Niche content is your 1-minute SEO hack if you’re a small fish in a red ocean:
Take a high-KD keyword you’d have no chance ranking for like “email marketing”, “newsletter templates” “social media marketing strategy” etc. and add “for {niche}”.
- …For churches
- …For dentists
- …For language schools
Drives traffic & converts like a dream.
I’ve run this playbook several times.
When to use the niche content SEO strategy?
Towards the end of 2019, I created a content strategy for a small Swedish email marketing tool. It didn’t involve just *blogs*, but also creating actual whole drip campaign templates for some *very* specific niches, they could just plug and play if they signed up. And blogs to promote these templates.
My VA at that time was a super-active member of her church community, which inspired the choice of niche. She swore every church community manager would kill for this. And she was right.
*Email marketing*. In 2020. One of the most competitive niches you can imagine. I still ogle at the conversion rates on the GDS dashboard I built for them:
Now, that may not seem like a lot. But let’s zoom out a bit: this company has not been publishing anything since we’ve stopped working together in May 2020. We started the campaign in December 2019:
Now, this puts things into perspective. But why is niche content strategy so effective, exactly?
How does the niche content strategy work?
Why are these posts converting like crazy? Because they are offering not just advice like everybody else, but immediate and ultra-relevant execution.
That’s the first reason.
The second is less obvious.
If you’re in an extremely competitive niche such as email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing etc. – where all the popular and high-search volume keywords are reserved for the Hubspots and Mailchimps of the world and your DR is a modest 47 – forget about it.
You will rank on page 4 and won’t see any of that search volume.
So what should you do if you’re an email marketing/ social media scheduling tool?
You can either:
- translate your content (and look for popular keyword equivalents in a foreign language with a much lower Keyword Difficulty) and risk that people from local markets will churn quickly without customer support in their language, spend a ton of money
- splash out on backlinks and pray for the best
- …or turn your popular keywords in long-tailed keywords by adding “for + niche” – indicating these email marketing strategies and newsletter templates are designed for a specific target audience.
This will not only help you cut through the SEO noise, but the content will be a lot more relevant to the reader – and the reader themselves will likely have a lot higher purchasing intent.
This means more conversions, of course.
How to get started with the niche content strategy in SaaS?
The niche content strategy is also the simplest way to leverage Product-Led Growth in your SaaS business.
How to get started?
Build some templates. And then re-package those templates for specific niches you’re catering to.
Two benefits:
- You will push the users towards the ‘aha’ and to develop product habits that will set them up for success faster by reducing friction
- You will arm yourself with an amazing marketing asset, working as I described above.
The downsides of the content niche SEO strategy
Well, despite the rosy picture I painted above, there are some downsides to the niche content strategy for SaaS:
- it’s time consuming & slow, therefore – relatively expensive to start with
- you need to bet on the right niches and create several pieces of content for each to build enough internal links that make sense
- you may risk diluting your domain relevance if you cover all the niches from dentists through strip clubs to life coaches.
Conclusion
If you’re in an extremely competitive field – don’t give up on content marketing. From translations, through pillar content to niche content strategy – there are plenty of ways how you can leverage organic SEO. If you have tried the niche content strategy yourself – please do ping me in the comments – I’d love to discuss it with you and publish a case study if you want to share your results!
