24. Single site, or several tighter niche sites?
September 10, 2008 by Andy
If you have followed my Wordtracker Tutorial as you carry out your keyword research, you have likely ended up with 2000+ highly targeted keyword phrases in your chosen niche.
That can be quite daunting for those planning a website. Where do you start? How do you plan the site? Should you create a single site with these 2000+ phrases, or is it better to build multiple sites, with a tighter niche focus.
Let’s look at a real example based on some keyword research I carried out a long time ago on barbecues. While I am going to use Keyword Results Analyzer in this example, you can all follow the steps by downloading the demo version which includes this database of keywords. You can find the demo here.
If you own KRA but don’t have that database, email me and I’ll send it to you.
OK, on loading the project in KRA, you can see that there are 1942 phrases relating to barbecues.
Order the phrases Descending by Count.
This will order the phrases according to search volume. Those phases that are searched for most frequently will be at the top.
Now, if you are going to build a single website, you should be looking down this list (ordered descending by count), and picking out the phrases that cover the entire niche. Where there are two or more similar phrases covering the same part of this niche, just choose one.
Here are the top few phrases:
bbq
charcoal grills
bbq grills
barbecue
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
patio lights
BBQ
charcoal grill
bbq pits
sonny’s real pit bbq
natural gas grill
bbq ribs
bbq recipes
bbq chicken
smoker grill
barbecue grills
bbq sauce
portable gas grills
portable gas grill
electric grills
bbq grill
bbq smoker
jenn air grills
electric grill
To encompass the entire niche of BBQ, I would pick out the following:
charcoal grills
bbq grills
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
bbq pits
bbq recipes
portable gas grills
electric grills
The second phrase, "bbq grills" can probably be left out of this list, as "charcoal grills", "outdoor grills", "natural gas grills", "portable gas grills" and "electric grills" all cover the theme of "bbq grills".
There are also a few gas grills phrases, so I would reduce those.
My final list would be something like:
charcoal grills
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
bbq pits
bbq recipes
electric grills
These would make up the main pages of my new site on Barbecues. For each phrase, I would go back to KRA and build a list of secondary keywords. e.g. let’s take the example "electric grills". How would you find secondaries for this term?
Well, in KRA, open the Advanced Root Word Search screen.
Enter "electric" and "grill" in the first box on the left (labelled AND), and click the Filter Button. This will find phrases that contain both of these words.
Now click the button at the bottom of the advanced filter screen labelled "Make Results Blue". This marks the phrases so we can manipulate them later.
OK, close the advanced filter screen.
KRA finds 85 phrases related to electric grills.
How do we choose secondaries from that list?
Well, I would select the top few phrases on this list and run a Keyword + Unique report.
Let’s try it and see what we get.
Order the phrases by Count Descending again.
Enter the value of 8 into the "minimum count" box so that we only select those phrases with a count of 8 or more.
Click the filter button.
OK, that has narrowed it down to 21 phrases.
Run the "Keywords + Uniques" Report and save it as a text file.
Here is the report produced:
electric grills
electric grill
outdoor electric grill
electric outdoor grill
electric outdoor grills
portable electric grills
indoor electric grill
replacement electric grill element
meco electric grill
portable electric grill
cooktops with electric grill
electric grill tucson
cooking pre made hamburgers on an electric grill
indoor outdoor electric grill
outdoor electric grills
electric bbq grills
electric bbq grill
electric char grills
general electric gas grill
electric barbecue grills
grills electric
Unique Keywords:
barbecue
bbq
char
cooking
cooktops
electric
element
gas
general
grill
grills
hamburgers
indoor
made
meco
outdoor
portable
pre
replacement
tucson
At the top of this report you have a list of complete phrases that people search for when looking for electric grill information. These are the phrases you should try to include in your page if you possibly can, and if it does not make your page look like it has been stuffed.
However, the lower part of this report is the uniques. These are the words that make up the phrases often used when searching for information on electric grills. These are the individual words that you use to theme your page. Insert as many as you can into your page on electric grills and the search engines will be left in no doubt what your page is about.
Repeat this process for all main pages.
OK, that’s what I would do if I was building one large site on Barbecues. However, there is potential here to build several smaller sites, each one based on one of the main page phrases we worked out earlier.
Here are those phrases again:
charcoal grills
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
bbq pits
bbq recipes
electric grills
It would be easy to create a single site on charcoal grills, another on bbq smokers, and so on.
Let’s go back to KRA.
Click the Remove filter button.
In the root word box, type in charcoal, and click Filter.
KRA return 88 phrases on charcoal grills, barbecues etc.
How do you turn those phrases into a complete site? Simply by following the guidelines above.
Order the phrases by Count, Descending.
Pick out the words that encompass the niche, and use them as main pages. Run advanced filtering on your database to pull out targeted secondaries and uniques to theme your page.
Here are the phrases I would pick for my main phrases on charcoal bbqs:
Homepage main keyword: charcoal grills
Main page phrases, in no particular order:
drop in charcoal grills
weber charcoal grills
charcoal grill grates
stainless steel charcoal grill
towable charcoal grills
folding charcoal grill
charcoal and gas grill
disposable charcoal grill
meco charcoal grills
Simple, eh?
So, one set of keyword research can yield one large site, or multiple smaller, tightly focused niches.
Which is better?
Well there are pros and cons to both approaches. A large site can often be seen as more authorative. It takes less work to add content, and you only need incoming links to one site. However, if that site did get dropped from the search engines, your income potential has gone.
Lots of sites mean more work, but greater security. If one gets dropped, you have lots of others. Owning lots of sites can work wonders for your reputation though. If you have your photo on all sites (like I do on my ezseonews site), then people researching bbqs will come across your face many times on several different sites they visit. That builds confidence in you as you become something of a guru in the field. Confidence in a website increases conversions.
Print This Post
Related Articles
- 6.1.1. How can you find in-demand phrases that are EASY to write articles on? - That is quite easy too, as long as you did your keyword research properly (as described in the Wordtracker Tutorial). Filter out phrases according to certain words they contain. e.g. In KRA-WT, remove any filtering criteria already entered, and instead, just use the "root word" box to filter your phrases. This feature of KRA-WT allows you to
- 7. Themeing Pages - With the phrases chosen for your main pages, and now the article pages, you are ready for a look at themeing. This is where we look at the main phrase for a page, and construct a list of related phrases that we want to write into our page. The related phrases should be other words that
- 3. Identifying Niches - Finding a profitable niche is a two-step process. 1. Find several potential niches. 2. Check to see which one is most profitable. 3.1. Find several potential niches Step 1 is often the biggest stumbling block for those starting out in this affiliate marketing business. Where do you get ideas from? I do get a lot of people asking me
- 6.1 What is an Article? - The basic idea with articles is to create informative content that ranks well for a range of keywords, and provides your visitors with useful information. These articles can then guide your visitor to any of your main pages, to try to get a sale. If the article was useful and informative, your visitor will have more
- 5.3. How to Group Your Keywords - The strategy highlighted above talks about two types of pages, articles and main pages. There is actually a third type of page – the homepage. These three types of page have very different functions: a) articles – get traffic b) main pages – sell affiliate products c) homepage – helps direct your visitors to what they want on your
