Blue Ocean Strategy is a term that refers to the new opportunities that exist in the marketplace. These are unexplored opportunities where a company can expand its business without facing any competition. In the world of SEO, uncontested market space is all about finding new keywords and long-tail keywords that will help you boost your traffic.
Blue Ocean Strategy and SEO
The idea of the Blue Ocean Strategy is to create a market space that is uncontested. The idea of SEO is to rank higher in search engines. These two concepts are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they can be used together to create a new market space that’s both uncontested and has high visibility.
Draw Your Attention to the Uncontested Market Space
In the classic blue ocean strategy, a business creates a new market and captures that market. While this can be effective when you’re starting from scratch, it can also be difficult to do in existing markets where there are already numerous players vying for control.
For example, if you want to start an online clothing store that sells t-shirts with witty sayings on them (like Urban Outfitters), you might create some of your own designs or simply buy pre-made shirts from other brands. You would then set up shop on Etsy or another marketplace and sell your wares as cheaply as possible while getting plenty of attention from social media influencers who will help spread the word about your brand.
The Rise of the Long Tail
Have you ever visited a website, looked at the search results, and thought, “I wish there were more of these results.”
That’s what this mental exercise is all about. The long tail of search results is a term used to describe a large number of niche, low competition keywords that are available to target. These can make for great new traffic opportunities for your business—and here’s how:
The Long Tail Rule states that online niches are much larger than most people realize—which means there are more potential customers out there than you think!
How to Boost Traffic from a High Volume, Low Competition Keyword Set?
If you’re just starting out in SEO, or if your site is new, you may not have much of a reputation online or many backlinks to help rank highly for high competition keywords.
One way to get around this is by targeting low-competition keywords that are still relevant to what you do.
Here are some examples:
- A web design agency could target “web design” as a keyword since their service is obviously web design. This can be thought of as the service category or vertical (the industry term). It would also be smart for them to go after some more specific related terms like “SEO copywriter” and “SEO content writer” because those visitors might not know about the agency’s services but will still be interested in learning more after coming across one of these terms on Google. For example, an agency specializing in website development could target phrases like “website maintenance services” and “updates on your website.”
The Blue Ocean SEO Process, Step-by-Step
The Blue Ocean SEO Process, Step-by-Step
With the tools you’ll learn in this post, you can follow the five steps of Blue Ocean Strategy to determine your content strategy and create a keyword set that will power your site through organic search.
- Identify an uncontested market space (e.g., local businesses)
- Examine your competitors’ keyword strategies
- Collaborate with your team to create a keyword set that captures the essence of your value proposition
- Engage in the competitor analysis and benchmarking research to find out which keywords are driving traffic to similar sites
- Optimize all pages on your site for those keywords
Step 1: Identify an “Uncontested Market Space” Based on Previous Research
This might seem obvious, but before you start on a solution, it’s important to define what the problem actually is. It’s easy to get caught up in your own vision of how things should be and miss the mark when it comes to addressing the actual issue at hand. If you’re looking for an example of this in action, look no further than the classic “What if I told you?” meme below:
Takeaway: Don’t worry about what other people’s goals are; only focus on yours. Be ambitious and realistic at once!
Step 2: One-by-One, Examine Each of Your Competitors’ Keyword Strategies
Let’s face it: Your competitors are living in a blue ocean. You can’t compete with them directly, since they have already claimed the best keywords and earned their share of the market. Instead, you’ll have to take a look at what they’re doing right and try to emulate that success.
To do this, you need to move out of your comfort zone and start exploring some new territory. Start by perusing the website of one of your competitors who has been successful in search engine optimization; look for things like keyword rankings and conversion rates from visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers or loyal users (if applicable).
Look at how these other companies are using keywords—and which keywords they’ve chosen not to use—and determine whether there’s room for improvement in your own strategy by making some adjustments based on what seems effective in theirs.
Step 3: Collaborate with Your Team on a Keyword Set That Captures the Essence of Your Value Proposition
You should now have a list of search terms that you can use to find keywords for your website. Next, you’ll want to look at the most commonly searched keywords and identify which are relevant to your business.
