A client recently asked me when SEO can be considered ‘done’.
The short answer is: probably never.
The limit here is ambition and imagination.
There is always more that can be done.
And this is why:
The bigger a site you build, the easier it becomes to rank for any keyword, and any location.
And this makes sense, right? The more content an organization has created, the more likely it is to be an authority in its field.
Big news sites like CNN, the BBC, Wikipedia and WebMD rank so well for so many terms because there is such a huge volume of content on their sites that is useful and relevant to their users in their niche (news/information/medical information), and because they cover so much information in so much detail.
And the more content you have, the more likely different groups of people are to link to your pages. Which boosts the perceived authority of your domain.
So these big sites get a lot of traffic because they’ve put a lot of work into getting to that state. They are the castles, with huge moats and big drawbridges, of the internet.
And the good news is, creating volume of content can be one of the quickest and easiest ways for you to outrank your competitors in search.
And, like I said before, the only limit to the amount of content you can create around your area of expertise, is imagination.
That means you:
Answer all the FAQs you can think of, and then add more
Write articles on every single one of your services. Go into as much detail as possible.
Interview clients, get testimonials.
Research what other people are writing about your topic – and write it better
Look up ‘People also asked’ in Google and answer all the questions there, each in a different article.
And yes, use keyword research tools too.
Basically, the more information you can publish about your business, the better.
Most of the business I work with – no matter their size – are just starting to scratch the surface of what is possible.
This is good news – it means there’s huge opportunity for them.
The internet is a big, big place, and it is growing. There is always room for more.
Most websites are really quite small in the grand context of the internet. Even your biggest competitors. So it isn’t that hard to outrank even established businesses.
So I would recommend you increase the size of your website, as this is often enough to give you a lift over your competitors.
Sometimes it can happen really quickly.
And sometimes (like in the case of my previous business), it’s a case of building over a longer period of time. It took us 5 years of posting 2-3 new articles/week to attract 45k vistiors.
And even when I left that business, there were hundreds – even thousands more articles we could have written.
I encourage you to think of your website as real estate for the internet.
You might have a condo right now, but the only way to convert it into a house with a pool is to keep building.
The bigger you can build a website (and obviously you should do this in a strategic way), the more valuable it becomes over time, and the more defensible any rankings become.
Even if you’re looking at big competitors in your niche and you’re thinking they’re a long way off and you’ll never overtake them in search, if you continue to build out your site over time in a consistent way, it’s possible to overtake almost any small business site out there.
Thankfully for me, the client who asked me this question has plenty of ambition. And I have plenty of imagination. So we’re in a pretty good place.
If you’re looking to attract new clients without spending on paid ads, drop me a DM any time.
My name's Claire and I’m an SEO and content strategy expert. I help startups and ambitious businesses improve their content, so that customers can find your website in search, and so that when they do, they convert.
I’m a former startup CEO, and I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press), as well as training with Google's in-house SEO team. I even built a website to attract 45k in organic search visitors/month. Drop me a line if you need help of any kind with SEO and content.
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