Website Niche

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Finding your website niche

Squeeze into your website niche

In the previous tutorial we explored how to select a website topic. So why must we narrow it down into a "website niche"?

The problem is that there are so many websites out there, competing with your site for the available traffic. If you position yourself in too broad a topic, you may have to compete with millions of websites for search engine traffic.

But if you choose a narrow website niche as your topic, you share it with relatively few other websites and get your share of the traffic. Too narrow, and there won't be  enough potential traffic for you to attract.

So how do you find the right balance between too broad and too narrow?

Fish niche

We're going to stick with our cooking website example. My friend Hilary wants to create a website about cooking. Now "cooking" is not a niche, it's more like the grand canyon! So how does Hilary turn a love for cooking into a viable website niche?

Suppose of all the dishes she enjoys cooking, fish dishes top the list. She has a talent for it and she loves doing it.

As a rough guide to the competition out there, let's see how many sites Google knows about as we narrow our search terms. (You could just as well use Yahoo, or your favourite search engine).

That was just one of a zillion different ways of narrowing the topic, starting from  "cooking".

Well, only Hilary can decide how much competition she wants to take on. For me I would already find 1.37 million competing sites for "grilled fish recipes" somewhat daunting. Is it narrow enough to qualify as a website niche?

Most of those 1.37 million sites include only a passing reference to grilled fish recipes, (which I'm now abbreviating to GFR - I don't want this web page ranking too high with Google for that search term!)

So if Hilary publishes a site entirely dedicated to GFR, with perhaps 20 recipes, she should do pretty well.

Rate the competition for a website niche

Let's try to make sure. We set Google search preferences to display the top 100 search results, and search again for GFR 

We look at the search engine results page (the top 100 of those 1.37 million websites). Around the bottom of these 100 sites are sites with only a single GFR. Hardly serious competition for Hilary's site.

Halfway up the list are websites that focus on various ways to cook fish, including a couple of grilling recipes. She should be able to beat that with her very specific focus on GFR.

In the top 10 results we find useful, focussed and attractive sites with lots of GFR, some with many other fish recipes also. The competition is tough up there. But that's where Hilary needs to aim.

Then, when she's made her mark in GFR and she's up there in Google's top 10 or 20,  she can think of ways of broadening her scope, perhaps to include "baked fish recipes."

Rate the demand for a website niche

One more thing to check before Hilary makes her final decision. She uses a good keywords analysis tool to find out how many people are searching each month for GFR  -  not just that exact phrase. They may use twenty different phrases, but they must be looking for GFR

Hilary uses the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (free). It will suggest many keyword phrases related to her primary phrase, and Hilary thinks of some other phrases herself. She adds the average monthly search volumes together for all relevant phrases to arrive at a total for her website niche topic.

When you do this analysis for your own website niche, remember that whatever number of people are searching, only a portion (perhaps 5-10%) will visit your site, assuming your webpage makes it onto Google's top 10 search results page.

Aim for the top 10 or 20 on the search engine results page

If you're not in the top 10, the percentage drops away very rapidly. For example, if you are only at number 40 on Google for a particular search term, you'll be lucky to get 0.1% of searchers to visit your site.

Hilary was satisfied. The total monthly visitors for her website niche came to 11000. If she could get into the top 10, she could bring perhaps 700 visitors to her site each month. She thought that would be worthwhile.

But if only 500 people had been searching every month - and she could only get 30 to visit her site,  she would have wanted to broaden her website niche to attract more visitors.

This kind of research is time consuming, but necessary if you want to have a successful site. I don't want to discourange you, but of over 200 million websites out there, at least 100 million of them get almost no traffic.

So perhaps you've now been able to find a good website niche, without too much competition and with plenty of potential traffic. The next step is to decide what web pages your site will include...
 

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Free Keyword Research Tools:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool




Keyword Research Software:

Micro Niche Finder




 

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How to define the initial scope of your website - your website niche.