Case Study of a Niche Wordpress Site
One of my readers Ryan Spegal has read my ebook on creating niche sites in WordPress and followed the process to create his first niche site about vehicular cycling. He wrote to me to ask if I could look over his site and offer and advice / tips, particular in reference to keyword research. One disclaimer here - SEO is probably my weakest area so you are better off reading Aaron Wall’s SEO book instead :-)
A Basic Site Overview
Before I look at the keywords I first want to take a look over the site in general and see how it’s been setup. From the home page it became apparent that Ryan has written the site content using blog posts rather than static pages. This will mean that those posts go into the RSS feed for the site but it also shows the date on each article which is fine for now but may not look so good in a few months time. It’s largely a matter of preference :-)
The home page of the site acts like a regular blog, showing the last few articles that Ryan has written. On the right hand side we can see that a list of articles has been constructed with links to each of the posts which looks nice.
AdSense looks like it is working correctly with lots of ads about cycling being shown in the various ad units on the site. All good so far…
Main Keyword Choice
I’m glad Ryan wrote to me because he might have hit a snag right from the start. I fired up the free Wordtracker tool which is always my first stop for basic research and typed in “vehicular cycling” - no results found! This is very bad news because Wordtracker usually over-estimates on its word counts so for it not to have any results at all for the main keyword in the site can almost guarantee that the pages within this website will not gain any organic traffic from Google whatsoever!
Generally speaking, one does not launch a niche site with the aim of getting much traffic from the main keyword as it is usually too competitive. The most common route is to pick a broad topic as the starting point and then target long-tail phrases that are based on the main phrase. The idea is that the long tail keyword phrases may not be searched for as much but will be easier to rank for and therefore more likely to draw in some traffic. But with the main phrase not having any traffic potential at all, I doubt very much whether any of the long tail phrases will either!
Okay maybe all is not lost. I checked out the article that explains what vehicular cycling is about and I am informed that it is also known as road cycling. Aha, there’s my next starting point for the keyword research. This time Wordtracker brings back a few results but not much at all - nowhere near enough to expect any significant traffic in my opinion.
I think Ryan may have to scrap this particular niche and do some better research before starting the next one. I highly recommend working through the content in the Thirty Day Challenge as that has a huge emphasis on doing good research up front before venturing into a niche.
Post Titles and Post Slugs
Now let’s ignore the traffic problem for now and assume that the main term has plenty of traffic. I think Ryan has still made some mistakes with his choice of titles and post slugs. Let me illustrate:
Article: Common Misconceptions
The title of the article is “Common Misconceptions” which sounds perfectly sensible for the reader but in terms of search engine traffic it is way too vague and worse still, has absolutely nothing to do with vehicular cycling! If the site topic had traffic then I would guess that there was a term such as “vehicular cycling misconceptions” that he could use instead and that would make a much better title and post slug.
He’s done this very well in the following articles:
- Vehicular cycling advocates
- Vehicular cycling alternatives
- Vehicular cycling attitude
- Vehicular cycling education
Unfortunately even though he may have chosen a good title for these articles, he has not used basic SEO on-page techniques on the pages themselves. Admittedly this is not a topic that I covered in the book (as I mentioned earlier, SEO is not my strong point) but the most basic advice is that keyword phrase should appear at least once in the body of the article, preferably near the top.
Let me illustrate with an example from the site. I have taken this excerpt from the article “vehicular cycling alternatives”:
An alternative to vehicular cycling is pedestrian bicycling, or bicycling according to the pedestrian rules of the road.
I would have written this line instead as:
There are vehicular cycling alternatives, such as pedestrian bicycling, which is bicycling according to the pedestrian rules of the world.
Conclusion
The main problem I see here is that Ryan has picked a topic that is unlikely to receive any traffic from Google so no matter how hard he works at developing the site or marketing it, those efforts will be futile as nobody is looking for the term “vehicular cycling”.
This issue highlights the importance on doing research first which is another topic that I did not cover in the ebook. I’ve noticed that since releasing the ebook I am getting quite a few emails asking me for advice on topics of niche sites in general that I did not talk about in the book so perhaps this is telling me that more detail is needed in the future.
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Rebecca
January 30, 2008
Your review of Ryan’s niche site has put a real spotlight on the importance of doing the research up front, and thoughtful composition of every element as the site unfolds — but even more importantly, I think, it’s a reminder that we need to step outside the specialized fields (with their own specialized language) in which we’re immersed, in order to reach out to readers outside that proscribed circle. That’s my own takehome lesson for today, at any rate… Many thanks for an extremely useful case study, as usual getting down to the practical “nuts and bolts” of it, much appreciated in a sea of theory!