Search engine optimization (SEO) is a must in today’s digital world, regardless of your business type or niche. However, navigating SEO when your business doesn’t fit within a traditional industry can be a little more difficult. Choosing the right keywords, narrowing down your audience, and designing an SEO strategy around your target audience are all important parts of niche SEO planning. Check out this guide to dominate your SEO campaign, even in a niche market.
Get To Know Your Audience on a Deeper Level
The niche market is unique, which also makes your target customer one of a kind. For this reason, one of the first things to do before integrating an SEO strategy is to learn everything you can about your target audience. Go beyond the usual location, age, gender, and use of product demographics. Consider your ideal customer’s goals, the most common barriers to success, and everyday struggles.
Once you have this information, you can better design your website and content around not only the customers you already have but also the ones you want to access. Take understanding your customer to a deeper level by continuing to learn throughout your campaign. Many businesses initially take the time to learn about their target customer, but few continue learning and evolving with them. Send your customers surveys, ask for social media feedback, use target audience tools, and take the time to really understand the data.
Give Off-Page Optimization the Time It Deserves
SEO isn’t only about optimizing on-page content. An effective niche strategy should also focus on off-page factors. Technical SEO is one of these factors. Page load speed is extremely important, regardless of whether you’re in a niche market or not. A study recently found that it takes just one second for 8% of website traffic to abandon a website they believe is loading too slowly. By two seconds, you have lost up to 19% of traffic. Add another second, and there goes 25% of your traffic. It’s important to note that this traffic is qualified, too. This is traffic that you have generally already taken the time to target and reach, which could translate to significant revenue loss.
Other technical factors to focus on include removing duplicate content, fixing broken links, and ensuring good website security. Schema markups are a great tool for niche markets. Schema markup means structured data, which is a strategy that structures your content to make it easier for search engine bots to scan and understand. Using schema data, you can categorize exactly what your content is about, which helps you reach a more specific customer. Search engine bots may find it difficult to define your business if it’s different from standard industries, and schema markups can be an excellent way to ensure it understands.
Make Search Volume an Important Analytic
It may seem natural to make a list of relevant terms in your niche market when choosing the keywords you want to target. However, if those keywords have minimal search volume, it may not even be worth your efforts to target them. Search volume should be an important part of your keyword research process. You can use online search tools to decide which keywords are worth putting resources behind. Historical tools, which show you search history for certain keywords, can also be beneficial in predicting search volume through fluctuating seasons.
Focus on Educational Content
One of the biggest barriers to success for niche markets is that customers may not fully understand your product or service. A good degree of your SEO content should be around educating the clients in an authoritative, helpful manner. Creating a niche educational blog on your website and guest posting are both excellent techniques for reaching your target audience.
Additionally, the more content you generate in your niche market, the more room you have for keyword placement. You can also use these educational searches to funnel traffic to your website, where users can learn more about the topic, giving you the opportunity to convert them into customers in the near future.
Use a Good Mix of Keyword Variations
Keyword variations are especially beneficial in niche markets. For example, if your business targets new moms seeking easy, nutritional meals, you might use various intentional keywords. Some options might include “new mom meal service” or “easy, healthy family meals.” You might also target longer keyword phrases, like “How to eat healthier as a new mom” or “What are some healthy dinner options for busy moms?” Use a good mix of short and long-tail keywords to target a wider customer base.
Including a good mix of easy- and hard-to-reach target keywords can also help provide your website with consistent traffic. Online SEO tools measure difficulty, which refers to the competitiveness of that keyword. Lower keyword difficulty is usually found with long-tail keywords that fewer brands are targeting. These keywords are typically easier to rank for. Medium- to high-difficulty keywords are usually shorter, more searched, and harder to rank your website for. Targeting multiple keywords allows you to notice increased traffic sooner with the easier keywords while working toward the more difficult ones.
