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The SEO industry has been entwined in a long-time love affair with vertical blinders. People have insisted on focusing only on what happens within their verticals for as long as I have been learning and studying about search engine optimization (and probably longer than that).

A vertical blinder is an attitude, a perspective, a set of boundaries you establish for yourself either through necessity (to avoid information overload), practicality (too little time to look at all that other stuff), focus (concentrate on where your competition is focused), or ignorance (I didn’t realize studying other verticals might help me).

We all have vertical blinders. It is impossible to NOT have vertical blinders, given that billions of searches are performed on the major search engines every month. So any discussion of vertical blindness (which refers to your blindness of verticals other than your own) is by no means pejorative or condescending.

Comparative Trends Analysis There are certainly lessons we can learn from each other’s verticals. For example, let’s say your vertical experiences seasonal spikes and dips in market activity. You know those patterns like the back of your hand. You won’t gain any insight into those patterns by studying other verticals but if you can identify seasonal verticals whose spikes and dips both presage and correlate with your vertical’s spikes and dips, you can employ trend-spotting analysis to get a leap on your competition. This is very advanced SEO but it’s a highly effective technique that helps you stay fresh and relevant to your target audience.

Comparative Promotional Methodology Analysis You can also look at how other people promote their sites within their own verticals. They may rely more on paid advertising, more on social media, more on link networks, etc. If you have become accustomed to marketing your site a certain way, or if you don’t know any other way, you should be looking at how people do it in other verticals. You may find some options your competitors have overlooked. There are no guarantees in this industry but one maxim that comes close to being a guarantee is that most people practicing search engine optimization are relying heavily on a handful of techniques. That doesn’t mean there are only a few good techniques. It just means we get comfortable with a core set of ideas and resources and we turn to those ideas and resources more often than others.

Comparative Ideological Analysis Learn to read blogs by people who are handling similar issues outside your industry and profession. Search engine optimizers tend to focus on tech blogs, SEO blogs, and news sites. There are hordes and hordes of PR industry, marketing research, legal industry, sales, and other blog communities out there who talk about the same challenges and principles we do from entirely different perspectives. They also reference resources you’ll never learn about from the SEO and geek communities. This is also very advanced SEO because you’re forcing yourself to think in another industry’s jargon and axioms. You may have to do this when you take on a new client but if you do it just to shake up your SEO thinking you’ll find many advantages and benefits from making the effort.

Speculative Resource Management Matt Cutts once made the point that you can build only so many really good sites, and then the quality of your work declines. That is, if you manage 2,000 sites their overall quality and uniqueness will probably be low compared to what you could accomplish if you manage 20 sites. Instead of trying to do everything at once, you can build seed sites that take a long time to flourish and blossom. You add to them gradually, maybe do a little bit of work every 2-3 months. These are low priority sites for you but as you place content on them and build links for them very gradually you eventually find yourself in possession of very helpful resources. As long as you don’t evaluate them from an SEO perspective they are speculative resources. You just build them, grow them naturally, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This is another advanced but fundamental SEO principle that was written thousands of years ago: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.” (Ecclesiastes 11:1)