them for everything.
Now what you do is you lie in wait and you have a look
and you watch the flock and you see
that actually the ones on the inside of the flock,
they're the healthiest, the fittest, the best protected.
The ones on the outside of the flock, hmm,
some of them are looking a little bit skinny,
a little bit weak and a little bit slow.
They might be interesting to pick off first.
So you bide your time and then eventually,
the flock comes near you and you spot one of the weaklings
and you go after them and you get that wildebeest.
Now, with the food that you get from that wildebeest,
this is a horrible metaphor, you're then able
to become bigger and stronger and then take on
another wildebeest and another and another and another.
That's exactly the same with SEO.
So what you're not gonna do is go
for your main head keywords.
Let's say that we're in the insurance space
and you're an insurance business that offers a range
of different insurances like car insurance,
home insurance, mobile home insurance,
holiday let insurance.
So you're all these different insurance types.
What you're not gonna do is go after car insurance
and home insurance terms
because those are the most competitive in the space.
You know that you're gonna be going up
against huge businesses
like these insurance comparison websites
that have been doing SEO, have so much content on their site
for so long, it's gonna be really tough to beat them.
So what you're gonna do instead is pick on one
of the services on the periphery that they're not doing
as well for or they're not trying as hard for
because it's an easier space
and you're gonna go after that first.
So how do you do this?
Well, let's say we're creating an insurance company,
Ninja Insurance and we offer a whole range
of different insurance policies and let's say
that we're going after motor home insurance
as our first target because we know that's a good market
for us and it's not a saturated by the bigger players,
although they offer it, they're not working
as hard for those terms as they could be.
So the first thing that we're gonna do is
understand the questions that people are asking
about motorhome insurance because underneath that umbrella
of motorhome insurance, we've got questions
and then we've got commercial terms.
So questions would be people that are earlier
in the buying process.
So they're in the awareness or interest stages
of the AIDA funnel and those might be things like,
do I need a year-round motor insurance
or what are the different types of motor insurance
or how much is motor insurance?
Then we've got the commercial queries
such as cheapest motor insurance, fast motor insurance,
motor insurance free Parker Pen or whatever, you know,
phrases that are being searched for by people
who are ready to buy now.
So the lowest competition phrases within the whole range
of motor insurance terms
are gonna be those informational ones.
So you can go after them first then add the commercial,
then once you're doing well in the motorhome space,
then you can start going after other spaces.
Step two is to create the best content possible
for that term.
So let's say that you're going after motorhome insurance
and you're targeting a phrase like
do I need year-round motorhome insurance.
What you're gonna do is type that phrase into Google
and you're gonna have a look and see
what sort of websites are showing up for that term
and how good the content is that they've written.
It's your job to them beat that content
by making it the most useful, the most valuable possible.
So think about all the sub questions
that people might have on that topic,
make sure you're answering all of those in your post
or on your page and you can also do things
like include rich media like videos and tweets or whatever.
then I'd include a tweet about
what type of motor home insurance you need, but hey,
it's not my job to do your work for you (laughs).
But hey, you look like a creative type,
so I'm sure you'll figure it out
or you could create a short video which explained it as well
and include that on your page.
Basically, your goal is to make the most useful page
in the world for that question
because then Google's gonna feel
a little bit algorithmically obliged to show your page
at the top of search results.
Step three is it's a good idea
to mark up your content using Schema.
Now, Schema is beyond the scope of this video,
but we've got other videos about it so check them out.
I'm sure there'll be linked somewhere.
Step four is to increase the user experience
of the page that you're trying to rank
and of your entire site.
So doing things like improving page speed,
be making sure there's no broken links,
making sure images are compressed, all that type of stuff.
Making sure it works really nicely on mobile.
All of these help to improve your ranking as well.
The next step is to create supporting content
and link back to it.
So for that, I'm gonna head right over
to ye old the internet
and we're gonna have a look at an example.
So here you can see we've actually done a search
for mobile home insurance.
Now, what's interesting about this example is that,
although the big players like go compare,
compare the markets, confuse.com and money.co.uk,
whilst they all have pages and content
targeting mobile home insurance, on the whole,
they're being out ranked by smaller insurance companies.
Now one of these smaller competitors is Intersure.com
who offer mobile home insurance.
So if we just have a look at the Intersure site,
what we will find is that they have a page dedicated
to mobile home insurance and it looks good.
There's a bit of information here which is great.
Now a huge amount, though.
This is a fairly commercial search.
So Google might not necessarily need
a huge amount of information to rank for it,
but I bet you though, if we find their blog,
I bet they've got a tonne of content about mobile homes
and design for mobile homes.
So here we go, drain down guide for static caravans.
Let's have a look and see what we've got here.
Preparing your caravan for the summer.
Guide to buying a caravan at a show.
Will park home owners rule this year?
buy-to-let, oh with an apostrophe.
What they've done is make this website a bit of a hub
for information about mobile homes and caravans.
