What do you do when a competitor grows 1,100% overnight - and suddenly everyone questions your SEO strategy?
A few years ago, I joined a mature company that depended heavily on SEO.
We managed millions of URLs, but deliberately kept most of them out of Google’s index.
Our playbook focused on user signals, content quality, and aggressively pruning pages that didn’t perform.
The strategy was working. Organic visibility grew 15% in six months.
Then the June 2021 Core Update came. We were not affected.
But a competitor grew by 1,100%.
We had been 15 times larger and never even considered them a threat. Suddenly, our lead was just 20%.
Stakeholders panicked.
The competitor had a smaller team, a smaller budget, less inventory, and a lesser-known brand. But they were pursuing a far more aggressive indexing strategy - and getting extraordinary results.
So the obvious conclusion was that our strategy must be wrong.
Except I didn’t believe their growth was sustainable.
For the next
X (Twitter) · 2 wks