New Site Launched
I have just made another new site. This one will be referred to as site #23. It is an ‘atomic niche’ site or micro niche site focussing on just one product. So far it has just one page and I am going to leave it that way for now and see how it ranks. The main keyword is the product number and the domain is the main keyword and is of the .co.uk variety.
The site has an Easy Content Unit price comparison widget as its main feature followed by text about the product. This product retails for about £1000 so I am hoping for some healthy commission from this one. If this attempt at a micro niche site is successful I will quickly add a few more and see how they get on.
The main downside and unknown factor in setting up a site like this is that as these niches are so small it is unlikely you will be able to get monthly search figures from the Google Keyword Tool for them. Therefore you have to take a leap of faith that the keyword/niche you have picked will get some searches. But due to the ease of setting up the site and the lack of competition this issue should be out weighted.
I will be providing updates of how this site gets on for anyone who is interested. If anyone out there has tried their hand at a micro niche site please post a comment about it.
Hi Seamaster…
I’ve tried a number of these websites and haven’t had much success with them yet. I also find it hard to decide on a product or model. By the time the models are in google, the products seem to be old hat.
Another problem I hit is with building backlinks to these small, fast SEO sites. With medium – larger websites it’s obviously worth doing an ongoing backlink campaign, but with the smaller niche sites it’s often more tricky.
So from my experimenting with these sites, the problem is one of getting enough traffic.
Hi Tom,
Did you manage to get your pages ranked well or was that your problem?
I’d be interested to know more about what didn’t work for you.
Cheers.
Hi,
Well with Google I usually find a quick burst of traffic, then rankings slide down the listings. I’m guessing this is down to backlinks, and if you posted this problem in a SEO forum, the answer would likely be ‘add content and build quality backlinks’. Which is fine, for a medium – large site. But the idea with these atomic websites is that the domain gets a lot of traffic because it’s basically the keyphrase.
For example, I own 26v4000.co.uk – google 26v4000 and you’ll not find it on the first page. It’s on page 3 at the moment. Great site, good on-page SEO, targetted domain but zilcho traffic because it’s not on page one – preferably in the top 5. While this doens’t prove that the method doesn’t work, it does show that there’s more to it than slapping up a site on a keyphrase domain.
For this to work, in my opinion, you’d have to spend a lot more time building backlinks. I just don’t know if it would be worth the time and effort for such a specific niche. I should stress I’ve only been playing with SEO for the past year. And this is one of the things I’ve tested out. I make my living in PPC so maybe I’m thinking about it with my PPC head on.
Great work on the blog BTW!
Tom
Hi Seamaster, I found your blog site today, very interesting posts so far. We’ve found that the more expensive products don’t tend to sell well. We have a niche site which lists a specific fitness equipment and can be priced up to £8000 so a nice earner. Even if we sold one in a year, we’d be happy with approx 7% commission. The problem is who will spend that much money online. Luckily enough we’re doing well on the cheaper range of products. Our site doesn’t target a specific model as we were concerned about the ranking.
@Tom: my atomic niche site is still in the bottom half of page one in google and is getting 1 or 2 hits a day. My other sites don’t have many backlinks and rank well so this one might be ok. You never know though. The item costs about £1000 so it could make me a few quid each sale but its only had a few click throughs so far. Your site looks really good though.
@Gary: On my sites where I have a range of products it tends to be the cheaper ones that sell best. I have decided that £50 items are the best for me at the moment. This gets me a couple of quid a sale and people don’t seem to mind buying items at that price online via an affiliate site. I started off with sites selling cheap stuff which was good as it got me sales to spur me on but didn’t get me much dosh.