A few years ago I started working with a new company that was trying to disrupt a competitive industry online.

They were already successfully building their brand on social media platforms and were gaining traction, but they hadn’t created a great looking website with great SEO yet.

So they decided to launch a brand new website.

Their field of work also happened to be one I am passionate about, and I quickly learned that the company’s values and ideas were very similar to mine. I was – and still am – a big believer in their product and brand, and I was very excited to help them grow.

Their brand name and awareness was already growing organically – and in a way, brand is SEO. I viewed this organic brand building as a big bonus that would surely increase chances of SEO success.

A potential dream client.

SEO Challenges

There are many SEO challenges for new websites in competitive industries.

You are often trying to compete with established brands that have dominated the first page of Google for years, if not decades. Even if you do everything right, it can take a long time and/or a lot of resources – and require a lot of patience – before you see SEO results.

In this instance, the “patience” part was… not exactly there.

I presented the client with an SEO audit of their website, a detailed SEO competitor analysis, and a tailored, long-term SEO strategy I believed would drive results.

It quickly became apparent that this client expected results much faster than was realistically possible within their budget.

Ramping up efforts and executing the strategy faster was possible to an extent, but this required a much higher investment than they were prepared to commit to.

There was also a fundamental misunderstanding about SEO on the client’s side – they believed you could “just do it” as a one-off exercise and then set it and forget it.

While this is arguably true for some aspects of SEO, a long term strategy requires ongoing efforts and improvements.

As much as I tried to explain and manage expectations… they just didn’t want to hear it.

It’s also entirely possible that I just failed to communicate effectively.

For a moment, I actually considered going along with it because I figured it would be possible to piggyback off their increasing brand awareness which would naturally lead to more SEO traffic.

But just saying “yes” and “agreed” is not in my nature, and I stood by my hypotheses about their industry – and the SEO game plan I provided them.

Ultimately, we both decided this wasn’t the right time and place to work together, and we parted ways on good terms.

What Happened Next

I never stopped believing in the potential of this website and brand, and I decided to periodically check in to their progress.

This is something I do with dozens of websites anyway, for various reasons.

RELATED: Become a Better SEO by Monitoring Websites & Search Queries.

For almost a year, the website didn’t change.

SEO traffic increased steadily, but it was driven exclusively by branded keywords – as was to be expected.

Then one day, I noticed some unusual traffic patterns.

Non-brand traffic was increasing!

It turned out they had started implementing some of the strategies I had laid out for them a year prior. 

Regularly publishing content targeting high buyer-intent keywords was a big part of the strategy. When they finally started doing this, it worked and it began moving the needle.

They are now ranking on the first page for some very competitive keywords and are disrupting the first page in their industry – which was the main goal all along.

They are still a long way off ranking in the top 3, because their competitors are not standing still.

But they are now a serious contender and still improving.

I later learned that my proposed long-term SEO strategy was in fact (partially) executed by their in-house marketing team – but only after it had been on the shelf collecting dust for close to a year.

The Key Takeaway

When companies are just starting out, they want to grow as quickly as possible. This makes total sense.

However, if you are trying to disrupt the SEO landscape of a very competitive industry with big established websites that have many years of history and dedicated SEO teams actively working to maintain and improve their positions…

And you are not willing or able to invest the resources required to move quickly…

It’s going to take some time and patience.

With this particular example, in hindsight I understand why they didn’t want to proceed with the SEO strategy I proposed.

When the company was just starting out, they saw a lot of initial success, traction, and sales from their social media strategy.

SEO, on the other hand, was a completely new channel for them with no “guaranteed” ROI. So, all the resources got poured into what they knew worked for them.

And actually, it did benefit their SEO – even if indirectly.

Over the course of a year, they built a lot of brand awareness through their social media strategy and some news websites and industry niche publications and bloggers started picking up on this. Naturally, the website has picked up some very powerful backlinks.

But ranking for your brand name is one thing.

You can build your brand awareness and acquire all the backlinks in the world. If your website doesn’t have SEO optimized pages and content targeting buyer-intent, non-brand keywords, you’re still never going to rank for them.

Once this company finally started executing good SEO and content strategies, things started picking up and rankings improved across the board, diversifying their traffic and revenue sources.

Ultimately, I’m happy to see the company do well, and it’s good to know that my proposed strategy did work in the end.

The only regret I have is that I was unable to convince them to start a year earlier – I’m convinced they would have been in an even better SEO position by now.

If you are looking for tailored advice and SEO strategies, I can help. Get in touch so we can explore opportunities.