Aggregator/comparitor site outranking us

[Discovery_SA]

Hi

I would like to know if anyone has experience with trying to outrank an aggregator/comparitor website.  We are being beat by one that also includes our range of products in their comparisons and I was wondering if there was a smart way around this?

[NgEF]

Hi Lida,

This is a great question and surprisingly not one that I've seen before too much.

I've been on both sides of this question before. Once as a small business in the hospitality industry trying to outrank Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) on non-brand keywords, and also once where I was running my own startup which was an aggregator/marketplace.

Having given a little bit of experience here, I can tell you that aggregators tend to focus in on fat keywords, which creates tons of opportunity for an individual business to focus on long tail keywords. As a smaller business, I had literally no chance to outrank an OTA on generic keywords. Heck, even trying to outrank them on my own brand-reviews keywords was a challenge. Instead of competing with the OTAs head-on in the fat keywords, I spent quite a bit of time to put together a list of long tail keywords that were ultra relevant to my business. Once I had that, I began optimizing and creating content targeted at these long tail keywords and I saw results almost instantly. The big benefit of targeting long tail keywords ignored by the aggregators is that there is little competition on these keywords, hence you're able to hit them fast, rank and move on to the next keyword to focus on. That was my strategy as a small business.

During my time in my startup, where I was the aggregator, it finally made sense to me exactly why the OTAs focused in on the fat keywords. As a small business, I had maybe 100 or 200 pages indexed. As an aggreagator, I had over 2000 pages indexed in the first month. I had almost no way of optimizing that huge amount of pages for the most relevant keywords for each of them. I chose to focus in on the more powerful 'category' pages which targeted the fatter keywords. I can say though, if I had the time and the resources, I would have done a much more thorough job and eventually gone through that entire index and done the keyword research properly before optimizing each and every page. If that had happened, there was no way I was going to be out-ranked by one of the smaller sites I was aggregating.