One surefire way to set your company apart from your competition is to have a niche that has less competition but higher profit potential. Typically, an ideal profitable niche is that sweet spot intersecting “High market demand”, “Low competition” and “High income potential”. If your business can become one of the front runners for that niche your target audience will then turn to you.
However, depending on the niche, it can be difficult to use SEO to your advantage. Even if you have a common target, using SEO can be difficult. With all the competition, how can you stand out? A hard niche means your businesses have any of the following challenges:
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- Their online audience is small.
- Their niche is common, but have to compete in SEO.
- There aren’t many links or information available about the niche.
- The niche is uninteresting or dull (i.e. “boring).
But just because you work in a hard niche, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to use SEO to earn a high rank and receive valuable traffic and enquiries. Here are a few suggestions on how to rank in a hard niche.
1. Start using long-tail keywords: Using basic, broad SEO keywords means your website will get lost amongst all your other competitors using the same keywords. Use more specific keywords with a long-tail keyword strategy, as this article on Codeless Interactive suggests. As an example, instead of marketing towards “kids’ shoes,” use something more specific such as “purple Sketcher shoes for kids.” Your audience uses long-tail keywords when searching on Google anyway to have a specific result. Cater to their needs and be more specific too with long-tail keywords.
2. Recycle old content and make it new: If you have blog entries or social media posts that have had “meh” responses from your audience, spice them up. Has a new development come out on the topic you were discussing about a few blog posts back? Update the post with new information, make it interesting and relevant and promote it again on social media, likely how you’ve done it before. Brian Dean, author of an article on Backlinko that discusses this SEO technique, did it with one of his case studies and had an “111.37% increase in organic traffic to that page.” The results you get will vary, but it’s worth giving it a shot.
3. Use one keyword phrase per page: According to Codeless Interactive, “you should focus on optimizing each post or page with only one keyphrase.” There’s no need to clutter your pages with so many keywords and phrases. “Spread them out by focusing each page on one topic.” Not only is this a clean approach for SEO, but this gives your niche more topics to explore instead of trying to cram everything about it in a few posts. Your hard niche should be fresh, relevant and interesting to your audience and competitors.
Niche marketing can be tough and ranking for a hard niche even tougher, but with a bit of smart thinking and the right help it can prove to be a very lucrative strategy. Find that target and go after it!
