Competing for customer attention can feel like an uphill battle for some businesses, but offering genuine value will help small brands stand out from large companies.

The premise of content marketing is that size doesn’t matter. Deep pockets and massive teams aren’t supposed to be difference-makers. The thinking goes that interesting content and useful media will eventually surface, no matter how small the site producing it. Yet small businesses and independent professionals could be forgiven for thinking they start out at a natural disadvantage. In a recent Webmasters video, Matt Cutts tried to assuage these concerns.

Cutts referenced what he calls the Katamari Philosophy, named for a popular video game where players start with small objects and roll them into increasingly larger balls. Sure, some sites might start out with limited budgets, operations and workforces, but if they become agile, experiment enough and find their unique place in the content market, they’ll eventually rise to the top.

“If you have a one-person website, taking on a 200-person website it’s going to be hard at first. So think about concentrating on a smaller topic area, one niche, and say, ‘OK, I’m the subject area [expert] on this particular area,’ and make sure you cover it really well. Then you can sort of built out from that smaller area until you become larger.”

Unique content – a blueprint for visibility

Matt Cutts knows firsthand that providing value and innovation can bring a small operation success. He even uses the competition between AltaVista and Google as an example. The former was considered the dominant search engine on the early web, but Google strove to provide better services and superior search results, eventually unseating AltaVista and becoming the industry giant it is today.

Not every businesses that begins a web marketing campaign is going to achieve the same success as Google, but this advice should be reassuring to brands frustrated they can’t reach enough customers. The word from the horse’s mouth is that they should focus on what they do well and continue doing it. That might mean providing the best insights for a particular group of customers, or it could be to offer higher levels of interaction and engagement with clients. No matter what, Google wants value to rise to the top, and the best SERP positions are open to marketers who provide the best content on the web.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.