Focus your SEO on what makes YOU great
One of the flaws in using keywords as the start of an SEO effort is that it breaks the focus of SEO from the beginning
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Airops.
One of the flaws in using keywords as the start of an SEO effort is that it breaks the focus of SEO from the beginning. It naturally makes you focus on what others are already searching for, rather than on your actual value props.
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This means that travel sites, which should be focused on the niche of travel they serve best, are instead focused on creating high-volume best travel destination pieces of content. Local providers, such as dentists, often fill their sites with information on dental health, even though the vast majority of their audience lives outside the geographic area they serve. There are even software sites that veer into hiring best practices content because it is a tangential keyword in their vertical.
This obsession with generic keywords isn't just bad SEO, it's bad business.
You can’t be everything for everyone
With a keyword-focused effort, you are trying to be who you are not. Instead, your SEO should be trying to be the perfect solution for your specific customers. SEO needs to live right at the intersection of what your customers want and what you provide. Being highly visible for something you don’t do well or at all doesn’t serve any purpose.
The source of the wrong focus is that many businesses treat SEO like they're playing someone else's game. They see competitors ranking for broad terms and assume their competitor is doing exceptionally well. The reality is likely that if competitors are ‘ranking’ on terms that don’t match their business, it likely doesn’t benefit them either.
This flawed thinking impacts both small and large businesses alike. I have clicked on businesses in Google Maps that have intentionally optimized for “near me” keywords only to discover that they weren’t near me and did not serve the needs of the broader public. The optimization effort and the money spent on that were a complete waste.
Similarly, I once met a small business accounting tool that was chasing terms like "W4 form filler" instead of "meals and entertainment calculator for digital consultants." Predictably, they had no visibility on their desired keywords, but they easily generated visibility by highlighting what they actually do once I convinced them to try something else. Many businesses ditch their strengths to fight battles they can't win.
This is entirely backwards. Massive companies with unlimited budgets and generic offerings own those generic keywords not because they are huge, but because they are brands. It’s not viable to expect to outmuscle the brands without building a similarly strong brand. When you chase generic terms, you're competing with everyone, and unless you are bigger and stronger than everyone else, that’s not a winning strategy.
Be yourself
But there is somewhere you can win and come out on top: your specific expertise and the particular way you solve problems. That's your SEO goldmine, yet too many businesses overlook it by focusing on the wrong metrics.
When you optimize for these specific searches, you're not competing against the entire competitive set; you're competing against maybe a handful of sites that do exactly what you do. Suddenly, you're not fighting for scraps from a massive keyword; you're dominating a profitable niche that perfectly matches your strengths. Your SEO will reflect your actual business.
How to do this
Don’t confuse this recommendation with a suggestion to chase random long-tail keywords. It's about identifying the specific ways your business creates value and building your entire SEO strategy around those things that make you different. For a startup that raised money from investors, it means putting the value prop of why those investors gave their funds into their SEO efforts. For a long-standing business, it's about incorporating the reasons for your strong word-of-mouth referrals also into the SEO efforts.
Doing this transforms SEO from spray and pray into a hyper-targeted, integrated marketing effort. Instead of being on page four of search results for a generic term, you become the definitive answer for your specialty. Traffic might be lower, but it is more targeted, and conversion rates are higher.
When you focus on your strengths, something interesting happens: you start building real topical authority. This authority builds on itself over time, not just with the algorithms, but with human users, too. Eventually, this brand authority will itself lead to more clicks and conversions. Being featured as a brand in AI Overviews will also lead to increased brand search.
Contrast this with generic strategies, which can't create this kind of authority because they're spread too thin. When you try to be authoritative about everything, you end up being authoritative about nothing. Focused expertise beats broad mediocrity every time.
Focus is an advantage
Too many businesses treat their specialization like a problem instead of a superpower. They view their narrow focus as a challenge to overcome rather than an opportunity to amplify. A travel site that helps retirees book vacation packages should become hyper-focused on that audience, even if it is lower traffic than a general travel audience. This is where their strengths and opportunities live.
Your niche isn't holding you back; it's your competitive advantage. The more specific your expertise, the easier it becomes to establish authority and capture high-intent traffic. Generic competitors can't replicate years of specialized knowledge, and search algorithms and models are getting better at recognizing and rewarding that expertise.
The potential
This requires a different way of thinking about SEO. Your SEO strategy should amplify what's already working in your business, not chase what's working for someone else.
Generic SEO strategies fail because they overlook what truly drives business success: solving specific problems for specific people more effectively than anyone else. When you align your SEO with your actual strengths, you're not just optimizing for the search channel; you're incorporating the core value that drives your business in SEO.
Stop chasing everyone else's keywords and start owning your space in search the same way you own it in other channels. The traffic will be more targeted, the competition will be more manageable, and the results will drive your bottom line. The goal is not winning at SEO, it’s winning at business.
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