to 10x your ranking in a competitive space using the “beachhead principle” //

Normandy was the first beachhead of 1944.

D-Day was a culmination of an effective head fake that surprised the Germans, and helped to establish a solid foothold for the Allies in order to retake France.

Clayton Christenson used the “beachhead” principle, a military concept, to explain in his best-selling book “Crossing the Chasm” how new products will only be able to establish dominance of a category once they have gained a foothold among a small, defined group of early adopters.

SEO is no exception, particularly today.

Never before has the world been so challenging, complex or competitive.

To make matters worse, even the most established sites face a Catch-22.

• You need a large website to rank well for keywords.
• Before you can build a large website, you must rank well for the right keywords.

Herein lies the problem. Let’s fix that today.

Why you cannot compete with giants (and what you should do instead)

SEO is a lengthy process.

Like a snowball, it slowly gains momentum and then takes shape after months (or even years).

It may appear that nothing is happening, but underneath, there’s traction building slowly and steadily.

Here’s why.

If 70-80% of users click on the first 5 SERPs, s outside of the top five will only see a small sliver in traffic. If any.

The does not mean that progress is not being made.

It’s also why organic search traffic may look flat for several months before suddenly spiking up and to your right, almost off the page.

The same principle is applicable to sites that are middling (think DR 40-60), but compete with industry titans (think DR 90+).

You won’t see any results if you’re not in the top five!

To accurately predict SEO success you must first prioritize keywords, topics and content that will reliably make it into the top five within a reasonable time frame.

For now, you can ignore the keywords or topics that are difficult to rank.

You can then set your sights even higher in a few months or years to go after categories with SEO giants.

David defeated Goliath indirectly, through asymmetrical warfare.

Do the same. Here’s how.

What keywords to prioritize based on your “payback period”

SEO is the best investment in digital marketing because it produces results that compound.

If done correctly, your investment does not grow by 10% per month, or become 10% cheaper, as PPC optimization.

It’s 10x instead. It’s 10x again.

What’s the catch?

Snowballs take a while to start rolling.

The payback time is one of the most important concepts for SEO projects.

You can invest in a capital asset like any other.

• Invest $X dollars/pesos/yen today, to
• Generate $Y dollars/pesos/yen tomorrow

But…

You’re not looking at days or weeks (like with advertising) but months or even years. Minimum.

Most marketers, as well as their bosses, are too busy focusing solely on lagging metrics, such as traffic, leads and sales, to notice the leading indicators that are bubbling below the surface.

You can divide the payback period in a few simple groups:

• 0-6 Months
• 6-12 Months
• 12-18 Months
• 18-24 Months
• 24+ Months

You can also prioritize keywords/topics/content that you believe will produce short-term (between 0-12 months) and long-term (between 18-24 months+) results.

Here’s the catch.

The majority of companies must balance both simultaneously

can be used to achieve some quick results , while is also being used to lay the foundation for more challenging campaigns that will yield a significant ROI in two years.

Why do we keep on talking about it?

Allocate resources!

Because it is the most important factor in determining your ability to produce results (or not).

You will never be able compete with the industry giants if you do not have a long-term plan, direction, budget and patience.

You need to know:

• Establish a beachhead and set priorities ASAP.
• Use quick wins to prove your concept.
• Show your boss you need more budget and a larger team to keep the SEO snowball rolling downhill.
• Allow your boss to convince the boss of the ROI in 2+ years if both you and the boss are willing to put in the necessary time and money.
• Freedom to take autonomous, strategic and long-term business decisions, without having to listen to the opinions of other HIPPOs.

The payback period will not determine your speed.

This is also directly linked to topical authority. You can move quickly or slowly.

• Slow : Starting at the beginning and creating topical authority within a category.
• Fast : You have some authority on the topic and you need to keep doubling down in order to increase it.
• Fastest : Already have topical expertise and are ready for dominance.

If the SEO results for next year are dependent on your work this year, it’s now time to establish your beachhead.

How to build your SEO base by going deep (vs. wide and broad)

Take a random SaaS key word, such as “customer churn.”