Leverage Industry Adjacent Relationships
Leveraging partnerships with other businesses that could closely align with your niche market can also be a powerful SEO tool. Backlinks provide your website with authority, which is an important ranking factor. You can significantly boost your search rankings by guest posting and generating backlinks from websites related to your industry. Finding good partnerships can be more difficult when you’re in a niche market, though. Working with trusted backlink building agencies can provide you with the resources you need to acquire SEO-boosting backlinks.
Learn From Your Competitors
Your competitors can provide you with a lot of valuable information, especially when in a niche market. A deep dive into your competitor’s marketing and SEO efforts can provide you with information you can use in your campaigns. Find out what type of content they publish, what backlinks they generate, and the keywords they’re targeting and ranking for.
A competitive analysis is the best way to thoroughly understand your competitors. Of course, ongoing competitive analysis ensures you’re well aware of new competitors throughout your business ownership, giving you the opportunity to pivot and adjust or make necessary changes to your SEO strategy.
Become a Trusted Leader in Your Niche Industry
One of the advantages of being in a niche market is that it may not be as hard to position yourself and your business as a trusted leader. Providing your readers with easy access to valuable content can help create the image that your business knows what they’re doing in that specific industry. With fewer options available, more customers will turn to you when they want or need what you sell.
Understanding your customer well is a crucial part of becoming a trusted leader in a specific niche industry. While content related to your specific industry is always useful, posting additional, related content can also be beneficial. For example, if you sell healthy recipes or services for new moms, you might also publish content around easy fitness plans since the same audience is likely also searching for that. This is another area where guest posting is valuable.
Engage With Your Customers
Another effective strategy that has proven to work in niche markets is to create a niche community and then engage with them on a regular basis. Not only does this provide you with valuable information about your current and target customers, but it also helps establish brand trust. Encourage your customers to invite their friends and family to learn more about your niche business, which helps expand your customer reach even further.
There are a variety of ways to leverage a niche community. You could use social media to create discussion groups that allow members to communicate with each other. You could create a newsletter or blog with frequent updates in your industry. If you have a local business, you might even host in-person groups with themes similar to your niche. Sharing publications for these groups can also help boost your SEO efforts.
Take Advantage of Trending Topics
You may feel limited when it comes to content ideation in a niche market. This is where following trending topics can be beneficial. Use social monitoring tools to learn when people are talking about trending topics in your niche. For example, you notice an increase in people talking about a new workout, and you sell workout clothes. Sharing this news or your feedback on the new workout can bring you more traffic to your website. This traffic is likely already interested in fitness, meaning you can position yourself also to sell your products.
Whether it’s a news story, social media trending topics, or a new product, you can leverage trending items to your advantage. People are already searching the trending topics, so when they come across your website, it only helps with your SEO efforts. Google notices that people find value on your website through increased traffic, which further improves your rankings.
Expand Your Content Type
As you’re starting out, blogs are a great way to boost your SEO results. However, over time, expanding your content type can help you reach a wider audience and achieve even better SEO results. For example, more recently, Google started prioritizing websites with video. Today’s customers want easy access to information, and they want it fast. Having a good mix of optimized content can be a great way to boost your SEO results.
How-to guides, FAQs, and customer testimonials are all also excellent methods of improving customer experience. A better customer experience means better SEO rankings. These different content methods also help you reach a different audience. The same audience who seeks a guide on how to do something is often different than the person seeking a how-to video. Varying content types also make it easier to target other keywords. Use helpful guides to target long-tail question keywords. FAQs allow you to target multiple question keywords in one article.
Leverage PPC Paired with SEO
Search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC) work especially well together in niche markets. PPC can help acquire fast niche-specific traffic, whereas SEO focuses on lasting results. Target ad campaigns for PPC allow you to reach your niche market. Carefully crafted landing pages help establish new traffic trust, which you can then convert into ongoing customers or followers.
If you’re in a niche market and you plan to use both SEO and PPC, make sure your teams are working together to target the same keywords and create a consistent marketing strategy.
SEO can be a little more difficult in niche industries, but it’s not impossible. Careful keyword research paired with a competitive analysis can help you create an SEO strategy that targets your ideal customer. Backlinks also have the power to increase your business’s trust, which can translate to better rankings.