So if we click on one of these blog pages,
I will bet you that there is a link to,
there we go, caravan insurance and then that's gonna go
to the caravan insurance page and Google knows
that Caravan insurance and mobile home insurance
are reasonably similar terms.
So here you can see that the they've picked
a smaller segment of the market,
they're able to go really deep in that market,
create loads of content around that
and it's really helped them to compete
against much larger competitors.
Traditionally, you'd expect a site like confuse.com
to be dominating a smaller site like this.
Because they've picked kind of niche insurance types
to go after, they're able to win.
So just also put them into SEMRush here
and let's just expand out their date range
and what we can see from this, just to give you a bit
of a primer on what we're looking at here,
so you can see the key web they're ranking for,
the position on Google and the volume
for that search term per month and then cost-per-click
which is an indication
of how much commercial intent there is behind that phrase
and what we can see is that really,
Intersure has built their visibility through niche keywords
like tenants liability insurance, holiday home insurance,
holiday home insurance Spain, buy-to-let property
which is a kind of broad term, holiday let insurance,
but even you know, ranking for buy-to-let property,
it shows the power of making the site a real hub
for that type of content that Google's saying,
do you know what, this site has so much information
about buy-to-let property insurance that actually,
it's relevant and deserves to rank
for the broader term buy-to-let property.
The mobile home insurance,
there we can see park home insurance.
So they've got all of these kind of different,
related terms and what's also interesting is
if you look at the pages that are ranking,
you can see here that we've got individual pages
for park home and mobile home
and each of those are the ones that are ranking.
Intersure.com/chalets.
So I can guarantee you that compare the mark (mumbles)
chalet pages because it's just not worth it for them.
They've cast such a wide net, they can't go as deep
as a business like this.
So you can see that by going granular
and by going really deep in those areas,
this business is able to survive and thrive.
Next step is to build your brand in that space.
So become known for these areas
and then once you're known for those areas,
you can start moving slightly further afield.
So this is not just a good digital marketing
and SEO strategy,
this is a good business strategy in general.
Become known for doing one thing really well
and then as soon as you're known for that,
you can start to broaden out and kind of reduce the amount
that your niching down, but niching allows you
to get traction in the early days for becoming known
for doing something and then as you grow,
as you build, you can add more and more services
in order to be more competitive
and take up more space in the market.
And then the final step is patience.
You've got to realise that even if you're going off
to a very specific niche set of keywords,
it's gonna take time to build that visibility.
It's not the sort of thing that you're gonna get overnight.
All of the brands that you're going up against,
they did not build their visibility overnight.
Even if they suddenly appeared to pop out of nowhere,
the chances are, they were putting in the legwork
and they were working to get their website to the stage
where eventually poof, it burst through
into your consciousness.
So be patient, stick at it.
We usually recommend to people to allow three to six months
to start seeing ranking improvement.
Really, three to twelve months as a sort of time scale
that you should be thinking about investing your time
and energy into SEO before you're starting to get a payoff.
So recap, number one, focus on longer tail keywords.
Go a bit more specific than your main head terms
and if even your niches are quite competitive,
then think about the informational side of those niches,
rather than going straight for the commercial terms
with the highest commercial intent.
Step number two is create the best content possible.
Think deep, think about all the questions
that people are gonna be asking about your topic
and make sure your page answers those.
Step three is to mark up your content with Schema.
Use all of the relevant Schema possible on your pages.
Step four is to make the user experience
as good as possible.
So improve user experience on your site,
make sure your content pages are really easy to use
and have clear calls to action in as well
and make sure your site works nicely on mobile,
load times are quick and all of the stuff
that you're sick of people banging on about
and that step is to try additional formats.
So think about using videos in your content,
particularly if it's a, quite a boring topic
that you might be able
to make a little bit more entertaining.
Next step is to build out
your additional supporting content.
So write more stuff about that topic,
write additional blog posts and knowledge base pieces
and link back to your main page
from that supporting content.
Step seven is to build your brand.
So focus on those spaces
that you know you can get traction early on,
but then start to broaden out your service
once you become known for that
and step number eight is a really boring one,
but it's one that you need to hear is to have patience
and keep the faith.
So I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful.
Don't forget to Like and subscribe and give us a comment
if there was any other digital marketing topics
that you want us to cover in the future.
And don't forget, if you want some help
to outrank your digital marketing competitors,
then you can request a free website and marketing review
from the ninjas here at Exposure Ninja.
These reviews are killer and we'll show you all
of the different ways that your competitors are ranking
and we'll even give you some suggestions
on how you can start to beat them as well.
So you can go to ExposureNinja.com to request that.
It's completely free of charge.
There is no obligation to use our agency,
although I do have to warn you,
the review videos are incredibly compelling,
so you might end up becoming a client as a result,
but there's no obligation to do so.
Until next time, just keep on pushing
and don't let them take your freedom.