Hello and welcome to episode 73 of S-Hod . I'm your host , ed Dawson , the founder of KiwisPubliescom . These solutions find the questions people ask online . I'm an affiliate marketer , seo . I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years . I've built sites from the ground up , bought sites and sold sites in large exits . I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today I'm going to ask the question are niche sites dead ?

Prior to the helpful content update , there was a booming niche site community online on Twitter , on email lists , on courses , on a whole bunch of places . But there was a lot of people out there who had built a niche site and had monetised it and were talking about how much money they'd made online , which is fine . I've got no problem with people sharing that information . That's completely up to them . But the helpful content update came along and hit a lot of the people who were quite well in this area quite hard . And also lots of other people that weren't quite so well known , who were running and started the niche site journey themselves , came online and said you know , we've been hit . Everything's terrible . The world is over . So this has put a lot of people to look at the niche site area as a real negative light and saying you know , niche sites are dead . You know Google's targeting niche sites . I just wanted to put kind of like a counterpoint of you here , because I mean a niche . Every site is a niche site . Broadband at Kodi UK , the site that I grew for nearly 20 years and sold in 2021 , that was a niche site . It's niche was Broadband .

There's lots of sites out there that are niched . You know niche just means a site about a certain thing . If you end up with a site that covers too large a topic area , then you know that's got problems in itself . You know there's actually , you think about the websites out there . There are very few websites that are just about everything . I mean Wikipedia is , but it's niches . It's an encyclopedia and it's human edited content . You know user generated content and collaborative content . It's got a niche in what it is , but its content is very broad .

So I don't think the idea of niche sites being dead is true . Where there is an issue , I think , is the whole niche sites , where people are building sites purely for trying to monetize them and that's where they're not thinking about making a site that's great for users . They're not thinking potentially user-centric first , they're just thinking how can I grow traffic to get more clicks on ads or more views on ads ? And that mindset of how you build sites possibly is going to die . Possibly is dead because I've looked at lots of the sites that have been hit and I know most people don't share their sites but you can find them if you look hard enough .

And looking at these sites , I think One of the key things that stands out to me is they don't . I think they lack a sense of coherence . Many of them they don't necessarily look to cover a topic well , they're looking to . They're chasing clicks , essentially , so they are just putting article after article after article that are not really necessarily related to each other . They might be slightly on the same topic , as in travel , for example , but they don't really go into any depth in any one place and they're jumping around from place to place and they're using clearly stock photography . There's no sense that the person writing these things has got any experience of the place they're talking about and I think it covers across all sorts of different niches . You know , if you're just , if you're not covering it well and in depth and coherently , with a good architecture and a good structure .

I think this is where a lot of sites that have just been chasing those one-off clicks from these search engines rather than trying to build up any kind of long-term readership at least or at least you know , I know lots of sites are always going to get like one-off clicks from search engines . But a decent site should at least cover a subject coherently enough that someone could come along and move from page to page within your site and actually become a reader of your site and actually learn something , learn the topic in depth from your site , rather than just a one-off article that's chasing display advertising or an affiliate click . And this is where a point that I've noted a lot of times when people especially in the sort of niche site mania , people were talking about how many pages and how many posts they were getting out per month and how many PE and how many total posts they wanted to get on their site , talking 500 , 1000 , 2000 and even getting into city numbers of how many posts and how many words they were going to post and what their targets were , as if just putting more and more content on would be the solution . Now , if you look at Broadbanded Credit UK . Look at the number of posts on that site that we built up over 20 odd years . It was low hundreds .

We didn't continually try and add a churn of new posts on a schedule to try and chase a number . What we did was look to cover areas in depth in maybe one or two posts and then go back and keep those posts up to date , because just adding new pages was potentially going to cannibalize our content . There's no point creating content that's going to compete with content you've already got . You want to keep your content tight on topic ? You don't have to .

It's not a numbers game in terms of number of posts , number of pages , number of words . It's about covering the concepts well and succinctly so you know a single page can rank for many , many different keywords . This is why we built the clustering tool on keywords people use , so that you can actually put all the questions and the keywords together that you're trying to rank for and cluster them so that you find out which keywords , which questions , you can get together on a single page . So , instead of having to write a page for every question , you cluster together the questions that are tightly related , so you only need to create the one page to cover all those pieces . And that's how to do content and covering a niche well .

It's not just churning out content and thinking I've got to produce so many posts a day or so many a week or whatever . It's about getting the keywords and the questions together into the tightest formation that you can Link together well , architected well , to cover that topic well . That is much more powerful than trying to be a content mill and just churn out , churn out , churn out , churn out . And that's , I think , where a lot of the niche sites that were part of the kind of the niche site mania , as it was , were looking purely in those , you know , churning content out rather than creating good quality , helpful content . So , in summary , I don't think niche sites are dead because every site is a niche site of some sort .

I do think that the content mill churn out content , unrelated or very loosely related content One after the chasing numbers type site is Definitely going to be a lot more challenging . Is it dead ? Done well , you might still be able to do well , but I think it's gonna . It's a lot harder now than it was . The helpful content update has really raised the bar for that kind of site . So they're on life support that kind of site , and there's people out there .

I feel for you feeling that situation , because it painful when something works then all of a sudden doesn't , because I've been there with Sites in the past for different reasons , but , yeah , it's really really painful when others and it feels like the rules have changed and you know you make a big loss . I Think , obviously , what was working and what lots of people were pushing clearly isn't anymore and You've got to look at raising your game . I Would seriously , you know I don't think there's going to be a situation where it's going to get reversed easily . So I think you know you've got to go back and look at it and Just reevaluate how you're going to do things . But does is web publishing sites for Affiliate revenue or display revenue dead ? Clearly not . But you've just Got to raise your game . You've just got to look at it in a different way and , as I say , look at it in terms of how tightly you can cover your content , how Close together you can bring keywords , so that you are , instead of Scattergunning , producing tons of content in the aim of trying to try to get traffic , is that you do it the other way , by condensing your content into tightly focused , well-linked areas to suck the content in .

Thanks for being a listener . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Sgo is not that hard as brought to you by keywords people use dot-com . The solution to finding the questions people ask online See where thousands of people use us every day . Try it today for free at keywords people use dot-com . You want to get in touch ? Have any questions ? I'd love to hear from you . I'm action on five on Twitter . You can email me at podcastic keywords people use dot-com . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard you .