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How To SEO For Your Niche
By Patrick Hare
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-01-11
In some ways, SEO for niche sites and products can be easy. There may not be a lot of competition for your keywords, and you can get good rankings on them in a relatively short amount of time. The downside is that you may not be seeing a lot of traffic, even with top rankings, because niche items (by definition) don't see a lot of demand.
Niche items can be very profitable, especially when they are intended for enterprise-level clients, so a single sale can be worth millions of dollars. Therefore, search engine visibility is still essential.
What's the best way to market your niche on search engines? Content and Visibility. Unsurprisingly, this answer also applies to high demand items, but for a profitable niche there is a greater need to be found for any variation of a valuable search term, no matter how low the search volume. For example, if you design custom electronics components, a single order could be quite lucrative, but you need to have plenty of information online outlining your company's capabilities. A well optimized site in this field would have pages describing the manufacturing process, international certifications, and types of products already developed. Additionally, case studies and white papers should be available to the general public, which also makes them easier for search engines to find. Finally, press releases and news items about products and services should also be present.
From a search engine optimization standpoint, keyword research for niche products is usually higher because of the lack of demand. A good researcher will try to get into the customer's mind and understand what a person might type in when he/she has a particular product in mind. With high demand terms, this is easy, because several thousand people type in the same phrases every month, and keyword tools will provide a list of alternates. Conversely, if you're selling a product that may be of interest to a few hundred product design engineers in the world, you have to consider all the variations that one of those people may use to look up what you're offering.
Using search engines to market products to the very wealthy is also quite challenging, yet highly rewarding. If you're going after an audience that represents 1% of the general public, you have to a site with content that is going to be found for a variety of low-volume searches. For instance, an agent selling Beverly Hills Real Estate should have pages describing mansions, bungalows, homes with gated entrances, and houses with secluded swimming pools. A site in this niche should become the top resource for its topic, and be interesting enough that it may even get a lot of curiosity seekers in additions to its intended audience.
Link building for niche sites can also be a challenge, although the quantity of links necessary to rank for a low-interest topic can be smaller. In many cases there may only be a handful of sites similar to yours, and if they're competing with you then soliciting links may be tough. In this case, standard link building through directories and other sources may be sufficient, but it can also pay to create content for relevant publications online that links back to your site. Online journals, industry blogs, and newsletters often will accept content if it is of interest to readers, so a blurb about your service, or an interesting story, may serve as alternate link building methods. Finally, soliciting links from your competitors may not always be a bad move, especially if you each have an added specialty that the other may not cover, or if you serve different geographical areas.
SEO for niche products and services isn't as easy as it used to be, but still offers some opportunities for people who don't need a high search volume to be profitable. For the most part, standard SEO rules apply to niche sites, but a higher amount of content and resources are essential, especially in fields where there isn't a standard word or phrase for your core competency. Considering the high profit margin of some items, the added SEO and content cost can often be covered by the value of a single extra sale. Therefore, going to the next level with your site architecture and link profile, while always recommended, is a must for people who are going for the rarest gems in the internet marketplace.
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About the Author:
Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group.
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