When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), there are countless factors to take into consideration: technical optimisation, content, backlinks and more. Whether you have an in-house or external team working on your SEO, you're investing a certain sum of money into the work. While well-known brands spend millions to rank for the most lucrative keywords, it doesn’t mean that small businesses and startups don't have a chance.
It's true that many big businesses have dominated the most common money keywords and informational topics in their niche, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're out of luck. You just have to work smarter instead of trying to win the spending game. Here's how.
Don't be a jack of all trades
As entrepreneurs, we have a tendency to dabble in everything until we hit upon the right formula. This can show up in how we approach SEO too. We'll spend some time carefully optimising content, later we'll look into backlinks, maybe do a bit of preliminary keyword research. And then we wonder why nothing happens.
Others sit at the opposite end of the spectrum, diving into one aspect of SEO to the exclusion of everything else. They focus entirely on building backlinks and off-site guest posts, but neglect proper content optimisation and strategy.
The way to win at SEO is to find a happy medium between dabbling and deep dives, where every effort you make compounds to provide an effective strategy with measurable results.
Topic and entity research
At the heart of every strong SEO campaign is research. Rather than going head-to-head with whoever has the deepest pockets in your niche, be more selective about the topics and keyword clusters you choose. Large brands have the budget and the people to optimise for a wide array of clusters at once, and smaller businesses may not have that luxury. It simply means you need to hyper-target the topics and clusters most likely to convert rather than spreading resources too thin.
Focus on the long tail
Those well-versed in SEO may already know the importance of long tail keywords - queries and phrases that may not be searched as frequently but have a higher probability of leading to a sale.
For example, competing for "diamond engagement rings" is a highly competitive race against major name brands. This search term could be from someone just looking for inspiration or researching and nowhere near the buying phase. They may not have even popped the question yet. On the other hand, "18k gold princess cut diamond engagement ring" is not only a term you can realistically rank for, it indicates someone very close to a purchase who has already decided the cut, the stone and the setting.
Understand user intent
Someone searching solely for "diamond engagement rings" is still in the just-looking phase. Someone searching a long and detailed phrase has a specific intent in mind. If they find what they're looking for on your website, their likelihood of converting is far higher than the person who's browsing. As well as lifting conversion rate, targeting these longer-tail phrases is much more cost effective than trying to catch everyone in the market with the same broad and expensive net.
Optimise for local geography
If your business serves a local community or region, optimise for keywords related to that area. Competition can be fierce even for products and services in large cities, however targeting specific regions or suburbs within those areas can be a more effective method.
Adhere to Google's guidelines
Google changes and updates its algorithm frequently, in line with user search trends and with attempts to circumvent the system. Google encourages content creators and publishers to demonstrate certain markers and features in what they publish.
E-E-A-T like you mean it
The latest addition to Google’s guidelines is another E to what was its original E-A-T evaluator: experience. Its guidelines now look for content crafted with expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and with genuine first-hand experience behind it.
Google's own example is instructive. If you're looking for information on how to correctly fill out your tax returns, you probably want content produced by an expert in accounting. But if you're looking for reviews of tax preparation software, you might want a different kind of information, perhaps a forum discussion from people who have actually used different services.
Google uses these E-E-A-T metrics to evaluate the intent and authority of the page, so it recommends the best website pages within search results for any given user query.
Don't forget your site structure
The architecture of your site also affects your ranking. Many SEO specialists recommend the traditional silo, which groups pages into specific categories based on user search patterns. The purpose of these groupings is to prove topical authority to search engines and increase site navigation.
However, the problem with a rigid silo system is what happens when something legitimately belongs in two places. If Sarah teaches pilates at one of the studios, you'd want to link internally to her profile, but that breaks the silo and spills the pattern you've so carefully built. While the strict groups served search engines, they no longer support the natural progression a user takes through a website’s content.
Instead, many now recommend a pyramid-like structure. Search engines can navigate both types of site, but the pyramid has the distinct advantage of letting you link internally wherever it makes sense while still maintaining a logical flow. That helps from a ranking perspective and it also improves the user experience, because visitors don't have to climb back up through countless categories to reach what they actually want.
An experimental approach around content depth can be to improve a site's E-E-A-T by publishing a higher volume of child pages underneath a parent page, covering sub-topics relevant to the core topic. Done well, this can demonstrate to Google that you genuinely are an authority on that subject through sheer depth and volume on the matter.
Optimise your content
On-site optimisation is about more than site structure, you should also strive to constantly improve and add to your content. There are no hard rules to content optimisation, but generally you can:
- Make sure the content has a specific purpose, whether that's answering a question or providing information on a particular subject.
- Mention the actual question or subject in the content. Make it obvious to readers that you're writing to answer the intent behind their search.
- Write to your audience's readability expectations. An expert audience needs content pitched accordingly, while an audience with little existing knowledge needs something far more accessible.
- Use visual aids where possible: images, video, diagrams, charts and tables.
- Look at the pages already ranking for your core query. What have they included? What structure did they use? Is it informational or transactional? Short and sharp, or long-form?
