Gary Illyes Of Google Discusses How Small Websites May Outperform Large Brand Websites And Reddit

By Author: Kasper Infotech
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In a video interview that was posted to YouTube, Gary Illyes of Google guided smaller companies looking to take on Reddit, Amazon, and other well-known websites.
About Big Brand Dominance
I'm making up for the underreported answers to SEO-related questions provided by Google's Gary Illyes in May this month. Gary responded to a query regarding how to go up against major businesses and Reddit.
Although Gary doesn't seem to agree with the notion that Reddit is taking over, that isn't the context of his response, nor is he contesting that view. Because his response addresses the fundamental problem of competing with well-known businesses in search engine results pages, the context goes beyond Reddit.

The question posed by one of the audience members was this:
"What can the smaller brands do other than focusing on long tail keywords since Reddit and large publishers now dominate the SERPS for many keywords?"

The History of Big Brands in The SERPs
Gary's response covers the whole history of large brands appearing in the SERPs as well as the SEO reaction to that. In the past, About.com was ...
... a website that could be found for almost everything and covered almost any topic. The fact that About.com used to rank so highly irritated many SEOs since it was like the Wikipedia of its day.
He first puts that context into his answer, that this complaint about Reddit is part of a long history of various brands ranking at the top of the SERPs and then washing out of the SERPs as trends change.

Gary answered:
“So, before I joined Google I was doing some SEO stuff for big publishers. …SEO type. I was also a server manager like a cluster manager.
So, I would have had the same questions and back in the day, we saw these kinds of questions all the time.
Now it’s Reddit. Back then it was Amazon. A few years before that, it was I think …About.com.
Pretty much every two years the name that you would put there changes.”

Small Websites Can Beat Out Major Brands
Gary goes on to say that small websites have always been able to outcompete larger ones because of their creative use of SEO. This is also accurate. Some of the most popular websites were formerly tiny ones that managed to outcompete bigger, well-known websites. For instance, Reviewed.com was founded by a young person whose enthusiasm for the subject helped it become incredibly popular before it was acquired by USA Today.

There are two things to do, according to Gary:
1. Await their imitation until someone else discovers how to outcompete them.
2. Or work things out on your own and take the lead.

Naturally, though, it's usually too late if you wait for someone else to lead the way.
He continued:
“It seems that people always figure out ways to compete with whoever would be the second word in that question.
So, it’s not like, oh my God, like everything sucks now and we can retire. It’s like, one thing you could do is to wait it out and let someone else come up with something for you that you can use to compete with Reddit and the big publishers that allegedly dominate nowadays the SERPs.
Or you sit down, and you start thinking about how you can employ some marketing strategies that will boost you to around the same positions as the big publishers and Reddit and whatnot.
One of the most inspiring presentations I’ve seen was the empathetic marketing… do that. Find a way to compete with these positions in the SERPs because it is possible, you just must find the angle to compete with them.”

Gary is right, big brands are afraid to take chances and are slowed down by red tape. As I previously stated regarding Reviewed.com, I can attest from both personal experience and knowing others who have taken a similar approach including the company's founder—that a sound plan can consistently outperform the major companies.
Long Tail Search Terms & Additional Techniques
Gary then moved on to discuss long-tail keywords. several inexperienced SEO experts describe long-tail keyword phrases as having several words. That is entirely incorrect. Long tail keyword phrases are those that are infrequently used by searchers. Not the number of words in the keyword phrase, but the rarity of the keyword use is what gives them their long tail.

The background to this section of Gary's response is that the individual posing the query effectively wrote off long-tail search requests as the trail mix that major corporations leave for smaller websites.

Gary clarifies:
Furthermore, as previously mentioned, what's left are the long tail keywords. We seem to be seeing somewhere between 15 and even more per cent of new long-tail keywords per day.

Long tail keyword traffic is very strong. You can get a ton of traffic by joining that bandwagon.

It is not noted that one strategy to get attention to a website that is about a topic is to dominate long-tail keyword phrases. People visit the long tail inquiries (those with more traffic) and come back for the head phrases.
Some small sites have the issue of attempting to target high-traffic keywords without first demonstrating their importance in the long tail. Developing a website from the ground up is one of their key strategies to success.

Small Websites Can Be Effective
Gary is correct in saying that the long tail and new trends have a lot of traffic. Small sites must keep in mind that large sites move slowly and must navigate multiple levels of bureaucracy before making a strategic choice. They are also less likely to experience large swings because the stakes are higher. The little site's strength is its speed and daring manoeuvres. Use it.