Startup SEO in a Highly Competitive Industry

I work with a recent startup (<1 year) in one of the more competitive consumer product industries in the United States. Within the last few years plenty of companies in this space have received large investments, resulting in numerous competitors with big marketing budgets in an already crowded marketplace.

The downside as I've outlined above is that this industry typically requires a large budget and is highly dependent on paid advertising to build brand awareness. Right now our brand awareness is nonexistent and we are particularly cash strapped from just trying to establish the typical startup expenses.

In addition, many competitors have extensive digital marketing strategies in-place (paid search, social ads, extensive blogging, scholarship links) and are pretty much dominating high and medium volume industry keywords, making it difficult for us to capitalize on some of the more traditional SEO strategies to gain volume. I would say at least 75-80% of the more popular blog topics that you could brainstorm for this particular industry have already been covered extensively by multiple competitors, and sometimes even general publications that have huge DA. Any low volume keywords with low competition for targeting start to lose their focus and overall purchase intent.

We are ranking for some small target terms with a brand new domain (6 months old), but are just not close to where we need to be. We are only gaining around 100 visits a month at the moment, if that. We have just started link building for the site, which we hope will give us a chance at ranking for more target keywords, as our on-page SEO and content is deep and well organized with more content being added weekly.

The reality is that we just need to get some qualified traffic (any quite frankly) to get the pipeline going. Our product is something that we believe we can sell if people are just able to find it. Our prices and margins are also built sufficiently enough to where it would only take a few sales a month for us to begin to further flesh things out

Any advice on how to potentially overcome this obstacle/strategies would be appreciated, and I'm curious to see how people would respond to this kind of issue. In the light browsing I've done, I haven't seen too many topics on how to thrive in highly competitive markets (mostly just targeting niche's and low volume keywords for quality traffic). We are looking to try and build this white hat as possible and are open to any suggestions.

Social media / social platforms don't have to cost you much of anything.

purchase guest post and do press release too.... for it , sure it will help you a lot

If your competitors have deep pockets and are already crowding you out of PPC and SEO, then you're not going to be able to compete against them here. SEO is expensive. PPC can be a game of who can pay to lose ad money to gain market share. It sounds like your competitors have deep pockets and will be able to outspend you.

I'd suggest finding a partnership with an existing business or organisation on whose client base you can leverage. That way you don't need to worry about Google. Once you've the money to invest, then go after guest posts.

Either find an influencer who will recommend your product or service, or find a business whose customer base matches your target. Offer each a share of revenue in return. Don't necessarily think about online.

What kind of a SEO budget do you actually have? I lot of work can be done yourself but backlinks are going to cost money, software costs money

If you insist on swimming in the same waters as those big sharks then yea you ain't got a chance in hell. Hire a VA or two to do some forum, blog commenting to bring some targeted traffic. Step 3 in this guide

JamaicanMoose said:

Social media / social platforms don't have to cost you much of anything.

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Agreed, but it seems that the only way to get traction on your social channels is to run paid growth campaigns, unless you design something that goes viral.

Unreliable Witness said:

If your competitors have deep pockets and are already crowding you out of PPC and SEO, then you're not going to be able to compete against them here. SEO is expensive. PPC can be a game of who can pay to lose ad money to gain market share. It sounds like your competitors have deep pockets and will be able to outspend you.

I'd suggest finding a partnership with an existing business or organisation on whose client base you can leverage. That way you don't need to worry about Google. Once you've the money to invest, then go after guest posts.

Either find an influencer who will recommend your product or service, or find a business whose customer base matches your target. Offer each a share of revenue in return. Don't necessarily think about online.

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This is an approach we've started to take as of recent. We're trying our best to network with small, local businesses to sell our products and receive a commission to steadily grow the pipeline.

ajrocks said:

What kind of a SEO budget do you actually have? I lot of work can be done yourself but backlinks are going to cost money, software costs money

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Small - I would say no more than $500. Sad for a start-up, but until we receive potential outside investment most of our credit goes to Product Development and Inventory.

radiant13 said:

If you insist on swimming in the same waters as those big sharks then yea you ain't got a chance in hell. Hire a VA or two to do some forum, blog commenting to bring some targeted traffic. Step 3 in this guide

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Thanks, was a good read and had some helpful info within.

Dash Rendar said:

Agreed, but it seems that the only way to get traction on your social channels is to run paid growth campaigns, unless you design something that goes viral.

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Right, so why not try and focus on that? If your budget is only $500, you're not going to be able to compete in any other area of SEO.