Blue Ocean SEO
By Thomas Herd
How To Find & Monopolize The White Spaces
& Untapped Gold Mines In Today’s Crowded Online Search Markets
Executive Summary
As of March, 2023 – before T1 Advertising was really offering SEO services to clients at scalewe were trying to assessing why so many companies had a real distaste for their SEO results and were constantly switching providers. In scouring over numerous examples and speaking to many of these disgruntled brands about the approaches they were taking, it was clear that these companies were taking 1 or more of the traditional routes that largely proved futile, namely:
- Going after the big, obvious keyword markets(Red Ocean markets)- like “best sushi”, “best whiskey”, “weight loss”, where there was a lotof search demand yet so much competition that most small to mid size businesses we work with would never in a million years rank near the top of Google and as a result never get in front of nor capture any meaningful traffic.
- Doing the exact opposite, and boomeranging to extremely niche Long Tail Keywords like “Best 25 year old malt whiskey from Kentucky” or “best red velvet vegan cupcake” where there’s no competition, yet hardly no search volume either to justify going after the keyword.
In reviewing why these strategies didn’t work, it became clear that they were either getting the competition part wrong or the demand part wrong.
To crack this challenge, what was necessary was to identify where the combination of a meaningful volume of search demand was that existed without (or with very little) competition, and with that insight Blue Ocean SEO was born.
A New Approach
Starting with this understanding, we set out to create a service that would focus (only) on the following 3 essentials when pulling search demand data audits from SEO platforms like SemRush and Ahrefs :
Essential Criteria
- Identifying meaningful search demand (ie search demand at or above 1000 searches per month on average)
- Filtering this meaningful search demand for transaction and USP (unique selling point) inquiries only
- Further filtering this search demand for the keyword results that met #1 and #2 above but that had a keyword difficulty rating (called a KD) of less than 30 out of 100.
In conducting this process, we would be left with keywords (regardless of whether they were longtail or shorttail) that had meaningful search demand related directly to what our clients sold where there was a lack of competition.
And given this lack of competition, these keywords clusters loaded with significant transaction oriented demand would be the fastest, easiest, and most efficient for us to get our clients to organically rank in front of on Google and other search engines (since less competition naturally means less drag & suppression for Google to uptick our clients’ URL’sover and therefore a much faster pathway to the top of the search results where all the traffic is captured).
Execution Phase
Having successfully reverse engineered our targeting process to show our clients where the white spaces aka untapped search demand gold mines in the market are, we now focus on putting them at the top of the Google search results for these Blue Ocean Gold Mines through blogging and metatagging specifically for these keywords.
Metatagging takes place on site- usually on product pages-, where for instance Blue Ocean keywords like “lemon flavored whiskey” and “lemon whiskey” for our client MurLarkey can be appropriately tagged on their sales page for the product they offer in that category and as a result they will appear #1 on both Google Search results for those keywords, and thus capture the vast majority of their recurring traffic.
Blue Ocean SEO
Blogging also takes place on site- on a company’s blog or news section- where in keeping with the same example of our client MurLarkey- our expert content writers write helpful content- that aligns with Google’s helpful content policy update– focused on Blue Ocean keywords that our data mining has identified for us like “Best Whiskey to Sip On Ice” and “Beer Versus Whiskey” where as a result our blogs will appear #1 on both Google Search results for those keywords and thus capture the vast majority of their recurring traffic.
When we expand this exercise- and blog & metatag for dozens to hundreds (depending on the scale of the program the client selects to go with) of Blue Ocean Gold Mine Keywords, the client’s site will be the only website (and thus the only company) to capture the recurring traffic (which can become up to 70%) for each keyword set we rank in front of.
And- given the lack of competition and therefore rapid ranking speed- when we quickly (within just months) have the Client ranking top of Google in front of dozens to 100’s of these keyword sets- the resulting search traffic intake for the Client is often 10-100x what it currently is generating at baseline as the case studies below demonstrate
Case Studies
Current Client Exponential Web Traffic + Sales Growth
Conclusion
Monopolizing The Available Search Market
Blue Ocean SEO achieves the outsized results you saw in our case studies above by getting our clients the entire monopoly board (outside of the Red Ocean Park Place and Boardwalk squares) of the online real estate most closely related- and therefore most highly valuable- to what they sell.
This domination and ownership of what can eventually become 95% of the most valuable online real estate (i.e. domination of all the Blue Ocean search traffic of what they sell) will feed our clients high intent demand and sales month in month out, year in-year out-, decade in-decade out that their competitors will never be able to take from them
