What is niching, and how can it help build traffic?
Q: "Traffic Generation: Finding Your Niche" - What is niching, and how can it help build traffic to my website?
A: One of the most important things that you can do to help build traffic for your website is to find a niche. A niche is a subset of a market. So yes, we're basically suggesting that one of the best things you can do to build traffic for your website is shrink your potential audience.
By niching your website, you're doing three important things. The first of these is eliminating the competition. As of this writing, if you Google "real estate" you get about 112 million results. Changing that to "Indiana real estate" cuts that number down to 31 million results. Make it "west central Indiana real estate" and you're down to a little more than 7 million results. You can do that excercise with almost anything else, by the way, and get similar results. By narrowing your focus, you're narrowing the number of sites you have to compete with.
Secondly, you're making your site much more friendly to search engine rankings. When a site's content is focused on the same set of specific keywords, such as narrowing something down to "west central Indiana real estate," Google puts much more emphasis on sites like tha tin search results. So, while there may be 7 million pages competing for ranking in that search tearm, the vast majority of them aren't specifically focused on it. So if your site can be narrowed to a niche like that, the chances of getting a good search engine ranking improve dramatically.
Finally, having a tightly niched site helps to build a loyal following. If your lawn mower is broken and you need to get a new blade for it, a site focued on lawn mowers won't be as useful as a site focused on lawn mower parts, which won't be as useful as a site focused on lawn mower blades. As your visitors find information that's actually useful to them on the site, they start to become regular consumers of your site. Often times, you'll get links from other sites, too, for being of great benefit to the visitor, and this is something else that is looked very fondly upon for search engine rankings.
So, if you want more visitors to your website, one of the first and best steps you can take is to narrow your focus. Find your niche, and plant your flag in it.