When creating a web project, “Picking a Niche” seems straight forward. But in actuality there’s more complexity involved than just being “different” than someone else on the internet. The internet is a big place and chances are that if you’re thinking of a good idea for a project, someone has thought of it before. Maybe not executed in the same way as you’re thinking and maybe not even the same business plan or model you’re aiming for, but the world is a big place with lots of ideas floating around and it’s likely that you’re not alone in your innovative thinking on a particular subject.
Projects
What are we talking about here? Let’s take “projects” as an example. If someone has an idea to create gift baskets and send them out to anyone who orders them online, chances are that business model exists. I’m sure you can think of several delivery services off the top of your head right now. Some that deliver food, some that deliver flowers, maybe candles, candies or cured meats.
In this example, the delivery service is the project, idea, or category. While the product it delivers (flowers, food, etc) is a niche within that original or over-arching category. Even within those niches there are further ways to break down into smaller niches. Maybe your idea continues into not only delivering candy… but specifically “vintage” candy brands.
The point here is there are way less internet companies that specialize in delivering “Vintage” candy gift baskets than there are companies that just deliver gift basket products (that may or may not include vintage candy in their product line). By specializing in vintage candy, you tend to compete with fewer online entities and tend to get more traffic specifically looking for your “niche” within the delivery services available online today.
Writing
Surely you can see the connection here with writing articles or creating content for these “niches” within “niches”. Articles that have the same information or point of view as what’s already out there on the internet, will likely get lower ranking for search engines. You should be writing articles that don’t exist yet or portray a different take on what’s already out there on the internet. Search engines can be almost spooky in how they are able to narrow in on a niche subject or topic you may be looking for. Take advantage of that in your writing and selection of topics to write about.
Personal experience within your chosen niche or topic not only gives you credibility with your readers but allows you to see a perspective that only people looking for your niche will understand and relate to. Expect your readers to be looking for something they haven’t read or seen before. If writing about “animal enclosures” because you have a unique perspective as zoo keeper or volunteer, then instead of writing about animal enclosures in general, dive into a niche within that topic. Write about “animal enclosures for water fowl” instead.
Search Engines
By narrowing down your audience you reduce the amount of “others” that may have the same content out there on the internet as what you’re trying to write about. This in turn makes you more valuable to search engines. Search Engines would much rather send their traffic to relevant content. Relevant content in this case is what their user searched for. If their user searched for “Animal Enclosures for Ducks”, their user is looking for your niche (if indeed you’re writing about “Animal Enclosures for Water Fowl”).
The user is likely going to find a better answer at your website than a website that generalizes how to keep animals enclosed, and the reward to you will be the traffic you’re looking for from these search engines. You’ll likely see better ranking for your niche “key words” compared to more generalized articles. That is the goal here… more traffic.
Writing an article more generally about animal enclosures that includes several ways and several animals, almost guarantees that your visitor will have to wade through all the unnecessary information to get to what their looking actually looking for. Even if you’ve attracted someone who does want to know about all animal enclosures because you’ve written your article that way, expect that there are other articles about the same topic on the internet. You may have a unique perspective on the subject but because your keywords and subject matter put you in a more generalized category, you will see that you’re likely behind in search engine ranking compared to something that’s already out there and has been out there for some time. Specialize your subject matter.
Diversify or Divide Your Articles
Instead of writing one article that encompasses “animal enclosures” in general, write three articles that specialize in “Water Fowl”, “Big Cats”, and another one that singles out “Amphibians”. You’ll end up with three articles instead of one and the traffic you’ll see for these articles will be of people who want to learn about the specificity of the animal enclosure. Search engines will send the traffic to you because you’re not generally talking about animal enclosures but specifically because you’re writing about animal enclosures for amphibians. The search engines want happy users. They’ll send their users to where they’ll find the answers without wading through a whole bunch of material to find what they’re looking for.
If you’re able to write several articles that drill down on a specific niche subject instead of one article that includes it all, you should always opt to write the articles that are more specific than more general. Expect the “general” knowledge to already be out there somewhere. If in doubt, do a search yourself for the topic you’re writing about. If there are three pages of results, expect your new article to go to the end of the line for rankings. Then ask yourself how many times you went to page four for an answer to a question you had or a subject you wanted to research. It’s probable that you didn’t go past page two.
Conclusion
Your articles, content, or project may have relevant and different unique content than another website. However, if you don’t specialize your content to a specific niche you will have to prove your site as relevant, among three pages of results about the same topic to start climbing those ranked results. Finding a niche keeps your traffic relevant from search engines while search engines are happy to see their users not return and make the same search because they didn’t find what they were looking for at your website.
Your traffic for the website will grow as visitors know that you are THE site to go to for your specific niche. People grow into communities and communities can grow reputations.
Thanks for reading.
~Kevin