SEO is all about competing for search results, right? While this does mean that you’re going to have to have a constant and consistent effort, it doesn’t mean you have to compete for the very top to reach your ultimate goal: traffic! What many people don’t realize is that you can get to top spots easier for targeted keywords that fit your niche. Niche keyword terms represent phrases that have a moderate amount of search volume, but aren’t highly competitive. Optimize for your niche keywords, and you could find your site getting the easiest SEO traffic you’ve ever seen.
About Niche Keywords
Identifying keywords in general can be a challenging process. You have to think from the mindset of the searcher; in their many different stages of the buying cycle. You can’t rely on simple product keywords alone. Depending on the popularity of your industry, these will always be highly competitive and over-saturated with existing competitive search engine optimization efforts. If you run an online printing company for example, terms like “Business Cards” are always going to be extremely competitive. Sure, these can be worth your time to invest in – and you’ll always want to put some focus there. However, if you can identify less competitive keywords that have a moderate amount of traffic – and are extremely relevant to your industry, you’re going to get some quick results. For example, again with a printing company – you could target a phrase like “Digital Printing”
That’s going to be much less competitive than Business Cards, while still giving you relevant traffic that is likely to convert.
Identifying Niche Keywords
Simple tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool can help you find terms for your industry, and will also let you see the search volume and competition level. Even great tools like this have the limitation of a robotic tool. You have to think like a buyer and try phrases that work, even misspellings. When you find a term or phrase that has even 500 or 1,000 targeted monthly searches for a term that’s relevant, with low competition – go for it! For example, these are phrases like “shoe graph” or “footwear chart”. These odd phrases are extremely relevant to a footwear site – and will be much easier to achieve high ranking for due to their low competition level. Each of these terms has well over 5,000 monthly searches, so definitely worth the effort. Get creative and find some industry keywords like these that match your site, and start targeting some effort to achieve this traffic.
Implementing Niche Keywords in SEO Campaign
Always remembering that SEO is about the human experience as much as robotic analysis, you have to be careful when implementing niche keywords into your overall strategy. For example, if you were to move forward with aggressive targeting of ripe niche keywords and change the majority of your website headers and title tags, as well as content to fit these niches – your content would seem quite irrelevant to your website visitors. They are going to expect to see major industry terms when they arrive at your site; not because they are “top SEO terms,” but because they are the logical result for the buying process. The right way to implement niche keywords into your overall strategy is to add them incrementally among your other target keywords. Build links with your niche terms as anchor text – and have these link to landing pages that are 1 or 2 steps deep into your site. These pages should have the same niche keywords as page headers and title tags, but also make sure to provide easy to see internal links to your product listings and homepage. You don’t want to turn someone off from buying just because they found you through a rarer keyword.
Tracking the Results
As with any SEO effort, tracking your results is essential. You want to make sure that what you are doing is paying off. So, setup traceable URLs from you links, put analytics on your landing pages, and make sure that your niche keywords are worth the effort you’re putting into them. If you don’t see a noticeable result within a few months – move on to the next term. SEO is a trial and error process that requires diligence, persistence, and constant modification. Niche keywords are yet another layer where, if you put in the effort, you can see results.