Winning organic market share in SERPs dominated by big brands with huge budgets may seem like a fairytale in today's modern organic landscape. However, that need not be the case. In this webinar, Ross Tavendale shows you blow for blow how he took a small business (less than 1m turnover) and grew their organic presence to beat out Tripadvisor's, HomeAway and Holiday Lettings for their core terms.

1. Killing Giants
How to Beat Big Brands in the SERPs

2. About the presenter
A/S/L?

3. Not Tin
Tin

4. Not a
designer

5. Not a
dancer

6. SEO guy
from a big
box agency
background

7. Now MD at Type A
SEO Consultants based in London

8. We build big links…...

9. That drive real business results

10. Agenda
▫ Brilliant basics
▪ Pedantic technical SEO
▪ UX and why we shouldn’t overlook it
▪ Keyword choice and topic grouping
▪ Search Console tricks
▪ HREF LANG implementations
▫ Link Building
▪ Link Multipliers
▪ Surveys & Data Journalism
▪ Facebook groups
▪ Fake News
▫ Creative
▪ Content production
▪ Scaling
▪ COPE - create once, publish
everywhere

11. Technical SEO
Our on page and technical SEO was absolutely perfect

12. Brilliant basics
● Start with UX, accessibility, crawlability and
indexation.
● A mobile first rebuild
● Clean bill of health from search console
● Markup: pagination, reviews, product
markup, business markup
● Thoughtful meta data written by our
copywriter, not our SEOs
● Cleaned up old content - 301 pages with
links and no-index
● Revamped all internal linking to push to
key pages
● Speed & security

13. The Site Before...

14. The Site Before...
Dump of all
products
No HREF
LANG
Non essential
information
Most important
navigation
sidelined
Confusing CTAs
Small product images
with unorganized
descriptions

15. The site after...

16. The site after...
Clear hierarchy of
products
Search is front
and centre
Big beautiful
product images
Well organised
product features
Schema on all
products

17. Flow: UX & Navigation
● Search bar
● Products split in sensible hierarchy
● Core pages in the main nav
● Blog promoted to main nav
● Changed all internal links to point to main
pages
● URLs resolving in 1 place

19. Quick way to map new category pages
If you have thousands of keywords and possible category combinations, use this
PPC trick.

20. Live demo
file:///Users/rosstavendale/Downloads/KeywordGrouperPro/KeywordGrouperPro.html

21. Build content off
the back of
successful
pieces
● View queries around
top landing page
● Sort by monthly
volume
● Voila!

22. Install this
plugin to make
life easier
● Search volumes in
search console, GA
and search
● Let’s you see keyword
value at a glance

23. HREF
LANG…..really
works
● Took about a month to see
uplift
● Tripled traffic to that
country
● May have been a side effect
of aggressive link building

24. Link multiplier
via syndicated
content
Run a site: https://www.apnews.com/
“tripadvisor"
To find all the headlines about
TripAdvisor
Put out all headlines and put them in
“”
Use scrape box to find all headlines
that are syndicated through
multiple sources
Pull the journalist names
Commission them to write a piece for
you on the AP
Conduct reclamation when it’s
syndicated
Rinse repeat

25. Link multiplier
via syndicated
content
Run a site: https://www.apnews.com/
“tripadvisor"
To find all the headlines about
TripAdvisor
Put out all headlines and put them in
“”
Use scrape box to find all headlines
that are syndicated through
multiple sources
Pull the journalist names
Commission them to write a piece for
you on the AP
Conduct reclamation when it’s
syndicated
Rinse repeat

26. Facebook
Groups
● 72 links generated
● Cut the bullshit- pay
them or give them
something
● Competitions work for
lower end sites

27. Survey data
● Just ask
● Design the survey to
fulfil you intended
outcome
● Build stories around
the data
● Don’t sell it into a
national

28. Reactive
Don’t be fooled - this is an
incredibly time consuming
task with a limited hit rate.
But when you hit. It tends
to be a national newspaper.

29. Fake news
We created the Iron Man mansion on the
mystical island of Es Vedra and pretended you
could book it.
▫ The british press didn’t really bite……..
▫ BUT the american’s freaking loved it
▫ Opens up tonnes of audiences to target
that are not directly travel related

30. eBuyer
Posted the “God Particle” for Sale when CERN built the particle accelerator

31. Tesco Direct
“Accidentally” priced the iPad at £49.99 instead of £499.99 - they still rank page 1

32. Boots Chemist
Created fake products around Christmas time like “Santa’s Chimney Lube”

33. Content
submissions
● Lots of quality sites
looking for inspiration
for lookbooks and and
new blog posts ideas
● Particularly in fashion
and retail

34. Creating the content
How to scale the content production to get high volumes of quality content out

35. What you’re up
against
● Diluted creative ideas
● All with a channel owner
that has the power to
can an ideas last minute
final sign off
● Slow, bloated process

36. Scale
Audit all assets
80/20 on effort
Set up an environment that
makes production easy
Double down on content that
begets more content
Give everything away
Lighting in
the ceiling
Camera on
tripod
always
setup
Pre-made
backdrops

37. COPE - Create Once, Publish Everywhere
A common amplification technique. Plan the content formats you are going to use and sketch out the
distribution strategy for them.