- Link internally to the new content from relevant existing pages, and link out from the new content where it's genuinely useful.
Get valuable backlinks
Backlinks are one of the ways search engines determine the authority and credibility of a site (also known as “clout”). If a lot of people are linking to it, there must be a reason, and that feeds into the authoritativeness and trustworthiness discussed earlier.
The good news is that plenty of tools let you ethically inspect where competitors' backlinks come from. From there you can pursue your own from the same places or similar ones. It's worth remembering that this isn't about how many backlinks a site has but about their quality. The more high-quality sites linking back to your content, the more authoritative and trustworthy your site appears - strengthening your SEO profile.
Optimise for all types of content
You may not be able to outspend the big brands, but you can out-optimise them, and that means going beyond classic search.
Google also lets searchers find images and videos related to their query, and earning a place under "People Also Ask" or sourced within Google AI Overview can be a significant boost, particularly when your content answers questions beginning with who, what, where, when, why and how. Depending on how well you optimise for your niche, it's entirely possible to appear across images, video, AI and answer features as well as standard results.
Treat SEO as an ongoing investment
Rushing to optimise everything at once might get Google's attention momentarily, but slow and steady wins the race for SEO. Effective strategies take time, and sustainable SEO is where businesses see long-term gains that aren't just a flash in the pan.
Larger companies may have the benefit of deep pockets, but they also have real structural advantages:
- Higher content velocity. More creators on the team means more chances to out-produce a smaller business across blogging, video, email and social.
- Digital and traditional PR. Covering both secures favourable media mentions across major publications online and offline.
- Conversion rate optimisation testing. Being able to split-test or multivariate-test changes sitewide means larger companies learn faster about what actually spurs action.
- Data and development teams. Whole teams sifting through data are able to develop and implement initiatives quickly, giving bigger brands a real edge.
- UX and customer experience. The people, training and budget to roll out large-scale experience improvements, lifting their odds once a lead is in the funnel.
Smaller businesses can still hold their own with the right research, the right execution plan, and an experienced SEO consultant overseeing the program. In fact, a site that appears to have invested overnight and suddenly dominates the rankings is more likely to be flagged by Google for underhanded methods than rewarded for enthusiasm.
Does AI search make this better or worse for smaller businesses?
The role out of Google’s AI Overview and the increased use of generative search within AI engines have made SEO better for small businesses, in one specific and useful way.
When someone asks an AI assistant which business they should use, they don't get a page of ten results ranked partly by domain strength as traditionally seen with search results. They get a curated handful of names and websites. The results that it generates depends less on decades of accumulated authority and more on whether the AI model can find clear, corroborated, specific information about a business that fits what the person described.
That's a genuinely more level surface than a competitive search results page. A large brand with an enormous budget has no automatic advantage in being the most obviously suitable answer to "who should I use for X in Y, given Z". A specialist small business with clear positioning, consistent facts through the web and third-party coverage backing it up can absolutely be named alongside or instead of larger brands.
This directly rewards the targeted SEO strategies and guidelines outlined in this article - hyper-specificity over broad reach. Whereas vague and generic positioning is invisible to an AI model trying to match a person's precise situation and detailed query.
All other things being equal, how do you outrank the competition?
Assume for a moment that you and your competitors are neck and neck. You spend roughly the same, you've optimised for the same topics and keywords, and you have all the same backlinks. What can you do to push the odds in your favour?
Better quality content.
If your competitors are publishing quick article snippets about your chosen topic, be the one that goes genuinely in depth or fully answers the questions a reader will have next. Do the research and the legwork to present information clearly. It can mean creating original charts, graphs or infographics, or conducting surveys and analysis to generate data study results. It's a lot of work, but it's also an investment in your content, and in turn - your audience. Remember that alongside expertise, trustworthiness and authority, Google is looking for first-hand experience.
Often, sites that aren't in direct competition with you will simply link to your results rather than try to duplicate the study themselves. Even if a competitor could rewrite your most detailed articles in their own words, Google gives preference to whoever shared the information first.
You don't need bottomless pockets to compete
Trying to outrank your competition on the same broad, blanket terms is simply a contest over who has deeper pockets, and it won’t necessarily produce quality clients, audiences or customers for your business. Enquiries from generic queries are often price shoppers or people outside your target market, which leaves you casting a wide net and then spending time filtering to find the few that fit.
A far better investment of time and money is having an experienced SEO consultant take a deep dive into your site, domain, current performance, market and competition to identify where you're most likely to get cut-through and drive enquiries from your exact target market. This targeted approach ensures every dollar within your budget is dedicated to moving the SEO needle for your business.
The result is not just a finely tuned site whose pages rank well, but growing credibility and clout as a recognised authority in your space.
Rankings are not the be-all end-all for SEO anymore. A cheaper, narrower strategy that produces fewer visitors and more customers beats an expensive broad one every time, and you can only see that if you're attributing enquiries and sales back to the work rather than reporting on positions.