A rant: It's getting harder on SERP for the small guys with limited funds

Recently, I’ve been thinking about SEO for small businesses and how it's getting harder to show up on search if you're a small SaaS company without some serious cash to burn.

Here are a few things that have been on my mind

1.      Small businesses with a tiny budget have to pick. Most times, they choose organic because they think it’s gonna work with content and good SEO. But that’s bullshit. It’s getting harder to rank with good content alone in the driver seat, especially if you’re a small brand with a small audience and zero budget for content distro or promotion

2.      SEO copywriters use keywords that fuck up the intro because that shit works. It’s the truth! Sometimes, when I’m analyzing SERP to understand why the beautiful content I’ve written isn’t ranking on its own, I start to see patterns.

Poorly written content by big brands, who know that they can get away with the bare minimum because they’ve established their brand name and audience and by extension their position on SERP.

And that shit pisses me the fuck up!

Think about it for a moment. You’ve done the in-depth research to write this amazing piece of content that’s filled with a ton of information. But it’s not ranking because page 1 is populated with shitty content where they’ve included the keyword or a variation in the headline, intro, alt image text, and all the other bullshit Yoast recommendations that I usually ignore.

Google can say all it wants about good content ranking, or SEO ranking signals to optimize for, but I see too many big brands doing the bare minimum and winning at search and I wonder….What the fuck are we doing out here?

Granted, it's not always the scenario, but it happens enough times for me to worry about what Google bots really define as good or great content.

3.      This is perhaps the reason why I gravitate towards large brands. Why fight the trend when you can join in and win?

The ones I work with have teams for everything. Design, content, SEO, distribution, tech SEO, tech content…shit….it’s paradise for a freelance SEO content writer like me! They have massive audiences on email and social to share the content.

I write the content, it performs, they retain me for long-term gigs, pay me a shit ton of money…everybody is happy.

4.      But it hurts when I work with smaller brands.

Where big teams have a budget built-in for promotion and content distro, these guys have to count the cost of everything. And I feel my heart breaking each time I tell them: “Hey, you’ve got to invest in tech SEO, content distro, link building, and all the other shit that cost a lot of money. They get this confusing and hurt look in their eyes when I tell them that the amazing content we’re creating is not gonna make it to page one on its own if we don’t spend three times our content budget on all the other stuff that actually makes content rank.

5.      So, don’t blame the SEO copywriter who is simply following instructions from a content manager. It’s wrong but it works and that's annoying. I’m mostly lucky because I work with larger brands that have the budget for everything, so we see results pretty quickly on our content.

But what about the little SaaS companies that are bootstrapped by a few founders who already have too much on their plate. When is Google gonna make SERPs a fair game for all?

6.      In the meantime, content distro and link building are just as important as content creation. I’ve never and will never be a fan of mass-produced content simply for the sake of numbers, without thinking through a proper strategy or purpose for the content. We’re spending 3x our content budget on link building and content distro and that’s the world we live in if we want to rank on search.

7.      SERPs were never fair to all, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Google never gave a shit, to begin with.

Finally, if you see any errors on this post, look past it, I wrote this stuff in 15 minutes!