The internet is filled with millions of websites all trying to compete with one another for rankings, whether directly or indirectly. As a result, a search result can bring back hundreds of millions of results when only a handful of them actually have the relevant information that was being searched for or answer the searcher’s question. To put it out there, the internet is becoming convoluted and heavily concentrated.
Because of this, webmasters and designers are always looking for a website topic that has not been jammed up with too many pages already, so that when their page is created, they can quickly outrank the few sites that do exist on the topic. They call this topic, a niche. The first thing a webmaster should do is to pick a niche. Google Tools can help you pick a niche, as you can look up the search results and search insights for a particular topic/ phrase. Once one that has a fair amount of search results have been selected, make sure it also has few competitors by seeing how many search results it pulls when that phrase is searched for.
You can also think of this as an umbrella type effort. First you should pick a general website topic or few topics that interests you, then you should narrow it down to a more defined topic, then you should continue narrowing it down until the topic is precise. For example: Let’s say you want to do a website on Student Study Materials. Then after doing some search insights you realize that more specifically that economics is a popular topic in today’s economic times. So now you have Student Study Materials –> Economics. Economics is still a broad topic, it would be best to go further and be more specific. You could either do a page on economics tutorials or economics exam answers. So you have Student Study Materials –> Economics –> Economics Tutorials or Student Study Materials –> Economics –> Economics Exam Answers. Each level should get more specific as to zone in on exactly what a searcher would want to find, and the more concise it is, the fewer competitors there generally are.
Now let us consider another popular topic. Cars! Cars includes a lot of sub topics such as repair, accidents, insurance, design, custom building, brands, accessories, road trips, sales… So “cars” would not be a good page to build a site upon. It should be more like Cars –> Auto Repair –> Auto Repair in Cincinnati. This eliminates all of the other sub categories, limits it to one sub category and then turns it into a very precise website topic within one geographical region. Google is now focusing heavily on local results, so having a page geared towards that will help in the rankings as well.
It is of course, always most important that as a webmaster, you pick a topic that you enjoy and that you can continue to write about for an extended period of time. A niche such as static eliminators may be a viable option to rank for, but is it viable to continue writing about? Pick something that you love and have a passion for and making a website will be that much more enjoyable.
Image Credit: @boetter.