SEO has become a staple in digital enterprises, and at least some knowledge of how SEO works and why it matters is essential to just about any business with a website. As many company owners know, there are many different layers to SEO, but the main goal is to increase your page/site on search engines to drive more awareness of your brand/company and traffic to your website. In other words, SEO is a competition to beat out other sites and companies for the top spot (or one of the top spots) on search engines. This we can all agree on.

However, this leaves one major question: What if you don’t have any competition? What if you are the major supplier or major company in your area, and you’ve been number one for years and years? How does SEO play into that scenario?

How SEO is Beneficial for Companies with Little or No Competition

It’s true: Government agencies, non-profit organizations, and even some of our franchise clients that have always been number one don’t really have competition when it comes to SEO. However, keeping SEO in mind is still important. It doesn’t have to be a number one priority, but it has to be some sort of consideration if you want your business to continue to grow.

Because SEO can sometimes get expensive, it’s easy for these types of businesses to decide that their efforts are better spent elsewhere and then ignore SEO altogether (and for a while, they may not notice any changes to their business at all), but there are things to consider that could affect this type of company’s future:

Visibility: SEO Knowledge Doesn’t Only Help You in the Rankings

If you have a website, you clearly want people to visit it, right? Of course you do, so at least minimal knowledge and experience in SEO is necessary because SEO isn’t just about marketing to search engine bots; it’s more about getting readers and consumers to your site, providing them information about your company or brand and relevant information about your industry or whatever it is they are researching. You want it to be as easy as possible for returning or potential consumers to get to your site and explore.

Optimizing your site using SEO tactics is a great way to make that happen, regardless of the competition level in your field. Understanding SEO means understanding website navigation (great for your readers), understanding engaging content types (great for your readers), understanding website architecture and design strategies (great for your readers), understanding linking so that your website is easily accessible (great for your readers), and more. Moral of the story: The search engine bots can relax because it’s not all about them.

Communicating with Search Engines

SEO also isn’t just about the consumer or the bots that do the ranking, but also about communicating with search engines in general. These sites scan your website for content and give you a PageRank, and you want to ensure you are held in high regard from search engines even if you have no competition. The higher you rank in PageRank, the more credibility you have for customers, proving to them that you are the best option and not just the only option in a small field. You need to be publishing unique content frequently and Google needs to continually index that content, and if they don’t, you could lose your page one spot to a company you didn’t even consider competition originally.

Understanding SEO and how search engines are perceiving your website can also help give you the tools you need to make sure that there are no glitches and nothing is going wrong. For example, if your content suddenly stops being indexed, there is a problem with your sitemap, your site is running slower than usual (which you may not have noticed otherwise), etc., it’s Google Webmaster Tools that are going to help you get back on track, and it’s your SEO knowledge that is going to help you solve the problem.

Future Competition

Plain and simple, nobody knows what the future will bring. Just because you don’t have any competition right now doesn’t mean it will always be that way. At some point, it’s reasonable to expect that you and your company/brand will have some competition that comes along, just based on the nature of the Internet’s impact on the business world. When that competition does come along, you want to ensure you’re already at the top of SEO rankings. It gives you that instant credibility for consumers, but it also gives you a leg up immediately on your competition. When you get to that point, you can fall back on your previous knowledge of SEO and how it relates to your company and then when competition does come along, you can invest more in SEO and leave your competition in the dust.

Think of it in the sense of online journalism. The newspapers that adopted the online nature of the business years ago were in a way better position than newspapers and magazines that were late to the online party. By the time every existing outlet joined the Internet craze and other, strictly online, news sites popped up, those first newspapers had a leg up from the get-go. That’s the position you want to be in because if you’re not, it won’t take long for your competition to rise above you in the rankings. If you have no SEO foundation, you’re almost starting with an even playing field.

The Takeaway

Just because you don’t have much competition doesn’t mean you can ignore SEO, but at the same time, just because you’re investing in SEO doesn’t mean you have to break the bank to do so. You may not have to hire an SEO agency or spend a ton of money on SEO campaigns, so it’s not crazy if you put SEO at the bottom of your priority list. Just make sure you keep it on the list and don’t completely ignore SEO. You never know when things in your field will change and if competition does come around, you want to be ready and prepared to improve your SEO and you need to have the knowledge to do so.

I recommend to first try and gain SEO knowledge on your own by reading popular SEO blogs, which you can check out here, but if more help is needed, of course look into a smaller, inexpensive agency. You can visit this article to learn more about teaching yourself SEO.

How have you experienced SEO in a field with little or no competition? Let us know in the comments section below.