I am a marketer who has worked with companies in almost every vertical you could imagine. This includes everything from tow truck companies and auto salvage yards to physicians and lawyers. Each industry presents its unique challenges, but some industries simply have higher competition than others. These are the accounts that create a real challenge: one that I happily take on.
A few examples of these high competition industries are lawyers, real estate, and addiction treatment. One thing that each of these industries has in common is that taking on a new client provides a potentially huge payday for the business. With lots of cash flow, there are higher budgets and many more people fighting for the same high traffic advertising locations.
SEO For High Competition Industries
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of optimizing a website domain and/or individual page in order to get it to rank high on organic search engine results. Organic results are often marketing in our industry as “free traffic”. However, in high competition industries, companies typically higher professionals to optimize their websites to rank well for high intent, high traffic keywords. Herein lies the conundrum. Now, you are paying someone, meaning the traffic is no longer “free” and there are and numerous people putting in ongoing hours to try and outrank each other and only 1 person can rank first for each keyword. At this point in the discussion, the question becomes whether or not to invest in this marketing strategy.
Let’s take treatment programs such as Amethyst Recovery Center and The Freedom Center as an example. They are able to dominate their area due to their investment in organic search. Their companies have been in the game for a while and they have a substantial amount of valuable content on their website. For this reason, they rank well for numerous keywords.
So, they can stop now, right?
Well… not really.
You see, the internet is always changing and Google’s search algorithms are always improving in order to serve the most helpful information possible to visitors. If an established website were to stop dead in its tracks, then new algorithm updates may cause rankings to drop and companies that are putting out new content and making appropriate changes may quickly outrank these more established sites. To stop SEO would ultimately be a death wish.
Next, let’s think of a new website for a newly established business in a high competition industry. Is it even worth it for them? If they plan on growing the value of their business or being in business for more than a few weeks, then SEO is certainly worth the investment! The later you start, the longer it will take to get up there ranking with the big boys. Plus, as I said before, all it takes is one major change or for another company to drop the ball in order to jump a few spots ahead of them.
Final Thoughts
Yes, marketing for high competition industries is challenging and requires an investment, but in the long run, it can be invaluable. It takes patience, research, and some experimentation to get a new website ranking in one of these challenging industries, but that makes it all the more rewarding in the end.
