A lot of times when people are building niche websites, they tell you to niche down. Well, that is not always the case of what you want to do. And I’m going to be showing you an exact example as to why that is the case.
What was Google’s priority before
Back in the old days of Google, in which there was some sort of priority given to the exact keyword match of domains and then the respective content on their pages, there was a time and place where you did want to niche really, really down.
For example, you’d want to create a website like bestgardeningtools.com, because you wanted to rank for all the different gardening tools out there, but that is no longer the case in today’s world. A lot of Google’s focus is now on E-A-T in terms of just making sure that you have that sort of expertise and authority out there.
Digging into a domain that I think suffers from niching down too far
In today’s article, I’m going to be sharing with you an example website that I think suffers from the trait of having niche down a little bit too far. I stumbled upon this website, I think because of either a forum or Facebook group that I was part of where this person was trying to sell their website. And so they shared their URL and this is what their site is all about.
Their domain in this particular example is ultimategamechair.com and right off the bat, what’s the problem with this? Well, the problem is that you’re probably limited the two game chairs and talking about game chairs. And so right off the bat, the first reason why you don’t want it potentially niche down is just because it limits the scope in which you can expand out in the case where your site actually is successful.
This is why when you’re looking for potential sites to buy or just domains in general, they’re going to have a component on some websites where they call it brandability. It is something in which the exact sort of domain phrase here is something that can be turned into a brand or something bigger than itself. And so in this particular example, if you have a domain like ultimategamechair.com, you’re pretty much limited to the content that you’re going to create for the entire existence of your site.
If you don’t create stuff on game shares, then people are just going to be confused as to why your website is called ultimate game chair. So the first thing that you have to consider when you’re thinking about naming your domain and nicheing down too far, is whether or not you are pigeonholing yourself in the future.
If you were, for example, trying to create a soccer gear website and you called it bestsoccergear.com, it’s going to start getting weird if you ever go into the informational intense side of soccer phrases where it’s like, what is a midfielder do? And so in this particular example, you can see how limiting this is for this creator in which they have this website, but you’ll notice how they actually try to expand out beyond best gaming chairs, but it started to look a little bit weird where you have best recliners or secret lab chairs.
These are still somewhat related, but for the most part, you’ll see that they couldn’t really talk about anything else except this particular topic.
Do this instead when you’re creating an affiliate website
In the case where you’re thinking about creating an affiliate website for different best products and things like that, try to think a little bit broader than just the exact sort of product category that you are going to be immediately creating content for.
Because the last thing you want to do is just have to force 301 redirect everything because of how you set up your website here. So if we take a look at this particular site, you can see how ultimate game chair actually has a really solid authority score. It’s 42 and they’ve got tons of backlinks, 3.2K links, and they rank for a decent number of keywords.
But the problem with this is that so much of their content just has to be focused and narrowed down to this particular use case. So even if I was remotely interested in creating content around gaming chairs, maybe I want to keep things open and potentially cover other chairs and equipment in the future. To do that, I need to think about some broader phrases that can still connect back to my principle of gaming chairs while not limiting my content to just gaming chairs.
Digging into competitors’ domains that have gone through this approach
Let’s take a look at the competitor’s tab in SEMRush to see what some other domains have done to approach this problem. What you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to head into the competitor’s tab here and as you scroll on down, you’re going to start to see some other websites that suffer from the same sort of problem as ultimategamingchair.com. You’ve got top gaming chair, you’ve got DX, racer X rocking, rocker gaming. This is potentially a little bit more broad-based. But what essentially we can do is we can start to open up some of these websites and try to get a sense of what is some of the content that is interesting here.
And what you notice actually is that one of the ones I found was called sit, work, play, and I liked that domain, ’cause I thought it was so brandable in terms of covering content beyond just gaming chairs. So let’s look at X Rocker Gaming here, you can see that this is actually just a website that sells actual gaming chairs, beds, accessories, and things like that. Probably going to go ahead and skip this guy.
In this case, secretlab.co is also another gaming chair company. But in sitworkplay, you can see how this is a very similar website to ultimategamingchair.com. But the difference is that they kept themselves open enough in terms of their domain name, to actually be expand beyond just gaming chairs, you can see how they’ve covered best chairs, best keyboard, best desk, best mice.
Because all of these sorts of things can connect back to that theme of sitting, working, and playing. And that’s really powerful because it means that in the case where they are successful in their first respective niche of gaming chairs, they can still expand and still use the existing link profile of the website as opposed to having to build an entirely new website.
And so you’ll see this in all the different sort of content pieces that they’re creating. If you go to their guide section, you can see how they’re digging into things like how to clean an office chair? How much should your office chair cost? How to create a comfortable work from home office space?
These are sorts of questions that ultimategamingchair.com can never really answer, ’cause it doesn’t really connect back to the core domain itself. The worst thing you want to do is put yourself in a position in which you have to create an entirely new website when you’ve got a website working for you. There is a beautiful component of compounding when you do get a website to work.
Use this approach when creating your niche site
So if you can, try to think about your domain in the broadest sense that you possibly can. This is the approach of creating an authoritative website as opposed to a niche website. And the reason why this is so valuable is because it makes your website way more scalable on a five and 10 year time horizon.
In the case where you’re just trying to rank for keywords in the short term, sure your best of content might work, but it’s not going to work much longer because that some point you will have exhausted all of the core intent that you possibly can rank for that it’s time for you to start to span the sort of queries that you’re targeting for. And so that’s going to be the situation where you’re going to run across that case just like the first example from today.
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