Nestling Into Niches: How To Build Authority Through Content

Creating a focus for the content you create is a great way to hone your marketing strategy. Not only will that focus make it easier to find topics to write about, but the focus of all that content on a specific topic and audience can really build your E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) with Google. 

Creating consistently within a subject, along with creating content that’s informative and engaging, can improve your business’s SEO scores, drive traffic, build backlinks, and more. 

You can’t pass up on that kind of boost to your site.

This is why the concept of working within a niche is so important. It can establish you as a credible source within that niche quicker than by being a generalist and helps improve your SEO by allowing you to make better use of long-tail keywords. Crafting the right long-tail keyword can be tricky when you’re creating content around a more broad set of topics. 

Here, we’re going to go over what a niche is, and how using them to focus your site’s content can change the way your online business creates new content and attracts the right audience.

What Is A Niche?

A niche is a more specific segment of the market. Every site should have a niche that helps decide the focus of the content so it speaks to a certain target audience and helps attract those visitors to your site. While a more broad topic might be “plants,” a more focused niche might be “repotting orchids.” While more people typically search for the topic of “plants” than the niche of“repotting orchids,” you’ll find less competition within the niche, which allows you to build more reliable traffic and authority. Creating this focus helps boost your SEO score and asserts your website as an authority on certain topics. The more specific your niche, the more likely you’ll be a bigger authority.

It’s hard to be an expert in all cars, but it’s probably easier to be the expert in 1970s Dodge Chargers, and even easier to be the authority in 1970s Dodge Charger engine repairs.

Being purposeful and specific with your niche can strengthen the focus and form of your content, which will create more focus within your brand.

Finding Your Niche

Before you begin creating content, though, you need to be aware of what niche you already fill. What services and products does your company provide? Does it require any special knowledge or skill? How can you leverage what your company is already an expert in?

Oftentimes this aspect of web design is ignored for streamlining load times, graphics, and other visual design aspects. It’s assumed that if the company makes a certain product the niche will just happen to revolve around it. But a niche has to be more purposeful than that to be effective, and if you’re not applying the focus a niche provides, then your content can feel disjointed and all over the place.

It’s essential to understand your niche if you want your business to succeed and grow.

Content creation can involve rigorous research and fact-checking but it can also come from a place of personal expertise. Build a list of skills from the teams within your company, observing the tasks they perform and the passions they display to perform their work. How do these skills fit into your niche? It’s amazing what we learn by doing and what we can teach about what we do!

You also might discover that your company is an expert in several niches. This is normal; as niches are small aspects of a larger topic, you’re bound to be experts in multiple niches. Try to keep your niches within the same broader category, though. If you’re a digital marketing company that writes extensively about the digital marketplace, don’t try to become an expert on content about topics like “repotting orchids.” Keep things related to your broader topic while still delving deeper into specific areas of that topic.

You can even find ways to keep completely unrelated niches together through the use of a single concept or idea. Content about parks, infrastructure, grocery store reviews, and personal journals might not be too related in terms of their topics, but on a blog site about Cleveland, these topics might make sense to be all on one site. The important aspect of niches is that they’re purposeful; whatever niches you’re committing to are either already connected or are connected through concepts and ideas your website is able to foster.

Keeping what you create contained to specific niches within a broader topic can help search engines narrow down what your website is about. Your site might be a 'general' site or a personal blog that doesn't stick to any particular topic, but even then there will be at least a 'theme' or a feel tying it together. You might create content about books, coffee, and a certain city, but that's still a niche in its own way and one that will attract a very specific type of person. And as you create more and more content, the niches you prefer to talk about will begin to bleed through.

When You’re Not An Expert

Niches are important that help your company’s content team narrow down their focus especially if it’s a topic that your team isn’t an expert in. Most likely your content creation team won’t be creating and designing too many aspects of the products you’re directly selling. Instead, they’ll be working with the marketing and creative departments to figure out how to best market your products to an audience. 

Your content staff, though, has ways to become experts enough to create confidently about the niches you pick.

Research and interviews with professionals can shed a lot of light on any subject and, from there, your team can craft content to inform and entertain others. However, the niche you’re focusing on should be related to the kinds of products and services your company produces. Keeping that connection reinforces your understanding of the product you’re selling, along with providing some more relevant keywords and topics for your customers.

Remember to research content from reliable sources. If the information you’re using is faulty or inaccurate, you’ll take a negative SEO hit to your website. Some search engines might not even display that page on a SERP if the content is viewed as being dodgy.

Google in particular has been making huge strides to incorporate fact-checking and trustworthiness into its search engine algorithms. This means that if you become an authority on a given subject you’ll see a huge boost in SEO. However, posting unfactual content can do the exact opposite. Make sure you’re fact-checking your own content before letting it go public.

Create Your Own Niche

Some subject areas, such as sports or gardening, are well-established topics. It’s important to understand the other authorities within your niche to better understand what you can contribute that’s different from the rest of the pack. By researching what others are creating you can learn how to stand out.

In your research, you might find that there’s little content about a given niche or topic. Those are goldmines of SEO traffic if you’re able to focus on them. You’ll be able to quickly rise as an authority in this area if there aren’t many people talking about it, which is also a great way to find new and different audiences that might be interested in what your company has to offer.

You can also look for places where your content topics can hybridize with other topics. Websites such as Lifehacker.com are sites that sit on the edge of life improvement, DIY projects, crafts, and self-improvement articles. These websites offer everything from how to build a birdhouse to how to create an investment plan. Normally you wouldn’t see financial advice on a website about carpentry, but Lifehacker.com and others have carved their own niche of “DIY adulting” content that has a broad appeal among younger people.

Or Excel In Existing Ones

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, either. Picking a niche that’s already filled by some people is more than valid. In fact, most companies do just that. Do you think that Chase Bank, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are creating new and inventive niches? Not at all. They’re creating for what they work with; financial information and banking knowledge.

If your company already exists, it probably is already settled into a niche. Embrace it, especially if your audience is already in that niche and supports your product. They’ll enjoy the extra content and expertise you bring.

If you want to try something new, you could always go more niche by thinking of smaller subsections of topics within a niche. This has the added benefit of still being within your original niche but builds more specific authority for your website. It will also help hyper-focus your SEO goals, allowing you to access more valuable long-tail keywords that can bring in a lot of traffic.

Niches Aren’t Niche

They’re all around you. Whether they know it or not, most products and businesses fit within a certain niche.

There’s a huge power to understanding what your niche is, and that power can unlock hidden potential in any website and online business.

Knowing where your niche authority lies helps you understand where you can’t act like an expert. Better yet, it allows your customers and potential customers to see your expertise on display. And by growing a library of factual, topic-specific content, you’ll gain the trust and confidence of your target audience and customers.