Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Focusing on Multiple Niches for one site: good or bad?
-
Is it wise to focus on multiple niches for one site, rather than zoning in one or two different niches?
On one hand, you can target many more topics and go after tons of keywords, but on the other hand doesn't google get confused of what your site is really about? Won't google just focus on one of the niches that you provide more than all others?
Any input would be great!
-
Good response Patrick. I would agree with him. You can target multiple niches on one site however take due care with your on site efforts / taxonomy structure and get ready to add loads of good relevant content.
-
102drive,
Develop a website (or continue working on your current website) to develop a great user experience through navigation and how content is presented across the Home page and inner pages. Google doesn't necessarily see websites targeting multiple niches in one domain as a bad thing. Actually, they are getting better at making sure all websites put to the web are providing valuable, quality content for the searchers/your visitors. When talking about niche websites and only one domain, you'll need to have a strong strategy of not only high quality content development behind the niche and it's pages in the site, but also how and what links are being built to those pages. Targeting multiple niches on the Home page is going to be very tough because you don't want to risk over-optimizing your Home page or any page for that matter. On page SEO can only take so much and trying to hit many niches which don't compliment each other is going to be almost impossible by shear relevance of the keywords you are going after, the content you have on the site and how and where you can optimize those keywords within the page/source code.
Build out your website like www.domain.com/niche1... then pages off of this and blog categories and articles linking to relevant pages and your off-page SEO linking to the /niche1 main page. www.domain.com/niche2 and so on. This way you can properly optimize each of these niche pages while referencing through from the root domain Home page or navigation and internal linking. It's like a client of ours who has many offices in different cities... we didn't build out a lot of sites for them, rather we are building authority to their main, older domain name like www.client.com/city1, www.client.com/city2 and so on. Then building their service pages with original content and blog articles off those folders for relevance.
Hope this was helpful, but it'll be much easier on pumping good content into 1 site vs 5 or 10 other websites, especially if your domain has some age and a little authority build up in Google's eye. New sites will be tougher to rank, depending on your content, your competition, and your main keywords.
Patrick
-
Hi,
If you want to focus on multiple niches using one domain, you have a huge task ahead (while this is highly recommended rather than coming up with multiple niche websites focused towards their corresponding niche). You would need content of great quality to cover all those niches. If you wish you make this domain to be able to rank high for different terms in multiple niches, you should prove the credibility of your website in terms of content quality and usefulness of it to the visitors. Take an example of websites like Wikipedia. They rank high for hundreds if not thousands of niches. So quality of the content is the key here.
Websites that try to target multiple niches with thin content will go no where in search engines and will be flattened within no time. By the way, big and authority websites with quality content can out perform niche websites (focused on a single niche) in many ways.
Hope you got the idea my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
One domain - Multiple servers
Can I have the root domain pointing to one server and other URLs on the domain pointing to another server without redirecting, domain masking or HTML masking? Dealing with an old site that is a mess. I want to avoid migrating the old website to the new environment. I want to work on a page by page and section by section basis, and whatever gets ready to go live I will release on the new server while keeping all other pages untouched and live on the old server. What are your recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Merging Niche Site
I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger. I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com). It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because: I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work. I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products. What makes me apprehensive are: The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA. Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more. If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword? Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA? Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for? I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience. TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Good or bad adding keywords in Pinterest description?
I added all keywords in description. Will this affect my website, Google takes this as negative way? I am not adding keywords on my own website, but adding keywords to third party website? https://www.pinterest.com/pin/304555993526970292/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
I have a .com site but I am only ranking good on google for Canada and not the USA.
We are located in Canada but sell our products world wide. We are ranking ok on google.ca but are not in the top 50 on google.com. Is it due to my ip address? Is there any tips that you can give me to help up my rating for google.com. Any info you can provide me with will be amazing. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewzal0