In Big Markets, SEO Should Follow Marketing Strategy

The best-in-class SEO powerhouses have an intelligent marketing strategy, and SEO is just one part of that.

This includes big players like:

1. NerdWallet

2. Healthline

3. Investopedia

4. Ramp.com

5. Canva

They certainly benefit from SEO and are skilled at it, but the key point is that SEO is a substantial component of an overall strategy.

Smaller sites in this area that are trying to hack the system with an SEO-only approach are living on borrowed time.

The overall lesson here is that SEO should be an integral part of a comprehensive strategy.

In my opinion, many big brands don’t dedicate enough time to SEO, but there are many very intelligent people analyzing the numbers and making that decision.

Example: Airbnb vs VRBO & HomeAway

VRBO and HomeAway are better at SEO than Airbnb.

Airbnb is much better than both of them at brand and overall marketing strategy.

Who is winning? Airbnb.

Used Car Brand Wars

CarGurus.com is a used car SEO behemoth. But does anyone talk about them? What’s their market share?

I hear people talking about Carvana, Carmax, and TrueCar instead.

What does that say?

Counterpoint: Small Affiliate and Lead Gen Plays

There is still plenty of room in the frontier-lands. There are still small affiliate and lead gen plays that can make a decent amount of money. But looking longer-term I don’t see any of these becoming a billion-dollar company.

The Points Guy and Student Loan Here are stand-out sites started by smaller teams, but again these layered on SEO, but they had a higher purpose of good writing, constant publishing, and acted more like smart publishers than just SEO dudes.

Updates Log

• October 2025 – very lightweight updates throughout, added internal link