Specificity is great, but if your business offering is somewhat narrow, it can feel challenging to find your ideal customers. You know they exist online, but you need to make them aware of you. Fortunately, SEO (search engine optimization) significantly democratizes search, so long as you know how to use it.
Businesses that exist in a niche arena frequently pair their business offerings with unique expertise and passion. As a result, their customers are often thrilled to have their specific needs met by a true expert. However, finding enough customers to support your business can be daunting. But with a smart SEO strategy, you’ll quickly fill your client list with customers who need your niche offering.
1. SEO – The Right People Can Find You
Hanging out your proverbial shingle for your niche business requires a leap of faith. And when the question “Who will your customers be?” arises, it can incite panic within the most confident person.
Attracting prospects and converting them into clients requires a strategy in any type of business. For those with highly specific products and services, knowing who your ideal customers are matters even more. If you offer a product that only 10% of consumers are likely to need, targeting the other 90% just wastes your marketing dollars. Creating customer personas can help you appeal to those market segments most apt to need what you have to offer.
Sometimes your niche exists as a subset within a broader category, such as the legal field. Say an individual is starting a business and needs a lawyer to help them establish their corporate entity and lease premises. It can be daunting to sort through the thousands of small business attorneys who may practice in their local area.
That’s even more the case when they’re starting a brewery to produce craft beer, one of the most-regulated products out there. How will they know that craft beverage law is even a thing and — more importantly — that you practice it?
Here’s where law firm SEO comes into play, creating a path for your client’s journey to you. By developing onsite content that addresses craft brewers’ concerns — whether that’s trademarking their flagship IPA or leasing a well-ventilated space — you demonstrate your expertise. Keywords like “TTB approval” and “how to distribute craft beer” will send brewers in need of legal guidance straight to your digital door.
2. You Can Be Clear About What Solution You Offer — and What You Don’t
Providing a solution to every problem is not possible. And even if it were, would it be a great way to run a business? Chances are, you got into your industry because a certain aspect of it was interesting or exciting. As you consider implementing SEO practices to promote your niche business, keep your original drivers in mind. Above all, consider how those drivers match the goals of your customers.
Effective search can quickly connect customers with potential solutions, making a conversion to sales or engagement more likely. As in the example above, using short- and long-tail keywords can improve your ranking in search results. To develop long-tail keywords, think about the questions your ideal customer is likely to ask. Consider what’s unique about your business, the solution you provide, and what your customer may need.
For example, the field of aesthetics is broad, spanning traditional beauty salons, cosmetic surgery, and even fashion. If you’re an aesthetic studio operator specializing in non-invasive, same-day procedures, you’d need a different set of keywords than a cosmetologist.
Instead of using “[beauty service]” + city name, a better keyword strategy is to use long-tail keywords with greater specificity. Keywords like “Will insurance cover my breast reduction” or “same-day eye lift” will attract your true target audience. Meanwhile, they will weed out searchers who are merely looking for a facial or an eyebrow wax.
Using the right keywords can drive more qualified traffic to your site, which can improve your conversion rate. More customers who truly need you can find you, and a greater percentage will ultimately do business with you.
3. You’ll Begin to Own a Category Name
Entrepreneurs like to characterize their product or service with phrases like “It’s the Tesla of takeout.” Anchoring a customer’s perception of your business with another, wildly successful or innovative brand can be effective. But what matters most is your company’s ability to deliver on its promise.
To launch your category-ownership strategy effectively, you’ll need more than just a homepage. Customers are discerning, and even more so in niche industries. That’s why developing a content strategy that spans owned channels and external sites is essential. In addition to your owned channels, place your content in external media outlets to garner third-party credibility and drive traffic to your site through backlinks. The greater the proliferation of your backlinks across the web, the higher you’ll rank within search.
Launch a blog and keep content clear, specific, and readable for the general audience, even if your industry is technical. Partner with external sites like news outlets, blogs, and industry publications to offer subject matter expertise.
If you’re a financial planner, you could provide a quote to be included in a personal finance article. In this scenario, request that your link be attached to one of your long-tail keywords. If you’re providing a written piece of content, include your linked keyword in the first third of the piece. Pair your owned link with another supportive yet non-competitive link later within the copy to improve credibility.
Launching Smart SEO Strategies for Your Niche Business
In the business world, growth, expansion, and other synonyms for getting bigger for the sake of “bigness” run rampant. But your niche business knows better. Leveraging SEO practices that connect you with the customers in need of your specific offering just makes sense.
After all, why would you want to market to everyone and be forced to compete with the noise? Instead, implement SEO strategies that use targeted keywords to build your list of prospects and convert them. You’ll create a cohort of customers who will be delighted they finally found a business capable of meeting their unique needs.
