Listen to Your Site
If you have a site which equally covers 4 parallel areas and you put the same amount of content up for each area odds are that one area will drastically outperform all the others. I have a 1,000 page AdSense site which gets about 100 ad clicks a day on the most profitable page of the site, while the site as a whole averages about 1 click a page. The reason one section will drastically outperform the others is not just due to how well that section is integrated into the web, but also due to what types of sites you are competing against. For example, many large corporations still do not get SEO, and in certain high margin verticals (especially with certain high paying keyword modifiers) the top ranked results are dominated by cheesy spam pages. It is going to be easier to outrank the cheesy spam than to carve out marketshare in results dominated by legitimate authoritative sites.
After you get the base of your site up listen to the feedback the search engines provide. They will tell you what they think your site is about and what sections they think have enough authority to merit a top ranked position.
And while this advice can sound like it is geared exclusively toward spammy AdSense sites, the same type of market feedback, if tracked, can be applied to improving lead quality for smaller ecommerce sites. Every market has gaps in it. If you create a base of real content and listen to your site you will find enough easy opportunity to create a revenue stream which builds up a profit stream that allows you to invest in building up the authority of your domain for more competitive queries.
Comments
Sounds like clearly put site stats tracking.
I guess it pays off to create a wide variety of content to cover a significant amount of search queries, too.
Too bad most niches are way too competitive to be able to spot possibly break throughs instantly.
Ive always been sort of fascinated with inefficiencies in markets..
With SEO & Internet Marketing I find this pretty appealing, too, because like you wrote in your book: 'there's a real disconnect between value and profit'
What do you consider a 'hyper niche'? in case you can sum it up in terms of link popularity?
Im interested in that, b/c you wrote in 'hyper-niches' it was possible to get around Google's site age problem, as much link authority wasnt needed to rank...but what do you consider a hyper-niche in terms of link authority/numbers? less than 100? less than 5?
I like how you take an ear to the ground approach. I don't think it can be over-stated that there is a true need for content out there.
I am also interested in what you mean by hyper-niche. It would be interesting to hear see a few different articles on this topic later.
Thanks for all you do!
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I hope I wasnt misunderstood as in that I want an exact definition of hyper-niche..like..'what is a good conversion rate? x,yz%?'. But I have to admit im a bit curious as Ive been doing almost nothing but keyword and niche-research for over a month now to find a couple of good fields (which Im also interested in of course).
I cannot agree more. Website analytics reveal so much stuff about your site and provide so much "suggestions" as to how you can yield better results. I'm really surprised how so many people overlook that.
I can't agree more with the article. I run for my business a small website and did discover that regular changes and add ons to my site got me up in the ladder of search results quite nicely.
But it is a slow process. Nevertheless I have some other content on my site which I feel is important for me too and it does nothing in search results as I somehow seem to compete against large corporations. What I suggest is switching over to a local market in which on can than dominate a little bit easier.
This approach brings skepticism for a lot of people because you are defining your site/business based on search engine feedback and not your core competencies.
Hi Blake
If we are meeting customers needs (even if those needs are surprising or unexpected) it is better to keep doing that and to do more of it rather than to expect the market to care about what we do (when often they do not).
Yes that's true you should have the complete details of your website in terms of statistics and also why one page outperforms the other. What the things that the visitors looking for on your website on certain pages that get more importance?
If you are not able to hear your site and make changes accordingly then there will be loads of hard work to be done for the same later.
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