Niche sites, are they harder to rank now?
We have setup a couple of quick niches recently. The reason for doing this was we spotted an area where we may be able to rank quickly and also keyword domains were available. Now I know people don’t like giving away their domains but we like to be honest here and therefore would like to make a couple of points we have noticed about them. The sites are for Batman Fancy Dress and Plus Size Swimwear. Now what we have noticed is that these sites have been hard to rank. We looked at the competition and thought we should be able to rank quite easily on Google on the keywords for these domains however after launching them it appears this isn’t the case. So has google changed something or are we seeing that actually thinner sites are going to be even harder to rank for these days.
It also highlights the need to be able to make sites in which you have an interest or can write content about easily as this is one of the key’s to ranking well. We know that content makes for good sites we are just surprised about these sites not ranking when there are sites ranking higher with less content. Oh well keep plugging away. These were just two small domains we knocked out in a day each to see if there was some potential with them. We know niches aren’t the whole way to go and are busy developing a mixture of sites.
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6 Responses to “Niche sites, are they harder to rank now?”
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I’m also finding it harder to rank for keyword exact domains than I would have thought. I suspect link building and content is the way to go.
Also agreed I don’t think retail niches is where the big money’s at. Internet marketing and health affiliates seem to be raking it in.
I’m enjoying read your site. Keep up the good work!
Hi Guys!
I just want to say how much i love your blog. I’ve just started getting into affiliate marketing myself an this has been a great source of help and inspiration!
I was wondering how your affiliate ecommerce stores mentioned above are coming along in terms of ranking. Your maternity swimwear site is still ranked in the top 3 on google which is excellent! Is there anything you did differently with that site to be ranked so highly? Do you have any tips on how to go about getting a strong ranking for a retail niche?
Many thanks,
Nay
Hi Guys, thanks for the comments. We’ve found that 3 keywords in the domain name has been harder to rank organically than 2 keywords (example of 3 keywords bigbluewidgets.com OR 2 keywords bluewidgets.com). Saying that these keyword niche domains that we have got have quite a bit more competition. Trying to find out if your chosen keywords are competitive or not is the key starting point to picking the niche in my opinion as well as picking a niche that you have the interest in or think you can write about.
Tips to check competition are use Google advance searches;
allintitle:blue widgets to see number of sites with those keywords in the TITLE
allinurl:blue widgets to see number of sites with those keywords in the URL address
allinachor:blue widgets to see those sites targeting those keywords when link building
If you find the niche keywords have too many sites competiting for those keywords then it could be difficult to rank.
Hope this helps
Thanks
Gary
This is a brilliant tip Gary, thanks! I had no idea about these.
Can I ask – did you have to rely heavily on backlinking for your highly ranked ecommerce sites? And if so, was it mainly social bookmarking? I’ve been reading a lot lately how google doesn’t like ‘thin’ sites, so I’m guessing my keyword tags alone aren’t going to help me. Maybe I need to add keyword rich articles also? What do you think?
Many thanks
Nay
Hi Nay,
Yes its a combination of both link building both internally and externally with relevant content and relevant sites AND writing keyword rich articles. So internally you will need to write unique content as often as you can, try and add 1 or 2 keyword links within the content. For external link building try and search for similar sites. I like to use google again and search for inurl:link keyword. This will find all those sites with both link and your chosen keyword in the url so you may come across sites wanting to do link exchanges with. Alternatively you can search google blogs just for your keywords and see if any of those sites would like to rank.
I would also recommend you write 1 or 2 external articles, doing so can not only get you another 1 way link back to your site, but also help you when writing the content as they have quite strict rules when say repeating the use of keywords etc. I would suggest ezinearticles.com.
This should do you for starters.
Thanks
Gary
Gary, thank you so much for your valuable information! Much appreciated. Now let’s see if I can make my site a success!!
Nay