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A Niche ... Right Under My Nose
October 08, 2004
I mentioned yesterday that there was a bit of excitement here with the PR updates. I should clarify. It wasn't the actual PR update itself that caused the excitement.
Our PR updates were exactly what we expected, except that the blog that we set up to complement my husband's business site somehow gained a higher PR than expected. And my game review site, which (I'm sad to admit) has been just sitting there not getting any larger or any sort of attention from me, somehow managed to gain PR despite this.
It looks like this blog will have to wait until the next round of updates to show any PR, though. I've got links coming in - much more than my game review site! - but Google doesn't seem to have found them, or else they're too new and we'll have to wait for them to mature.
Anyway, back to the tiny bit of excitement we experienced. We were quite happy with the PR for my husband's new pages. We'd given the site a complete overhaul earlier this summer and used SSIs, which resulted, unfortunately, in file name changes. But with this update we got our PR back, so all is well.
However, I then decided to just pop over to Google and check out our positioning for our targeted keywords.
Some good news, and some bad news.
The good news was that we held the top position for our main keyword.
The bad news? This is a location driven keyword phrase - and it looks like our town is now part of Google's beta local search feature. So there we were, sitting pretty at the top of the organic search results, and there was my husband's main competitor (the one who already has location, location, location) sitting pretty right ABOVE us in the local search results.
Grrrr.
I've been trying to figure out the whole local search parameters and as far as I can tell, a lot depends on your yellow pages ad, or rather, the name of your business in your yellow pages ad.
Unfortunately, our business name is a "branded" name.
It's too late to change our ad this year, but next year it looks like we might have to ante up and get ourselves more listings than we already have, as well as change the name of our business slightly to include our keywords.
But that's a whole year of this guy sitting pretty above us for our main search phrase.
Of course, it did work out in our favour for another search phrase, where we were third in the organic results but first in the local search beta results.
To top it all off, though, we found that two of our other keyword phrases have somehow dropped to the second page of search results. The last time I'd checked, about a month ago, they had both been sitting nicely with mid-first-page results.
So obviously, one challenge is to fix this particular problem, and get us back onto the first page.
But then, in the face of all of this, my husband and I came up with a brilliant (to us) idea that combines my newfound Internet marketing skills with his area of expertise. We decided to create a series of content sites in niches related to his business.
Initially we had two goals. First, to help out his main business site's search positioning, since we'll link the content sites to the business site. And second, to brand him as an expert in his field.
But then I said, "Hey, why don't we also try to monetize these sites?" After all, if we were going to be putting up pages and pages of content ...
A journey over to Wordtracker just now showed us that our planned site categories have lots of good potential keywords.
A quick search of Google for several of those keywords showed an abundance of advertisers in the field.
Another niche. And this one was right under my nose.
- BJ
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Posted by BJ at 11:15 PM in Internet Marketing | Permalink
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