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You know what problems your niche brand faces in being discovered online. Now it’s time to learn the strategies and solutions that will help you get found.
A few weeks ago, we covered the unique hurdles niche brands face when gaining impressions and traffic online. As a quick refresh, the five challenges we explored are:
However, understanding what problems your niche brand faces is just one part of the equation. You also need to know the strategies to employ to help you overcome them. In the second and final part of this series, we share four solutions that have helped us skyrocket digital traffic for our niche clients.
When you’re Nike or Starbucks, you can rely on brand recognition to drive a significant portion of your online traffic. Folks will likely use branded keywords (keywords containing your company or product names) when searching for what they need, like “starbucks austin” or “air max near me.”
When you don’t have a powerhouse name behind you, your focus needs to shift toward non-branded keyphrases — keywords related to your products or services that do not include your company or specific product names. Examples of non-branded keywords are “coffee shop austin” or “running shoes near me.”
For niche brands, new customers can’t find you using your brand name because they don’t know who you are — yet. (Remember challenge #3: Fewer offline and online mentions.) Targeting non-branded keyphrases can be a game-changer. It helps you gain visibility for relevant searches and get your brand name out there, paving the way for new opportunities.
When brainstorming and choosing content topics, you need to prioritize discoverability. Discoverability, paired with the need to focus on non-branded terms, makes performing keyword research a must.
Big-name brands are free to do ooey-gooey feel-good pieces and human interest stories, like Patagonia’s The Stories We Wear. There likely isn’t search volume behind articles like this, but brands like Patagonia aren’t relying on discoverability because consumers already know the company exists. So, these enterprise brands can use their blog for brand maintenance instead.
Your niche brand needs to focus on building awareness, meaning discovery is paramount. While you might want to write the fun, fluffy pieces Patagonia publishes, you need to focus on crafting articles with search volume behind them. Let’s look at Cloudline Apparel as an example. They are a smaller outdoor apparel brand focusing solely on socks. Their blog contains relevant topics that consumers actually search for, like How to Get Started Backpacking. These topics can help them get discovered by searchers interested in outdoor adventures who will likely need quality socks in the future.
Many niche brands have a young or new website (problem #4 on our list), leading to problems like low domain authority (#2). Publishing often and consistently can help you combat this.
Google and its algorithms want to see content published consistently, and a new website or blog needs a ton of content to land on Google’s radar and build authority. That doesn’t mean you should open ChatGPT and have it crank out hundreds of low-quality blogs to publish immediately, though. From our experience, you should aim for at least one high-quality blog post a week if your site or blog is less than a year old.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see traffic take off right away. Because your site is new, it will take time for Google to gauge your topical authority and your blog to start climbing the ranks. On the other hand, mature blogs from large enterprise brands can rank high almost immediately because they’ve earned trust from Google through years of quality, consistent publishing.
Niche brands tend to have few or no content resources (problem #5), which can make this task seem daunting. Outsourcing some of the work can be a huge help here — and you don’t have to dedicate a large portion of your marketing budget to content. With options like GPO’s AI-Assisted Blogs program, you can still receive high-quality, research-backed blogs at a more affordable price.
To build authority and compete with enterprise brands, you must stay closer to your subject matter and expertise. You need to leverage topic adjacency to gain a foothold and build your online traffic from the ground up.
Topic adjacency is an exercise designed to guide keyword research and help you pinpoint the most beneficial topics. It involves exploring ideas closely related to your brand’s products or services. Begin with the concepts most directly related to your products or services and gradually expand outward. Typically, these initial, closely associated topics are where you can quickly establish credibility and attract traffic.
The thought process is divided into three rings: Product, Audience, and Industry. Below is an example of topic adjacency for one of our clients, a carbon fiber bow manufacturer.
Product: We started with the product, carbon fiber violin bows, and wrote about carbon fiber vs. wood bows, products associated with bows (rosin), and relevant services (when to rehair your bow).
Audience: Once we established authority with topics directly related to the product, we branched out to topics string players (the audience) might be interested in. This included posts about keeping a practice journal, how to travel with your instrument, and finger exercises before practicing.
Industry: We further branched out with topics like Pernambuco wood, an endangered wood from which many high-end bows are made. The protected classification of Pernambuco wood and how its ban impacts violin players is a topic relevant to the industry at large.
We stayed close to our client’s topical home (the product) and began building connections between topics. We slowly moved outward and created a natural web of content that remained relevant to the audience and industry. We’ve built the brand’s authority on string instruments and bows and don’t move too far from the topical center.
Enterprise brands, conversely, can stray farther away in the web because they’ve established more connecting points and have years of brand recognition and semantic understanding. For example, an enterprise car repair brand can cover topics like tips for driving through the night. This is not directly related to their service, car maintenance and repair. However, they’ve built themselves as an authority for anything related to cars and driving through years of relevant, quality content.
So, how do you practice topic adjacency for your own brand? We’ve put together a handy chart to help you brainstorm. The chart is broken into three sections for Product, Audience, and Industry, taking you left to right on the journey. The top portion contains questions for kickstarting ideation, and the bottom portion offers sources for inspiration when you feel stuck.
Remember to start in the first column with your product/service and slowly branch out to your audience and eventually your industry as you build authority and rank high in search.
Overcome the unique challenges your niche brand faces with expert solutions from GPO. From small burrito restaurant chains to local radon mediation services, we know how to create a content strategy that increases site traffic and leads to increased conversions. By employing the strategies above, we’ve helped a regional burrito chain achieve 20k monthly blog visits — and experience an increase in online and catering orderings alongside that.
If you’re ready to boost your discoverability online, our experts can help. Get in touch today, and we’ll happily chat strategy with your brand.
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