So you’ve found a way to make money from your passion. That’s awesome, and exciting! But when you take to the internet, you find yourself crowded out by an ever-amassing horde of businesses with a more conventional approach.
How can you possibly compete with the likes of Amazon in the rankings when you only sell robots made from broken appliances? The good news is, you don’t actually have to.
SEO for niche businesses is, well… niche.
What you need is to rank well for what you do so you can be visible to people who are looking specifically for your work. And, be available to others who are in to similar things. The best part is, it’s actually not as hard as it seems.
It is all about finding out what your customers want. For example, customers want their medical malpractice attorneys to be compassionate. They want them to work quickly and efficiently, and they want them to understand how important their plight is.
So, first of all, let’s consider what SEO actually is. It’s a term many find intimidating because people make whole careers out of understanding and implementing it.
But SEO is actually a very simple concept. And what you need to remember is that the job of a search engine is to work out what a person wants from their internet search. So what you need to consider is ‘how would people who like my stuff actually know how to find me?’.
To answer this question, you’ve got to find out what your potential customer base is looking for and, ultimately, what they actually want.
There are a few ways you can do this:
- Find out what keywords (search terms) people are using to find your stuff, or things that are similar to it. You can use freely available tools like Google Trends and Wordtracker Scout.
- Use Google Analytics to get a handle on market research metrics within your area of expertise.
- Have a look at your competitor’s social media and website and work out how they are marketing themselves. If they are doing pretty well, it’s probably a safe bet to emulate their strategy in some way.
- Have a look at your own website’s current metrics, e.g. page views, number of unique visitors, and so on (many website builders offer metrics as an add-on).
It’s only by finding out what kind of customers you have, what approaches work best for them, and what sort of content they share, that you can tailor what you’re doing to suit them.
With this information in hand, you can try:
- Updating your website to suit your customer’s preferences
- Write useful content (like ‘How To’s’ and ‘The Best Of’) about your products and services and any problems that you’ve found out people normally have with them
- Recreate the success of the most visited and used pages of your website by adjusting the others to match
Understanding what your customers truly want is the only place to start when marketing a niche business. And hopefully, these tips help you get started in the right direction.
