How Your Niche Website Can Benefit From SEO

Jessica Madrazo, Operations Director of Coffeebot Digital Marketing Agency in the Philippines, gives us insight on how niche websites can benefit from making use of an ongoing SEO strategy.

Apart from the convenience it provides, a good website is a great way to tell online users (which are also potential customers) that your business is up to date when it comes to keeping up with other businesses and with the technology itself.

A quick scour around the internet and you’ll most likely observe that some of the most popular sites are those that offer a wide variety of content, websites like Google (of course), YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia; there are even studies on such popularity to prove such. So what do these websites all have in common? They are all able to offer users a wide range of content – no doubt a big factor in their popularity.

This leads a lot of more market-specific businesses to doubt the benefits that a good website can bring them. While such niche websites are agreeably less diverse in content, that doesn’t mean they should miss out on the online market. How can niche websites compete? The answer is SEO.

What is a niche website, anyway?

A niche is basically what you call a target-specific or focused area of a market. With that, a niche website is a site that caters to that particular, specialized audience, and this is reflected in the content of such website. Niche websites are all about delivering specific content, and they don’t veer away from this. With that, a steady stream of traffic may be a little difficult to maintain if no measures are taken. For businesses with more specific markets in mind, like cosmetics, car gear, and even footwear, a niche site is a great way to build a following full of loyal patrons, and as every business knows, a loyal following is a great way to encourage referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations.

How can SEO help my niche site?

If you run a niche site, chances are you have trouble gaining traffic now and again, and with such a focused target market, that’s totally understandable. That’s also where search engine optimization comes in – it makes sure your website is easier to reach and helps you reach the customers you need. This is why a lot of niche sites, and even non-niche sites, invest in getting themselves a good SEO service provider. But how exactly can hiring one help? Here are four ways in which SEO can be employed for the benefit of your niche site:

Work with WordPress

When you’re a niche site, you have to consider that you don’t have as much grab as wider content variety sites, and that doesn’t have to be a problem at all, but it does mean you have to work smarter when it comes to making your site more accessible to those customers who are on the lookout for you. Choosing the best CMS for your site helps you achieve this.

It’s the most SEO-friendly CMS

A reported 27% of the sites on the internet are using WordPress for their blogging platform – and for good reason. Aside from the fact that it’s one of the easiest tools to customize, it’s the most popularly used CMS (or Content Management System) online due to it’s being very search engine-friendly. The themes in Wordpress are written with proper HTML markup, which makes it easy to understand for search engines when they’re crawling your site. The quality designs don’t hurt either since they encourage users to stay on your site longer – a factor that search engines take into consideration when evaluating a site.

It’s very customizable

Moreover, the permalinks in Wordpress are easy to customize, so you can include your keywords in them and boost keyword presence. Another great keyword maximize are their SEO-friendly plugins, social media integration, and standard of being optimized for mobile devices. These not only help bring convenience to the user, which is a major selling point in itself, they also help make your site easier to spot.

Invest in quality content

Good content is a staple for any site, but it’s particularly useful for a niche site since it provides the double purpose of organically reeling users in with engaging information as well as allowing the strategic placement of SEO keywords.

Keywords are everything

A large part of SEO is how well you utilize popular keywords. Content is the best way for a niche site to play on high-traffic keywords, helping the site put themselves out there for their customers. Including the necessary keywords in as early as the first 100 words really help search engines track your page better, and this should be incorporated in creating your page’s content. More importantly, if you use the right keywords, you can target customers with very specific queries in mind, meaning there’s less chance of competition and better opportunity to make an impression with customers.

Research and placement of keywords are vital

Researching on and utilizing the right keywords at the right time can be very beneficial for bringing in traffic, and if a niche site plays their cards just right (or rather, place their links just right), they could well be on the road to getting a top spot on the search results whenever a user makes the relevant query. This is why part of any niche website’s SEO efforts is researching which popular keywords are being used by their target market. Apart from being up-to-date, it’s also important to consider how the customer thinks when looking for something online.

Such considerations help you reach the right people better. Similarly important is how you include the keywords. You can’t just spam readers with the same keyword appearing five times within a single paragraph. It’s a given that you may have more narrowed down options when you’re a niche site, but if you invest in good writing, sufficient placement of keywords all the while maintaining

Assert your brand online

With the thousands of websites and pages floating around online, your website is bound to share its line of service or products with another site, and a lot of times, your website or company names will be more or less similar, too. This is why you should be extra assertive in establishing your presence online. It’s not just about making users see how credible your business is, but building accounts on several platforms help you claim a better spot among search results.

For example, when a user happens to input your keywords on Google search, Google’s algorithms make sure to include shortcuts to your other accounts along with your website. It would be particularly smart to build well-managed accounts on some of the most popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube, LinkedIn, even Instagram. As you can, it not only helps you create a stronger brand presence, but it has SEO perks, too.

Don’t neglect the “small stuff”

The tiniest details could have large impacts when it comes to SEO. While other areas may not be as frontal as content and website development, they mustn’t be neglected.

Modifiers

Patrons of niche websites can be some of the most particular customers, and by adding modifiers to your title, you’re not only helping users with specific queries in mind find what they’re looking for quickly, but you’re also directing them to you. Modifiers like “2018” or the name of your city can help you reach audiences looking for the latest materials or local products and services. Also, it’s another thing that Google considers when ranking websites.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Similar to modifiers, latent semantic indexing (LSI) means making use of terms along with your primary keywords, but this time to make things broader. While customers may be online looking for something specific, a lot of the time, they only have a vague notion of what they want, and what you’re offering may just be what they’re looking for.

Niche websites may not have the content variety that drives the typical internet user in, but that’s no reason for niche sites to be deprived of traffic, and more importantly, potential customers. If you have a niche website and are looking to up your traffic and sales, working with a good SEO company may just be the extra measure your website needs.

With better website development, more carefully created content, brand presence, and more attention to smaller, vital details, you won’t have to worry about your niche site missing any action.

Jessica Madrazo

Operations Director at Coffeebot

Visit Coffeebot

About the Author

Jessica Madrazo is the Operations Director of Coffeebot, a Philippine-based digital marketing company that offers SEO, social media, lead generation, web design and other general virtual assistant services. She has been in the outsourcing industry for years and has helped small businesses from different parts of the globe reach their goals.

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