Most SEO strategies fail for a simple reason – they are not strategies at all. They are a pile of tactics: publish more content, build links, chase keywords, repeat. For a while, it might work. Then Google changes, competitors move in, or platforms shift, and suddenly the traffic disappears.
Real strategy looks different.
It starts with understanding the forces that shape your visibility online. Competition. Topics. Audience. Regulation. Platforms. These forces determine whether your content gets discovered or buried.
In this article, you will learn how to use a strategic lens – inspired by Michael Porter’s famous framework and Richard Rumelt’s concept of strategy – to build a system for sustainable online visibility.
By the end, you will understand how to:
- Analyze the real competitive landscape behind search results
- Choose topics with both demand and long-term growth potential
- Align your content with the motives and behaviour of your audience
- Navigate regulations like GDPR and AI-related policies
- Reduce risk by adapting to powerful platforms like Google and ChatGPT
This framework has helped strategists move beyond guesswork and build durable online growth that compounds. In fact, our clients see a median 44% increase in organic visibility within 90 days of working with us. Instead of reacting to algorithm changes, you will learn how to design a strategy that works with the forces shaping the internet today. 🚀
What is strategy?
According to Richard Rumelt, strategy is a way of dealing with a specific, high‑stakes challenge by designing a focused mix of policies and actions to overcome it. He emphasizes that goals or visions alone are not a strategy; instead, a good strategy has a “kernel” made of three parts: a clear diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for addressing it, and a set of coherent actions that work together to carry out that policy.
What are the 5 forces of online visibility?
Build your strategy by understanding the forces exerted on your business, or, in our case here, your online visibility. Understanding these forces will help you diagnose the key challenges you face and develop a plan to tackle them.
Competition
While we can’t control our competition, we can plan for it. From a visibility perspective, you want to understand whether your industry has many or few competitors. You also want to understand whether major players control the market. If there are many small players, you might be able to win with higher-quality content and a bit of brand-building. On the other hand, if there are a couple of major players, entry into a space could be more complicated.
Topic
The topic force encompasses everything you need to write for your website. To grasp this force, you need to know the size and complexity of the subject and determine whether concepts are covered extensively. This view gives you a picture of how much content you will need to succeed and how vigorously you’ll need to write. Here are the characteristics to look at when analyzing the topic aspect of your strategy.
Topic breadth
Topic breadth is about how wide the topic goes. If you’re a digital marketing consultant, you might write about various aspects of digital marketing, like Google search or email marketing. However, if your focus is SEM, your content breadth is smaller because you’d only want to focus on Google and Bing ads.
Topic volume
Topic volume, on the other hand, is about how much demand there is for your topic. Topic volume is a bit like keyword volume, only you’ll take a wider view and look at the entire topic to see the whole demand.
Topic clarity
Topic clarity concerns both a topic’s complexity and the strength of its definition. Simple topics like learning to play cards have less room for growth and fewer new concepts, since the ideas have already been discovered. Complex topics, such as how an LLM works, have more room for additional concepts and new information, which allows you to take advantage of information gain. As well, complex topics may require advanced expertise that you’ll need to acquire to produce credible content.
Audience
We spent a lot of time debating whether the audience is a core force or if it should be part of the topic force. There are good arguments for both, but in the end, we felt that audiences are a vital driver of a strategy’s success, so they became one of our 5 primary forces.
The audience force is all about the reader or your customer. The main embodiment is who they are, but it also seeks to learn how powerful they are. Beyond the primary demographics, the key questions to ask about your audience are:
- How big are they?
- Are they homogeneous?
- How easy are they to reach?
- How critical is word of mouth?
- Are they influenced by a key person or group?
- What are their key motives? And does that match what you can provide?
Going beyond demographics helps us determine both how best to reach our audience and if we can even do so. An audience that’s deeply influenced by word of mouth and industry peers (i.e. medical professionals) requires a different strategic approach than a consumer looking to book a vacation.
Regulation
It’s hard to neglect the need to understand the regulatory aspects of your industry. In some spaces, there isn’t much to pay attention to, while others will require daily vigilance. Google’s YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) framework is a simple way to check, but don’t forget to understand broader regulations like GDPR and EU AI Act. Each of these may impact your business, your industry and the platforms you use.
Platforms
From Google to Bing and ChatGPT to Meta, platforms are the most significant force of online visibility. They control access to your content. A strategy must work with this force. Ignoring it doesn’t work.
Here’s a recent example. Google launched AI Mode globally in July 2025. Around the same time, we also saw an increase in queries with AI Overviews. Both of these caused traffic to drop from many websites. Website owners had a choice: they could sit around and complain, or they could figure out a way to get cited.
From a strategy perspective, two things follow from the example above. One, strategy must evolve as things change. Regular checks are required. Setting up systems to monitor and predict change helps, too. Second, a strategy must be able to work within the industry’s shape. In this case, Google controls your destiny, but finding ways to be less reliant on a single platform is a smart strategic move. Or you can look to combine organic and paid strategies.
It’s a system
This model compounds when you think of it as a system. All of the parts are independent but connected. Changes to the competition force will impact your topics. Platform or regulatory changes can impact your entire strategy.
Most changes will have both a positive and a negative pull. For example, if there is a new regulation introduced in your field, there will be an opportunity to explain it to your audience. However, that same regulation might be detrimental as it introduces uncertainty or restrictions. Your job as a strategist is to identify these opportunities and challenges and decide where they give you leverage.
How to use the forces
The first thing you need to do is go through each force and determine its shape and strength. Below is a table showing each force and the starter questions you can ask to understand it.
| Strategic Force | Questions to Ask |
| Competition | How many competitors do you have?Do any competitors have a large market share?How mature is the industry? |
| Topic | How complicated is your main topic?Is your main topic a new concept?Can your topic be subcategorized?How much demand is there for your topic? |
| Audience | How big is your audience?Are there significant influencers present?Where do they like to get information from? |
| Regulation | What are the major regulations in your field?Who sets the regulations?Are there demands for more or less regulation? |
| Platform | Which platforms provide access to your audience?What is the maturity of the platforms? |
With the shape and strength determined, you can now start to understand where to put your efforts. For example, if your topic is mostly known, there isn’t much need to create new concepts. You can focus on making the content easier to understand, or try different underserved channels.
Static vs dynamic forces
You’ve probably noticed that some of these forces are static and others are dynamic. Every industry and niche will be different in where each force falls on the spectrum, but this is useful to know because it allows you to concentrate your resources. For example, the way a platform works is dynamic. Google is constantly tweaking the algorithm. On the other hand, your audience’s preferences are static. Once you have determined their needs, you don’t need to keep a close monitor on them since they don’t change often.
Building your strategy
Strategy is not a one-time plan; it’s an ongoing process of observing the forces that shape your visibility and adjusting your actions. When you understand how competition, topics, audiences, regulations, and platforms interact, your marketing stops being reactive. Instead of chasing algorithm updates or copying what others are doing, you begin making deliberate choices that create long-term advantage.
The organizations that win online are rarely the ones producing the most content. They are the ones with the clearest diagnosis of their environment and a focused set of actions that work together. By evaluating the five forces and identifying where you have leverage, you can build a system that grows visibility even as the internet continues to evolve.
If you want help turning these ideas into a practical strategy for your business, consider working with a digital marketing consultant. The right guidance can help you analyze your landscape, prioritize the right opportunities, and design a visibility strategy.