The volume looks good. CPC shows at least some purchasing intent. keyword difficulty is difficult but not impossible.

Note that keyword difficulty can be biased by the number of domains pointing at each piece of content and does not always reflect the domain strength of the site.

The “Easy KD” in your favorite SEO tool may actually be a much harder ranking in reality, because the DR 90 sites that are ranking have only 10 referring websites each.

Let me explain.

In theory, it’s not that hard to compete with the quantity of domains listed below. Take a look at the average DR for the top ten domains and you will quickly see that this is going to be a tough battle.

Yikes.

Seven of the top ten sites are DR 90+. Two of the top ten sites are in the mid-to high 80s while the final one is the only site that falls into the 70s.

This keyword is very competitive from the domain level!

Let’s say that your site has a DR of 50. Respectable! It’s quite good!

But is not good enough to outrank these competitors reliably in the next few months alone.

This means several things:

• It is possible to increase your own DR…
• It will take at least 12 months to reach 80 or 90.
• You need to focus on the easier targets right now in order to…
• Come back in 12-24 months and rank the “customer churn”.

What’s the point?

You should create a “customer-churn” page, and then surround it with child pages that are based on “Question”, “Terms Match” or other queries which have a larger variation.

Still with me?

We can find some great options for the near term (again, 0-12 month) by digging deeper into these lists, such as these related keywords to “predict customer churn.”

You can quickly identify a good deal of overlap by doing a SERP analysis of all these. It is probably better to create one well-written article than creating unique content for every slight variation.

This last sentence can be further validated by examining the relationship between Potential Traffic and volume for one of these keywords.

Traffic Potential being 2X Volume usually means that there is overlap in intent between several closely related keywords.

The Keyword Difficulty is also more appealing on this long-tail variant (“customer churn predictions”).

The work doesn’t end there. The DR ranges need to be compared again.

Voila!

There are still some heavyweights, but you have at least a few opponents in your weight class.

You can do this if you are persistent and continue to dig deep, become the “go-to” resource for all things related to customer churn while updating or repurposing existing content in order to get a payback of 0-6 months.

You should consider branching out to other clusters and pillars after exhausting the one you have chosen.

You can use your topical authority to establish a beachhead in one particular area. To successfully take territory from others, you need to expand.

Repeat this process for several months and you will find that those “hard” keyword phrases, which used to be difficult to rank for, are now “much easier”. This is largely due to your existing authority in the topic.

Don’t get me wrong.

You’ll need to build a link-building engine behind the scenes in most highly competitive web spaces (read: those where there is a lot money).

The point is that the point is what matters.

• You can establish a strong foothold in a highly relevant area to your product or service.
• You can gain more traction with less competitive but still relevant keywords.
• This jump from page 2 to position 2 will increase traffic by 10X or more on each URL.
• Now you adjust your sights to the top positions in the area.
• You can only get a payback period that is palatable and realistic when you already have a topical authority on your site.

It’s not always easy.

Pros – those who have proven success in multiple categories and websites over time – should keep their heads down, work hard, and not worry about the rest.

In just two years, a former client of mine increased traffic by more than 600%.

No tricks or gimmicks.

They trusted the process and focused on execution month after month, every year.

The results were self-evident.

Delivering SEO results to long-term success

Most SEO campaigns are often unsuccessful for two main reasons:

• You or your boss have unrealistically set high goals for keywords that are completely out of reach (in the near term).
• You (or your manager) change directions too soon, or pull the plug on a project before it has had enough time to produce results.

That’s it!

At the end of it all, simplicity is the best.

Either you fail to achieve your long-term goals or you set wrong targets.

Both are SEO cardinal sins. Both will undermine your efforts.

They focus on their food intake, number of steps, etc.

Compounding is more important than focusing on outputs or lagging indicators like the weight lost on a weighing scale.

Weight loss, like SEO results, goes slowly. Then, suddenly.

Months turn into years. Only then will you achieve success.

The post How can you 10x your ranking in highly competitive areas using the “beachhead principle” first appeared on Search Engine land.