I get it.
No, really, I do.
You have a great product or service, but it only serves a small-volume niche. In fact, you even anticipated struggling to identify and tap into the most relevant market(s) before you even launched your first marketing campaign. Still, this is your dream, and there are definitely people out there who want what you’re selling … right?
The internet is a big place. I have no doubt whatsoever that every niche has an online audience. I don’t care how obscure a product or service may be, someone out there wants it. The only trouble, then, is finding the ones who do. This is the goal of small niche market content marketing, and it’s also where SEO comes into play.
If you want people to be able to find your tiny corner of cyberspace, they need to have an easy and direct way to do it. Of course, I can’t guarantee that the advice I’m about to offer will help you find ideal customers or clients. However, you will have a much better chance of ranking higher if you engage in good SEO practices. The more optimized your website and content are, the higher individual pages will rank and the easier it will be to tap the most relevant market(s).
Let’s just get to it, then, shall we? Excellent!
1. Get Your SEO House in Order
I’m going to step outside the arena of words for a moment and just make sure you understand this crucial principle of SEO: There’s more to it than keywords. Yes, keywords matter greatly in SEO, but there are plenty of other things that should be optimized to get the attention of the SERPs, as well.
For starters, your website overall should be optimized, particularly in the areas of responsive design, page load times, and the quality of your content. All three of these things factor in to how well your site and its individual pages can expect to rank. I have multiple articles on page formatting, content presentation, and much more, so I will defer to my previous words on those topics. Right now, I’m just going to list a few things you should think of when attempting to optimize an entire website:
• High compression on multimedia files (primarily images and videos)
• Reasonable relevant keyword density in articles and blogs
• Good use of keyword-rich meta descriptions
• Responsiveness
• Consistent dimensions for images
I’ll also recommend doing a site audit to get a better picture of the overall health of your website.
2. Constantly Research Relevant Keywords
I’m just going to say it: Nobody does this. Most marketers — knowing full well how much the market fluctuates — still insist on using the same store of keywords over and over again. They then wonder why they aren’t reaching a bigger audience.
There is no instance where the concept of relevance is more important than in niche marketing. Smaller niches need to prove to their audiences that they are in the moment — relevant, influential, knowledgeable, etc. The best way to do it is to be proactive in researching keywords for every new piece of content. It’s what we train our writers to do here at Beez.
3. Use Longtail Keywords
Longtail keywords matter if you’re targeting small groups of people or specific geographical areas. Let’s say your niche is glass blowing. Relevant longtail keywords would include “soda lime glass blowing supplies in Worcester” and “borosilicate glass blowing community in Tallahassee.” Narrowing down the audience in this way makes it easier for specific people to find your site.
4. Learn About LSI Keywords
Modern search engines use multiple algorithms to determine where pages rank in SERPs and what pages to serve when certain specific and often-repeated keywords are entered. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a search engine algorithm that serves pages based on specific phrases that appear in conjunction with the main theme of your page. If that sounds confusing, stay with me. It’ll make sense in a minute.
Quite often, specific phrases appear in clusters on websites. LSI looks at those clusters of phrases and decides how congruous they are with what the search engine has determined to be the main theme of a page. The more relevant the LSI keywords, the more likely the search engine will be to serve that page if an LSI keyword is used in conjunction with a more popular general one.
I could write an entire post on this one (and probably will, eventually), to be honest. For now, I’m going to refer you here for a more comprehensive definition and explanation for how LSI keywords work and how to use them. This is a pocket of SEO that I think every responsible marketer should understand and use to their advantage.
5. Attract the Right Audience(s) on Social Media
If might not be a bad idea to, at least initially, invest in some paid ads on social channels that already net you good engagement. Facebook, in particular, makes it easy to focus content marketing on tiny niches and expand your audience through highly targeted micro-ad campaigns. How micro? You can advertise for as little as $1 a day on Facebook. That tiny investment can then expand your reach considerably if yours is a particularly small market.
The effect this has on SEO is in areas like backlinks and shares. If people click on links to your blog, you’ve generated some new organic traffic. If they share links to your content, the search engines take notice that people are engaging and, subsequently, start ranking your content better. These kinds of things are part of off-page SEO, and they matter every bit as much as quality content and page optimization. I have material on off-page SEO here, too, but I also like this article by Neil Patel in particular.
After reading all this, if you’re still feeling lost, you can check out some of my other articles on related topics for a more in-depth look at concepts like of-page SEO and the like. However, if you think the task of optimizing your content is a little too daunting or you just don’t understand how SEO works well enough to be comfortable going it alone, contact us. At BeezContent, we pay close attention to SEO trends and can help you optimize your niche market content to reach even small markets like yours.
