How do you optimize a website in a small niche? How do you do it in a way that benefits you even if your keywords don’t get searched more than about a hundred times a month? Well, if there’s a sustainable business model for this type of product or service, there is probably a website about that somewhere.
Every business doesn’t need SEO, but it can benefit you. If you want to capitalize on a larger volume of direct sales, you’ll want to do this, even if it’s a bit of a struggle.
Most tools that you use aren’t the ideal models for accuracy, even the ones that are straight from search engines don’t give numbers that match the reality of this. If you think Google Keyword Planner is giving the exact number, then chances are it’s definitely not accurate. You need to understand the data may not be accurate even for the smaller search volumes, and in some cases, it isn’t available.
So how do you do this? Well, first and foremost, the key to dominating your audience is of course, to understand your audience. If there are enough interested in the product or service in order to sustain your business, then there are people that are searching for the solution that you provide, even if the google keyword planner tells otherwise. You should look at what they’re searching for, and focus on that.
You can build keyword lists from this, but you need to focus on the topics over keywords when you’re dealing with a small niche.
Keywords are nice, but you need to dominate the topics around the niche, and understand that the brand needs to be associated with a broad subset of different queries that are relevant to the service or the product.
Google has done this for a long time, and has said that usually about 15% of the queries there have never been seen before, but the percentages are probably even higher with small niches. When you’re optimizing a smaller niche, you may not want to be able to show the success through the keyword, but instead, you need to make sure that you understand the querying items that are relevant to the topic more than anything else.
Links are more important when you’re optimizing for small niches. In smaller niches, the subset of relevant sites that are out there are limited. Google will make use of those baby algorithms in order to ensure different topics, so even though the number of links seems small, google adjusts this in order to accommodate the sample size. You need to dominate the topics, and the best way for you to do this, is getting mentions on relevant sites that’ll rank for hat topic. The links not only provide the site with authority for the search engines, but it’ll also put your brand front and center on these topics as well.
When you optimize a small niche, create those relationships first! That way, you’ll be able to improve your own ability to influence the space, and from there, you can get them to talk about you with a link. This makes a world of a difference, and in total, it will help with this.
A lack of data doesn’t mean you can’t optimize for these search engines, and for many of us, we’ve become so dependent on the arsenal of tools that we forget that we don’t need these to optimize your site for many of the search engines. The tools help, but you should focus on the topics.