Everyone Fights Over the Same Ground. The Opportunity Is Everywhere Else.
There is a predictable pattern in how most businesses approach SEO. They identify the biggest, most competitive keywords in their industry — the obvious terms everyone in the space is targeting — and they focus almost exclusively on winning those. The problem is that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing. The competition is fiercest precisely where the thinking is least original.
Meanwhile, an enormous amount of legitimate, convertible search traffic sits largely unclaimed. Long tail keywords that individually drive modest volume but collectively add up to significant reach. Search engines that competitors have written off as not worth the effort. Local and geographic variations of core terms. Question-based queries that a well-structured page could own completely. Pages that address specific variants of a service rather than just the broad category.
The philosophy I have operated by for thirty years is simple: leave no stone unturned. Not because every stone hides gold, but because the cumulative effect of picking up every available crumb — while competitors are ignoring them — compounds into a meaningful and durable advantage over time. Efficiency is knowing which stones to turn first. Thoroughness is making sure you eventually turn them all.
I Do. And So Do Nearly 10% of the People Searching for Your Business.
The most common reaction when I bring up Bing optimization is some variation of: who uses Bing? The answer is a meaningful share of the searching population — nearly 10% of US searches, when you account for Bing itself and the other engines that run on its index, including Yahoo. That is not a rounding error. For a business generating leads from search, ignoring Bing is leaving a real slice of available traffic on the table for no reason other than assumption.
The more interesting point is not the percentage — it is the competition. Almost nobody optimizes specifically for Bing. The businesses that do are often competing against far fewer rivals for that traffic than they would be on Google. The effort required to perform well on Bing is modest for anyone already doing solid SEO work, because the fundamentals overlap significantly. The return, relative to that effort, is disproportionate.
This is what leaving no stone unturned actually looks like in practice. Not heroic effort on a single front — methodical attention to every front where traffic is available and competition is thin. Bing is one example. It is not the only one.
- Bing holds nearly 10% of US search volume — real traffic most competitors ignore entirely
- Bing Webmaster Tools is free and provides data and optimization guidance specific to Bing’s index
- Lower competition on Bing means the effort-to-return ratio is often better than on Google
- Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and other engines that use Bing’s index extend the reach further
A Former Google Insider Put It Plainly: One Page for Every Term You Care About.
I had a conversation years ago with someone who had worked inside Google — someone with direct insight into how the algorithm evaluates and rewards site structure. The advice was straightforward and has stayed with me: a website needs at least one dedicated page for each keyword term it wants to rank for. Not one page trying to rank for everything. One page, per term.
That means if your business serves multiple cities, each city deserves its own page — not a single page that mentions several locations. If you offer multiple variants of a service, each variant deserves its own page. If there are related terms that prospective customers search for, each of those terms deserves dedicated content that addresses it directly. Google wants to send searchers to the page that most specifically answers their query. A page trying to cover everything answers nothing as well as a page built specifically for one thing.
This is where the crumb-picking philosophy becomes a content strategy. Every long tail keyword, every geographic variant, every related service term is an opportunity for a page that can rank for something specific and send qualified traffic. The businesses that build those pages systematically — and build them well — accumulate search visibility that broad-strokes competitors simply cannot match.
- One dedicated page per keyword term — not one page targeting everything
- City and locale pages for businesses serving multiple geographic areas
- Service variant pages for related but distinct offerings
- Question-based pages that directly answer specific queries in your space
- Each page built to rank for its specific term, not to mention it in passing
The Specific Searches Nobody Is Fighting Over Are Often the Ones That Convert Best.
Long tail keywords — the longer, more specific search phrases that individually generate lower search volume than broad head terms — are where a disproportionate share of conversion happens. Someone searching “moving companies” is early in a research process. Someone searching “two bedroom apartment movers Fort Wayne available this weekend” is ready to hire. The second search has a fraction of the volume and a fraction of the competition. It also has a much higher probability of converting into actual revenue.
Most SEO strategies underinvest in long tail content because the individual keyword volumes look unimpressive in a report. That is short-sighted. The aggregate volume of long tail searches in any given industry dwarfs the volume of the handful of competitive head terms everyone is targeting. And the visitors those searches deliver are further along in the decision process, which means they convert at higher rates with less friction.