The best way to do this is by using a keyword research tool like Google Adwords or Wordtracker. A tool like this will allow you to see how many people are searching for each term and which ones have the highest volume of searches per month (and/or year).
For example, if our company wanted more leads in the form of blue ocean strategy consultants, we could type “blue ocean strategy consultant” into Google’s Keyword Planner – a free tool provided by Google Adwords – then click on “Get Search Volume.”
Step 4: Determine the Necessary Onsite Changes
Now that you’ve done your research, it’s time to make some changes. The first step is to review your current onsite content and identify what might need to be tweaked or updated in order to better align with the blue ocean strategy.
- Does your onsite content include any keywords related to the target market? If not, it should! This could mean adding more keyword-rich pages and articles (and possibly even content types) targeted at these keywords.
- Are there any pages or sections of your site that aren’t using language consistent with the value proposition? If so, they should be updated as well—either by adding new ones that do reflect this language or by updating existing ones in line with it.
- Are any of these pages inconsistent with brand voice? This could mean taking out any overly corporate jargon from product descriptions or hiring writers who use a more casual tone if you have one available for hire. It can also mean writing additional new pages reflecting a different tone for specific products if necessary.
The next steps are up for debate: Should we focus on improving our ranking potential now (by making these changes), or should we wait until after launch so as not to risk losing traffic during updates?
Step 5: Create a New Webpage with the Keywords You Identified in Step 3
Once you’ve identified your keywords, use them in the following places:
- Page title and URL. These are the two most important on-page factors for SEO, so make sure you have them set up correctly. You can also use a plugin like Yoast SEO to help guide you through this process.
- Page description (meta description). A meta description is a snippet of text that shows up below your link when someone searches Google or another search engine; it should be between 150–160 characters with spaces included. The purpose of this snippet is to entice searchers into clicking through to read more about what they found in their search results because it’s extremely important that they do so if they want their website to rank well online! Use your keywords here too because Google uses these descriptions when pulling content out of search results pages and placing them into its SERPs (search engine result pages).
- H1 tags (headlines). It’s best practice for web developers not only to include short but descriptive headlines but also ones that contain relevant keywords so as not only to make sense as titles but also help determine how content is displayed in SERPs by displaying different sections as “Posts” versus “Articles” based on length alone rather than actual topic area coverage – which may lead users away from reading further down past those first few sentences until later when searching again later from another page within site navigation options provided by CMS systems such as WordPress™ itself or Blogger™ which both allow users access blogging platforms free-of-charge via internet connection speeds available today worldwide thanks largely due technological advances made during#ENDWRITE
Blue Ocean SEO Tools and Resources
Blue Ocean SEO tools and resources are an excellent way to discover new keywords, competitors, content and traffic sources. They can also help you identify onsite changes that will help you achieve your blue ocean goals.
Here’s a list of some of the best tools available:
- Rank Ranger: This tool provides you with keyword research options based on results from multiple sources. It includes data such as top-ranking keywords in search engines, most expensive CPC (cost per click) ad placements, volume/competition estimates for target terms, and more. You can use this information to create lists of high-value long-tail phrases for optimization purposes.
- Ahrefs: With this platform, you can quickly find out what keywords searchers are using when they look for content similar to yours or related topics. You’ll also get insights into which sites are linked to those pages so that if there’s something that needs changing about them—or new ones need to be added—you’ll know where people will be looking when they’re trying to find information like yours online!
New traffic opportunities are outside your existing market space.
The Blue Ocean Strategy is a business strategy. It’s also a marketing strategy, but it goes beyond that: the Blue Ocean Strategy is about how you think about your business, and how you approach new opportunities. The concept of “new markets” isn’t limited to geography or location—it can include anything that extends beyond what you already do (or are currently focusing on).
Conclusion
The blue ocean theory is an excellent way to start thinking about SEO in a new way. You may not be able to compete with Google for top spots on the SERP, but there are other areas of opportunity for your business. By thinking creatively, you can find ways that don’t necessarily involve making big investments or massive changes. Instead, focus on what Google doesn’t do well: helping users find things they weren’t even looking for in the first place!