Anyone Care to Share Some SEO Tricks for Competitive Industries?

[newwhy]

[Insert word "hack" if you prefer that, but it's so overused that I'm using "trick" instead]

I've been doing SEO for ten years, and I'm pretty good at covering my bases. For the client I'm seeking help with, here's what we're doing: strong and regular onsite keyword optimized content (both long tail and competitive keyphrases), good local SEO, high-quality guest posting on relevant local news sites and blogs, heavy community involvement and support, scholarships and sponsorships, lots of videos, all the social media, tons of competitive research and link building, ongoing website architecture analysis and tweaking, a systematized process for getting reviews, onsite chat, Google Search Ads, etc.

This client has been around for years  in a very competitive industry in a medium-sized American city. We do alright in the local pack for certain search terms, but overall his rankings are not good.

For anyone who works in a super competitive industry, do you have any tricks you'd be willing to share? I don't want to steal your secrets, but I could use some advice. Thank you!

[ClaytonJ]

You cannot beat high quality contextual earned links.

That said schema makes search easier for search engines, so review the schema mark-up and help feed structured data to google in the best way possible.  So start with a schema audit.

Hope that helps.

[EGOL]

Onpage optimization can get you rankings when competition is low, especially in local SERPs in sleepy little towns.

When things get competitive, then onpage optimization has much less of an impact.   Then, great content and great links are much more important.

[newwhy]

Thank you both. We have pretty great content and many high quality contextual earned links already. And we're always working on expanding this. This is stuff that I know from all the years in SEO.  We don't have a lot rich snippets, and while I know they help search engines, they're assumed not to actually help rankings, right? In my experience they've done very little to actually boost rankings (or CTR), but if you've seen some huge impact from them, we can see if a complete schema markup is viable. I'm hesitant to direct a ton of time and resources toward busy tasks that don't have much results.

[ClaytonJ]

Hi Natalie

We chase featured snippets for customers, not rankings, ie position 0 delivers a huge ROI for the right customer query.  It is great branding exposure as well if it a zero-click snippet. Featured snippets are not a huge amount of work, more training and guidance. We start with the below and work from there.

• Content on page has to be perfectly optimised for mobile.
• HTTPS
• Use lots of headers (H2 and H3) tags
• Short answer to the question/s - 40-45 words - ideal 42.
• Link out to Authority Sources.

On schema again, not huge on time but high on impact.

Go get em.

[DonnaDuncan]

Have you done a side-by-side comparison of your client and his top competitors? Things I'd be looking for:

• Are his top competitors specialists in the topics you want to rank for whereas your client is more of a generalist?
• What is your client's online reputation relative to the competition?  Is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative?
• How does their anchor text compare? Are the topics you want to rank for included in the link text?
• Do competitors have keywords in their domain name? I know that's not a ranking factor, but it often translates into incoming anchor text with those topics / keywords which IS a ranking factor.
• Is the content on your client's site organized around the key topics he wants to be known for?
• Is your client listed as its author?

So, no tricks or hacks. Just a few things I look for when in this situation.