Picking up crumbs is not a consolation prize for businesses that cannot compete for the big terms. It is a deliberate strategy that compounds over time, delivers highly qualified traffic, and builds a body of content that collectively covers the full landscape of how potential customers search — not just the obvious entry points.
A Business That Lives and Dies by a Few Keywords Is One Algorithm Update Away From a Crisis.
Early in my career I spent three years inside a large global corporation managing a search marketing budget of roughly two million dollars a year. The company was heavily dependent on a handful of highly competitive terms — the kind of broad, high-volume keywords that every competitor in the space was also targeting. On any given day, a shift of a few positions in the rankings for those terms could meaningfully change the volume of leads coming in. The team watched those rankings the way traders watch a stock ticker.
That is a fragile position to be in. And it is more common than most business owners realize. When your visibility is concentrated in a small number of terms, every Google update is a threat. Every competitor who outranks you on one of those terms takes a disproportionate bite out of your traffic. You have no cushion, no redundancy, and no diversity to absorb the impact.
What long tail keywords and dedicated local and variant pages provide — beyond the additional traffic — is resilience. A site with visibility spread across hundreds of terms is not meaningfully damaged when any single one of them shifts. The traffic comes from too many places for one change to matter much. That diversity is not just a growth strategy. It is a risk management strategy.
The businesses most vulnerable to algorithm updates are the ones with the least diverse search footprints. The ones that weather those updates best are the ones that have been picking up crumbs all along — because when the big terms move, the crumbs are still there.
- Concentration in a few high-volume terms creates fragility — one update can cause a real crisis
- Diverse search visibility distributes risk across hundreds of terms instead of a handful
- Long tail and local pages provide a cushion that broad-keyword-only strategies never have
- Algorithm updates consistently hurt concentrated strategies and largely spare diverse ones
Crumbs Are Not Just Keywords. They Are Every Friction Point Between a Visitor and a Conversion.
The leave-no-stone-unturned philosophy does not stop at search rankings. It extends to everything that happens after a visitor arrives — because getting traffic to a page that fails to convert is not winning. It is just moving the problem downstream.
I have spent enough time evaluating websites that I cannot look at one — even for personal reasons, even when nobody has asked me to — without the observations starting automatically. An extra click in the navigation path that should not be there. A call to action buried below the fold that should be the first thing a visitor sees. A form with one field too many. A page that answers every question except the one that would make someone pick up the phone. These are crumbs of a different kind — small inefficiencies that individually seem minor and collectively determine whether a site converts or just generates traffic reports.
Removing friction from the path between arrival and conversion is as much a part of the job as ranking for the right terms. A site that ranks well and converts poorly is leaving money on the table just as surely as one that ignores Bing or skips the long tail. The stones are everywhere. The ones between the visitor and the conversion are often the most valuable ones to turn.
- Every unnecessary click between a visitor and a conversion is a crumb worth picking up
- Above the fold content — what a visitor sees before scrolling — determines whether they stay
- Navigation structure either guides visitors toward conversion or lets them wander and leave
- Page load time, mobile experience, and form length all affect conversion rates measurably
- Ranking well and converting poorly is still leaving significant revenue on the table
Efficiency Is Knowing the Path. Thoroughness Is Owning Every Step of It.
The businesses that perform best in search over the long term are rarely the ones that won the most competitive keyword battles. They are the ones that showed up everywhere their potential customers were looking — the obvious places and the overlooked ones — and made sure that every visit, from every source, had the best possible chance of turning into a relationship.
That requires knowing the path — understanding which optimizations produce results and in what order to pursue them. It also requires thoroughness — the willingness to check Bing when everyone else has written it off, to build the city page that seems redundant, to fix the navigation click that seems minor, to write the long tail page that will never generate impressive volume on its own but will contribute to a body of work that collectively outperforms anything built around shortcuts.
After thirty years of doing this work, the pattern is consistent. The businesses that win at search are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most aggressive strategies. They are the ones that leave nothing on the table — that treat every available crumb of visibility as worth claiming and every friction point as worth fixing. That approach compounds. The shortcuts do not.
Leave no stone unturned. Pick up every crumb. Own the results. That has been the strategy for thirty years and it has never stopped working.