Just because you are not the biggest company on the block does not mean you have to go run and hide from big competitors.
There are often creative ways to go after their market share through SEO.
Kyle Roof shared one such story about how he helped a smaller bank go after one of the top 3 largest banks in the United States, Wells Fargo.
I have no love loss for Wells Fargo. Having worked for them in the past, I can tell you they are every bit as corrupt and evil as you hear in the news.
That made me like this story even more.
If you don’t know who Kyle is, he is a well-known figure in the SEO industry, particularly recognized for his expertise in on-page SEO and algorithm testing. He is the co-founder of High Voltage SEO, an SEO agency, and PageOptimizer Pro (POP), an on-page SEO tool that helps SEOs optimize their content based on algorithmic insights, and that I highly recommend.
Kyle is famous for his scientific approach to SEO, using controlled experiments to test Google’s ranking factors. One of his most notable experiments involved ranking a webpage written in lorem ipsum (dummy text) for a competitive keyword, proving that Google primarily relies on keyword placement and structure rather than semantic understanding alone.
Let’s get on with the story…
How a small bank went after Wells Fargo’s clients with SEO
What Kyle and his team realized was that big banks like Wells Fargo do not optimize for things that people don’t like about them.
For example, things like “Wells Fargo checking fees”.
What they did was create pages around these fees for all the major banks, and targeted featured snippets.
They kept all the informational factual about the fees with an explanation of them, but then included a mention that this bank doesn’t charge those fees.
The great thing about this is that generally you are catching this people at a time when they are mad at the bank (that is usually why people go searching for information about the fees), so they are likely to be open to changing banks.
SEO does not always have to be just about going after the most obvious search queries.
This is a great example of being creative with SEO and finding weaknesses in a competitor’s online visibility that can be exploited.
I’ll include a link to the video where Kyle talks about this example if you want to watch it.
