‘Niche’ is a difficult word for businesses. It’s kind of like ’boutique’, but without the glamour. Perhaps this is why so many businesses avoid niche strategies with their SEO. Putting the connotations of the word itself aside, targeting a niche place in your industry can be an excellent way to the top of the SERPs.

Establishing yourself in a niche is usually much easier than trying to compete in the mainstream. Before we get into how to establish your niche, let’s talk about why you would even want to.

Why niches work

Niche SEO is all about establishing your business as an influence on the net. Most businesses cannot do this when competing in the mainstream, so targeting a niche makes sense. A lot of businesses do this in a small way anyway, when targeting keywords that are appropriate to their level of competition. Targeting a niche subject with your content is simply a way to consolidate your SEO strategy for low-competition keywords.

This strategy works well because, although it shrinks your audience, it makes you a bigger fish. If you’re able to establish authority within your niche, you’re likely to have more traffic and regular users than someone struggling in the big pond.

How to find a niche

When targeting a niche, you need to cover two areas. The first, and most important for your business, is to find an area that suits your objectives. You might find that there is a vacant niche in your industry for advice on cooking with whitebait, but this isn’t helpful when what you want to do is sell smoked salmon. The second area is to find out which areas haven’t been covered by your competitors. These are vacant niches.

1. Keyword research. Hunting for a niche should begin right in the keyword research stage of search engine optimisation. While you’re looking into keywords, you’re likely to notice all of the strange little areas your business covers. Take note of these small areas, and have your SEO consultant help you look into how much information is out there for each. It’s likely that the lower-competition keywords will provide suitable bases for a niche strategy.
2. Audience research. As you will know from keyword selection, a low-competition keyword usually means a smaller audience. Although niches involve small audiences, you want to select a topic that will give you at least some coverage. Audience research will help you determine whether there’s a market out there.
3. Selection. It’s a good idea to discuss niche selection with your SEO company, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia. Just like choosing keywords, your niche selection will be a result of benefits versus risk. Once you’ve selected, start building up content specific to your niche and establishing authority in the broader community.

Note: Other niches. You aren’t restricted to covering just one niche subject. It is possible to target a number of niche areas, but be careful. Each niche needs to be treated as a separate campaign, or you risk losing the focus that makes niche campaigns so successful.

Information architecture, or site architecture, is one of the silent killers of rankings. It lurks in the background, causing lots of little issues between your site and the search engines. It’s one of those things that is easy to gloss over when you SEO.

It’s important to look at your site architecture when going through the first stages of SEO. Here are five of the more common issues encountered:

1. Duplicate content. This is an issue that might surprise you, being found in an article on architecture. The usual issue discussed in relation to duplicate content is the risk it poses to your pages of being pushed off the search engines. Duplicate content can also cause issues with site architecture, in that it can confuse search engine spiders. If you have a page that is linked to through multiple URLs, you risk distracting spiders.
2. Canonical issues. When you have www.example.com and example.com pointing to the same site, you have a canonical issue. Use redirects to channel traffic from minor URLs properly.
3. Printing pages. A lot of sites set out print versions of their pages for the convenience of site users. These pages can distract search engine spiders, using up time that should be spent on more important content. Use your robots.txt file to instruct spiders to ignore these kinds of elements on your page.
4. Infinite space issues. Sometimes, sites that use calendars and other time-reference tools inadvertently create spider traps. If a calendar on your site allows users to scan forward through the months, it’s possible that a search engine spider could follow those months on through infinity. Google’s webmasters have stated that they have figured out many ways to deal with infinite space issues, but that there is always the chance that such things could trip the spiders up.
   • It’s best to deal with these if you can. Limiting the amount of future on your tools is inconvenient, but removes the problem. You can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about infinite space issues.
5. Links in all the wrong places. Another incredibly common problem sites encounter is in directing search engine spiders off their pages too quickly. Spiders tend to follow links when they find them, meaning they may miss out on parts of your page if you’re not careful. There is heaps of advice on the placement of links in the SEO community, so check in with forums or your search engine optimisation consultant if you’re unsure.
   • There are other things that are going to cause problems for your information architecture which are not exactly issues. For example, long tail search means lots of pages. This can mean a huge mess unless you plan your architecture very carefully. When you’re implementing a strategy involving long-tail keywords, you naturally want as many of your pages indexed as quickly as possible. Other things are likely to come up when you SEO, so it’s important to always return to the basics, plan carefully, and keep checking back.