How do I compete with a bigger brand on the same keywords?

Pick a fight you can win

The broad term has the volume and almost none of the intent. ‘Running shoes’ is browsing. ‘Running shoes for flat feet under 5000’ is a purchase decision that has already been half made. The second query brings only a small fraction of the traffic and yet converts several times better, and the large brand, busy defending the head term, is simply not bothering to write pages for it.

Build a list of these from your own customer questions, your site search, the People Also Ask boxes and the search terms report in Google Ads. Real language from real buyers. Not a keyword tool export sorted by volume.

Comparison queries are the other soft spot. People search your competitor’s name plus alternatives, or your brand against theirs. Write those pages honestly, including the places where the competitor is genuinely a better fit, because the credibility is exactly what makes the page work.

Beat them on depth, not budget

Large brands publish thin category copy, because it was written once for a hundred pages by a team under deadline. You can outwrite that on twenty pages that matter. Real photographs, actual sizing data, honest limitations, answers to the questions your support inbox receives every single week.

Speed is your other advantage. You can publish a page about a new material or a seasonal problem in two days. Their approval chain takes six weeks. Use that on anything topical.

And use the founder. First-person expertise, a named person with a face and a track record, is something a faceless catalogue cannot replicate. It also matters a great deal more now than it once did, both for the search quality signals Google leans on and for the AI systems summarising answers, all of which increasingly reward clear, identifiable human expertise.

On the paid side

Do not bid on their brand name unless you have a real comparison page to send the click to, and even then keep your expectations modest. Bid instead on the long-tail commercial terms, the ones where their big broad campaigns are quietly inefficient and overpaying, and bid on your own brand name as well, simply to protect it from anyone else.

Track both position and revenue for your own chosen cluster of specific, lower-volume terms, rather than obsessively watching where you sit on the single head term that every competitor in the market is already chasing. Ten specific pages ranking well will bring more revenue than a page-three placement on the term everyone chases, and you can see the progress within a quarter rather than never.