Why Niching Down Makes SEO 10x Easier (And More Profitable)

I was walking through Manhattan a couple hours ago, and I had this thought about niches in SEO and how much easier search engine optimization is when you find a niche, not just easier, easier and more profitable when you find a niche and completely double down on it. And the reason I had this thought is because in Manhattan, there's so many different neighborhoods that are their own ecosystems where the neighborhood might seem really small. Like if you look at the size of NoLita in Manhattan, it seems really small. But if you dominate just NoLita, you will make plenty of money if you dominate even just NoLita, even though it's so tiny. But people they start, they say, "I want to dominate Manhattan." They don't niche down. And if you niche down, SEO becomes a lot easier, you're able to take over your niche, and it's a lot easier to get all the money in your niche before expanding to adjacent niches. So if you're trying to be a HubSpot where you go from I think HubSpot was at like off the top of my head in February 2024, I think, it was at 23 million clicks a month from Google, and then Google tightened its algorithms around topical authority, and HubSpot was ranking for tons of things that it didn't have topical authority for, putting in all this effort and capital into things that it didn't have topical authority for. Now I believe it's down to like 5 million clicks a month or something. If you're watching on YouTube, we'll show it on screen and then you'll see if I'm wrong or close, but something like that, it dropped a ton because it was ranking for lots of keywords that it didn't have topical authority for. Whereas if they had really niched down and put up just only content into their niche and like very semi-adjacent niches, that would have been a much better use of time, of capital. They would have hit all aspects of the funnel, but instead they were putting their time and effort into making pages like motivational quotes. They're already very dominant in their niche, but they're still in their niche, there's a lot of competitors. And they have honestly, they do so many different things, HubSpot, that they could have just completely double down into each one of those categories, and they didn't do that. So if you're starting, it could be tempting to have your SEO target all sorts of different categories, things that might be adjacent to each other, but it's better to just zone in on one category. Your niche already has enough money in it for you to own. And by doing this, you will get massive authority within your topic, which also makes it easier to get the best keywords, the most competitive keywords, the keywords with the highest search volume, and the highest intent, where you don't even have to do any shady tactics to rank for these keywords because you are just such a big player in your niche. You just kind of scale up naturally dominating your niche, and then you get more competitive keywords and more competitive keywords, more authority, more authority in general, and more authority in your topic. You also get This is something that a lot of people don't think about, you get a lot of top-of-mind awareness. So this means when people think of your niche, they think of you. And this top-of-mind awareness, it increases your branded searches, so people are just searching your brand in the first place, making your backlink profile look a lot more natural. People don't know that. If you are getting all these backlinks, but you don't have any branded searches, that actually looks unnatural to Google. You want to get branded searches to go along with the backlinks that you're getting. Increased top-of-mind awareness, it increases click-through rate. People are like, "Oh, I know this brand." So you get more clicks in the SERPs, which is a major positive signal for Google. You want to have good click-through rates. You actually have less pogo sticking even if the content is bad because people trust you more, they know your brand, and so they trust you more, they're willing to give you more patience. People will also This is an amazing benefit of top-of-mind awareness in your niche, you just acquire links naturally. You don't I even have to go out of your way to get backlinks. So The Edward Show, this podcast, has a lot of top-of-mind awareness for SEO, and I constantly see people saying, "Yeah, I'm learning SEO from Edward's podcast." And they just link to to my YouTube all the time. Some people, which is amazing, and I'm super grateful for this, some people are starting to think of SEO, and they just think of me, and then they link to my stuff. It's crazy. But the same thing happens when you when you double down, triple down, quadruple down in a niche. And then all of this also increases your surface area for opportunity. Just in general, when people know your brand and when they think of your niche and they think of you, someone will come across an opportunity that's relevant to you and be like, "Oh, I know just the brand for this." Some other reasons to just completely niche down, please niche down, some other reasons. It makes keyword research easier because your surface area for keywords shrinks, so you don't have to look for keywords all over the place. You become an expert for what people want in your niche, so you're more easily able to write higher converting copy. You know what what people who are looking for what you do, what they care about, what they want. All of this language is naturally put into everything that you write, everything that your company writes. You get a lot more conversions really just because your copy is so much better because you've been in the business for so long, you've been in the niche for so long. The longer you're in a niche, the more testimonials This is something else. The longer you're in a niche, the more testimonials you get in that niche, and these testimonials build up. Now it's not just an incredible body of of positive reviews on your landing page, it's positive reviews that you spread all around the internet with branded, keyword-rich, heavy language. So you're taking your review and you're putting it on YouTube with your brand name and then the word review and then is it any good? And you have so many different reviews, and they're all over the place. And it's just the reviews build up and build up and build up, and people who are considering your brand for this one niche, they see all of these people saying it's great for this one niche, and then they go, "Okay, I'm converting." Just like that. Then, once you feel like you've really dominated your niche, then you can expand, but you don't go into areas that are super far away from your niche, you expand into adjacent areas. So if you were SoHo out there in Manhattan, you expanded to NoLita, which is an adjacent neighborhood to SoHo. I'm in Brooklyn now. If you are in Cobble Hill, you expand into Brooklyn Heights. And then you go, you dominate that niche, and then you expand more. You use everything that you learned from dominating your own niche to dominate this new niche. You do it a lot faster because you already have a lot of things going for you, you already have authority, you already have great links. You're able to dominate this new niche a lot faster, and then you can move into more areas areas and more areas. You go from NoLita to Bowery, to SoHo, to TriBeCa. So niching down, super [snorts] cool, double, triple, quintuple down on your niche. Just go so far down into it, and then expand into other areas. There's so much money to get from just dominating your niche. It's what I was thinking about when I was seeing such diverse neighborhoods here in New York. Just got in, so I wanted to make this podcast. I hope you got some value from this. If you want to get my exact method of doing search engine optimization, that's the thing on my shirt called Compact Keywords, compactkeywords.com. It's 13 and 1/2 hours of me sharing my screen, showing me doing SEO, finding high purchase intent keywords. That what That's what the course targets, how I'm doing link building, how I'm structuring my site for pages that convert and target bottom-of-funnel, high converting keywords, and so much more. That's at compactkeywords.com, and that is everything that I've got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,015 of The Edward Show, 1,015 days in a row doing this podcast. Let's go. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If somehow you listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast, I want you to know I'm literally recording this out in public with a ton of people running around behind me in the city of Manhattan, just out there behind my back across the beautiful East River. But if you just listen, thank you for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.