Ranking for the Niche

For most of my career I’ve worked with small to mid-size companies looking to rank better in the search engines. When working with eager CEOs many of them have high expectations of ranking well for popular keywords. Now their reasoning might be justified. Ranking well on popular terms usually generates a lot of traffic. But you and I both know that ranking well for broad term keywords can be difficult, expensive and less qualified.

So what’s the Alternative?

You might have heard of the term ‘long-tail’ being used by a lot of online marketers. What does ‘long-tail’ mean exactly? Let’s take a look at the graph as an example. The steep part of the graph is where there is a lot of competition with high amounts of traffic. If you look toward the end of the graph you’ll notice keywords with less competition but also less traffic. This is called the ‘long tail’, or as marketers like to put it, a niche.

Why Niche?

A niche is an important area to take note of as there are several benefits of marketing to a niche. For one, the competition is light which means with some effort you can outperform your competition. Also, this space is generally less expensive since you won’t be competing against large marketing budgets and big brands. And one of the biggest advantages of this area is that it is extremely focused or qualified. The people you find in a niche will be looking exclusively for your product which means you can market directly to them.

Once you’re able to identify a niche or a group of ‘long tail’ keywords, you can begin your different marketing methods and start targeting these areas.

Use Blogging to Drive Keywords

Blogging is a great tool to use to rank well in the search engines. If we use the analogy of search being similar to a lottery and blog posts representing tickets, then the more tickets you have the better your odds are in winning. This means that the more content you put into Google, the more opportunity for different, unique keyword terms to rank well. And from my experience, the traffic from these keywords can add up significantly.

Blue Ocean Keywords

Recently, Hubspot wrote a great article on a term called Blue Ocean Keywords reiterating my point. The term ‘blue ocean’ is a fresh take on the term ‘long-tail’ and it refers to a vast representation of low competition and highly qualified keywords. The opposite being ‘red ocean’, where competition is fierce and keywords are expensive. The point Hubspot is making is to focus on the’ blue ocean’ keywords by generating lots of content and ranking for this wide array of terms.

Patience

Unfortunately, ranking for ‘long-tail’ or ‘blue-ocean’ keywords takes time and is a cumulative process. It’s also less impressive to show your CEO that you rank first for a highly qualified keyword term. Instead, what you must illustrate to the CEO is the total amount of traffic generated by all of your keywords.

So instead of focusing on broad term keywords and putting in a lot of effort in ranking well for highly competitive and expensive terms, I suggest you give the ‘long-tail’ approach a try and consider marketing to a niche. You’ll see that over time, you will start ranking for multiple keywords that will add up and increase the amount of qualified traffic to your site.

What do you guys think? Is it a better approach to go broad or to focus on a niche? What’s more attainable?

Guest post by: Zaid Rasid is the founder of the internet marketing blog Better Social* Skills. He provides expert social media, lead generation & brand awareness advice to small and medium sized businesses. For a practical look at how online marketing can work for you, visit www.zaidrasid.com or follow him on twitter: www.twitter.com/zaidrasid

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