SEO is the Slight Edge in PR

We need a slight edge in PR — we need SEO.

Growing up play­ing hockey, our coach often reminded us, “Second place is the first loser.”

Tough love, I guess.

Inbound mar­ket­ing is kind of the same. It’s dis­pro­por­tion­ally expens­ive to come in second.

But the sil­ver lin­ing is that you only need to win by a little to win big.
And this seems to be espe­cially true for SEO.

Here’s why:

The Wimbledon Prize Money

We’re all some­what famil­i­ar with the bene­fits of fin­ish­ing first, but we rarely acknow­ledge how dev­ast­at­ing it can be to fin­ish second. 

In the 2016 Wimbledon Championships, the male and female singles win­ners col­lec­ted £2,000,000 in prize money. 

The run­ner-ups? They received half of that — £1,000,000. That’s a lot of money, but only half of the win­ners got it.

The singles win­ners also col­lec­ted 2,000 valu­able cham­pi­on­ship points, where­as the male run­ner-up col­lec­ted 1,200 points and the female run­ner-up 1,300 points. 

In addi­tion to prize money, there’s the massive pub­li­city boost that comes from win­ning the Wimbledon tour­na­ment. Including the effects on spon­sor­ships and fan­base growth. 

“To the vic­tor go the spoils,” right?

In the case of Wimbledon, we rarely encounter tour­na­ment win­ners that are twice as good as their final­ist opponents. 

In oth­er instances, the run­ner-up fair even worse. If ten com­pan­ies com­pete for a single cus­tom­er, nine out of ten will lose out on 100%. And it does­n’t mat­ter how small the los­ing mar­gin was.

The bene­fits of suc­cess are rarely evenly dis­trib­uted; it’s the nat­ur­al out­come of the power-law dis­tri­bu­tion.

The Winner Takes All Principle

Still, the “win­ner-takes-all” is no new concept in economics. 

David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, authors of Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms, argue that such mar­kets are less and less of a sure thing in today’s net­worked economy.

In an HBR art­icle, the authors conclude:

“The mes­sage is simple: beware of the siren song of net­work effects, win­ner-take-all, and first-mover advant­ages. Network effects can cre­ate great value rap­idly, but they can des­troy it just as fast.”

The Slight Edge in SEO

A slight edge can have massive effects. The mar­ket lead­er might only have to be 1% bet­ter than their closest com­pet­it­or to win 80 – 90% more business.

Finishing second in SEO is long-term expens­ive. Because most of the time, the win­ner does take the most of it.

As for SEO, the slight edge seems to be of sig­ni­fic­ant importance: 

If you man­age to rank in Google, it mat­ters that organ­ic first-page res­ults will col­lect 90% of all traffic. The first, second, and third organ­ic search res­ults will attract 61% clicks. And out of all the traffic, the num­ber one organ­ic search res­ult will col­lect 33% of all traffic while the second organ­ic search res­ult will get nearly half — 17,6% (The First Page of Google by the Numbers).

As any social media nat­ur­al will tell you, there are plenty of online tac­tics to take advant­age of the slight edge. One instance is where you strive to build con­tent sky­scrapers (also known as the sky­scraper tech­nique) by barely adding just enough qual­ity to push your­self onto the top position.

In sum­mary:

Either you go after it (a top keyword rank, an interest group or seg­ment, a tar­get con­ver­sion rate etc.), and you make 100% sure to get it — or you’d be bet­ter off shift­ing your resources elsewhere.