The Key to Success in a Broad Niche

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If you follow my YouTube channel or have read through some of the posts on this site, you’ve probably figured out by now that a big part of my team’s strategy is to go broad with our niche selection.

That’s not to say that you can’t be successful in a small niche, but for us, our goal is to create sites that we can continue to grow for years to come. For that to happen, you need a lot of potential topics to write about.

With that being said, many internet marketers will tell you that the key to building a successful blog is to “find your niche.” By that, they mean to pick something that’s somewhat unique and not over saturated.

However, from our experience, there’s still plenty of room for new sites in most niches, at least outside of the YMYL space. All of our sites are in very broad niches that most people probably wouldn’t even consider during their niche selection process.

In fact, most people would probably be looking for sub niches within the niches that we target, simply because they wouldn’t think it’s possible to succeed in the larger niche as a whole.

All of our sites have become quite successful in a relatively short amount of time in these broad niches. All it really boils down to is our approach, and that’s what I’ll dive into in this post.

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Think Big, Start Small

Building a successful niche site in a broad niche is much easier than most people think. The key is to think big, but start small. Let me break this down a bit further.

Let’s say you want to target a broad niche like boating. Most people would say that’s too broad and start diving further into the boating niche to find sub niches, like yachts, sailboats, or pontoon boats.

People do this because the thought is that there’s much less competition in these smaller niches than there is in the overall boating niche. That assumption is definitely accurate.

If you create a site based around pontoon boats, you will be competing with other pontoon boat sites. If you create a site around boating in general, you will be competing against boating sites in general.

This is why most people would stay away from boating and go with one of the smaller niches that I mentioned instead. However, there’s a simple way to target boating in general, without competing with the large boating sites in the niche.

That trick is to pick a broad domain name, but only create content around one of the smaller sub niches early on. So in our boating example, pick a domain name like yourboatingguide.com, but only create content based around pontoon boats in the beginning.

After you’ve covered all of the pontoon boat topics you can find, you can move on to sailboats, etc. Because you chose a broad domain name, you won’t hit a wall when it comes to finding more topics to write about on your site.

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Why This Works

Now that you know the basic strategy, a few questions might come to mind. By answering these questions, you’ll get a better understanding of why this works.

It would be fair to ask the following:

• Won’t Google rank me against other boating sites because of my domain name?
• Won’t people bounce when they see that I only have pontoon boat articles on my boating site?
• Will people even click my article in Google Search when searching for a pontoon boat article?

These are all valid questions to consider when using the strategy that I just mentioned. Your gut instinct might even tell you that it doesn’t make sense to go broad after asking yourself these questions, but let me explain why you shouldn’t be too concerned.

Let’s take a look at each question individually:

Won’t Google Rank me Against Other Broad Sites?

While you might think that your domain name plays a large role in determining what your site is about, in Google’s eyes, it’s no longer as important as it used to be.

As you can see in this post from Search Engine Journal, John Mueller from Google even says that keywords in your domain name don’t improve your rankings. Instead, the relevancy of your content is what drives your rankings.

What this basically means is that the content on your site is what determines what your site is about, as far as Google is concerned. If all of your articles are about pontoon boats, Google will view your site as a pontoon boat site.

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Won’t People Bounce?

You might also be worried that people will bounce when they get to your site and only see articles about pontoon boats. If you view this through the lens of a visitor though, you’ll quickly see that that’s unlikely to be an issue.

When most people visit a website from a Google Search result, they are looking for a specific piece of content. If the resulting page covers that content well, most visitors will get the information that they need, then bounce.

With an info site, a high bounce rate is not a concern and is likely to be the case regardless of whether or not all of your articles are specific to one topic within your broad niche.

You also have to remember that the vast majority of your users will arrive on your site via mobile devices, so they won’t even see your menu and categories unless they specifically seek them out. They won’t even know that you only have pontoon boat articles on your site.

Won’t My Clickthrough Be Poor?

As far as your clickthrough rate being lower because of your domain name, that’s also unlikely to be the case. For one, most people don’t even know what a domain name is and won’t even notice that your domain name is related to boating and not pontoon boats.

Second, even for those people that do notice your domain name, it will still match the topic that they searched for. Pontoon boats are a sub niche within the boating niche, so a boating domain shouldn’t lower your clickthrough rate for a pontoon boat search term.

Final Thoughts

By choosing a broad niche, the ceiling of your site will be much higher. This means that you will be able to continue to add content to your site for years, instead of hitting a wall after running out of topics.

The key to succeeding in a broad niche is to choose a broad domain name, but target a small sub niche within the larger niche early on. When all of your content is focused around a sub niche, Google will view your site as a site based around that smaller sub niche.

After you’ve exhausted all of the topics in the first sub niche, move on to another, and so on. Over time, the scope of your site will broaden, but because you started small, you will have gained some traction in Google Search, making it easier to rank for other topics within you overall niche.