Why Is Natural Search Important?

Searchers who understand the difference between paid and natural results are more likely to hold the natural results in a higher regard, much like a person reading a magazine would probably be more positively influenced by an article about a particular company than by a paid advertisement from the company.

What Advantages Do Huge Corporations Have?

The primary advantage that large corporations have is their ability to obtain large amounts of inbound links, which can have a huge impact on search engine rankings. Many of the huge corporation's vendors, affiliates, partners, etc. are eager to show their association with the company and link to the corporate site readily and non-reciprocally.

What Advantages Do Smaller Companies Have?

A willingness to pursue the channel - smaller companies are typically more willing to devote resources to natural search than large corporations.

A willingness to change the company website - smaller, leaner companies are able to approve necessary website changes more quickly, and are almost always more willing to quickly adapt to the needs of the customer.

A willingness to outsource - larger companies have more internal resources at their disposal, and are less likely to outsource this specialized service to someone with proven experience.

A lack of technical hurdles - huge corporations are more likely to have technical issues on their website that can prevent search engines from indexing all of their pages. Often the pages of corporate websites are generated "on the fly" from large databases, and such pages (without modification to the URLs) are sometimes never indexed. In addition, (although usability studies are making this happen less often), some huge corporations have their sites built entirely in flash or use other technologies that are virtually invisible to search engines.

The Bottom Line

As most search engine optimization experts will tell you, some of the most egregious search engine mistakes are consistently made by household name companies - leaving their smaller, leaner competitors the opportunity to take full advantage.