Authority Sites vs Niche Sites

Posted on 03. May, 2010 by Aaron in Internet Marketing

These are just some observations from someone who works online in his day job and part time totalling 50-70 hours a week in both. It’s not meant to be the be all and end all of text typed up on the subject but food for thought. Some ideas may differ from mine but what’s typed up below is based on my own real experience not some regurgitated mess from a piece of untested information. It does focus more on authority sites and yes, I am fully aware that people do make a good living from 1-5 page niche sites. Like I said before, this is just something to get people thinking.

My Original Plan of Building Just Niche Sites

My original plan has been to build a mass of niche sites then decide which to build out

As some of you who’ve been reading this blog might have noticed I have a well executed plan of attack for Amazon niche sites. I can get 4 out now in the space of two and a half hours, leave them for a month or two and decide whether to expand or ditch them. Only problem is this week I made a few discoveries that has put my line of thinking into doubt.
My original plan has been to build a mass of niche sites then decide which to build out and promote further and which to flip based on the initial traffic coming through. Only thing was I had to do a product update on a works site this week and something not so much took me by surprise but concreted a line of thought I’d had for quite a while.

Think More About What Google Wants to See

The works site I’m talking about is what I’d call, and by the looks of things what Google would call too, an authority site in every sense. It’s nearly 400 pages in size, ranks well for it’s chosen keywords, and just for those people using various linking techniques out there it has what I’d call a nice healthy mix of links.

Linking For Site Strength Not Just Pagerank

I hate to use pagerank as a measure but for this example it’ll paint the picture nicely. The site I’m using as an example is a PR4, now some of you will argue you can make a PR4 site by using automated services and link packets, have 10,000 trashy links and be done with it (bit of a generalisation I know but you get the picture). Well, this site has under a 1000 links, which vary from a balance of low rate directory links to high profile links from national newspaper websites like the Telegraph, the only common theme is that for the most part these links are relevant.

The Blueprint For Onsite Optimisation

The whole site is built off a blueprint that’s the exact same one in my free onsite SEO Book (can’t miss it if you want a copy, it’s on the front page of my blog if you want to take a look) and before I encountered a whole wide world of mis/information online I learnt from a small group of chosen SEO’s and closely followed what they were talking about, this is what I always believed to be the right approach. Only thing is one small project this week absolutely 100% validated everything I’d learnt.

The Small Project Which Changed Everything

The small project was updating a product page deep in one of our authority sites in a competitive niche not competitive because of the amount of traffic available but because of the ticket price on the product, I’m not going to say what niche it is as we make upwards of £2000 per customer in this niche and I’m going to give some extra stats which will make your eyes pop. Now all I wanted to do was create a video and photo gallery lightbox to show our product off even more and afterwards just take a quick glance at the overall stats for the page being worked on over the past year (which has already done really well on sales).

Now bare in mind this page had been up about a year and all I’d done was onpage and onsite optimisation meaning I’d done some internal linking via the authority site main menu and breadcrumb system and created the page as per my usual onsite methods. I’ve not spent a single second backlinking from external sites to this page. Basically this is plug the page into the site, wait and be patient for a few months then reap the rewards.

What Was Happening Small Scale Was Going to Hit Big Time

To be honest this exact same thing has happened time and time again but on what I’d call small niches a hundred times over on our main site, with our core product line doing very well because I always (correctly) believed this was the core theme of our site in on and offsite optimisation. But this niche is far departed from our core product range, same’ish area but not the same, bit like a plastic surgeon also having brain surgery on their site, same parent niche (medical) but very different sub niches.

Don’t Just Weigh Up The Traffic Numbers

£6000 in sales from under 300 pageviews

Here’s the bit you’ve been waiting for, some hard real life figures, and again, please don’t ask for the niche you won’t get a response. So, the page in question on our authority site has had fewer than 300 individual page views over the past month and to the best of my knowledge has accounted for around £6000 worth of sales for the same period, when I say to the best of my knowledge these are the sales I definitely know about, there could very well be more that have happened in the sales office from people viewing our website and buying offline that I don’t know about. I try to expand on the communication channels between the offline and online sales departments but it’s hard work, they keep thinking I’m trying to steal their sales.

One of The Key Components To An Authority Site

The key here is that all the links to the product page are internal, there’s only 19 of them (double checked using a couple of link tools as well as the standard search engine queries) and the pages that link to this product are all optimised for the parent niche which is what I’d class as a very large niche and closely tied with the niche in question. Another thing to note is the pagerank flows nicely down through the site, again I hate the word pagerank but it shows the effect of the internal linking reaching deep into the lower pages of the site.

The Rankings

We now rank at around 2^nd in the UK and 7^th globally on Google for the 4 core keyphrase variations (these are as top level as you can get for this niche), and for those of you who want the search count in quotes for these keywords, which I don’t think is relevant as you should be looking at the competition on the first couple of pages it’s 1,750,000. Not forgetting to mention the traffic coming in from longtail searches based on the core keywords.

Don’t Stress Over Keyword Rich Domains

It gets even better, for anyone who’s scrambling around for keyword rich domains, half of the domains on the first page are keyword rich and we’ve beaten them with a URL that’s www.totallyunrelatedtradename.com/then-the-parent-category/then-the-niche-keyphrase.htm. Really, if you were asked what do we sell based on our trade name/domain you wouldn’t have a clue if you didn’t know the company.

In Conclusion

The point I’m getting at is that it’s fine to have all these small niche sites with keyword rich domain names but just think while you’re going through the same processes to backlink and promote niche sites time and time again, which is either costing you via outsourcing or your own time, you can create an authority site and concentrate all your linking efforts on a select few sites. Not to mention there is a ceiling to how far you can grow the tightly themed small niche sites out for further profits.

Then if you do on occasion have a tough sub niche to crack you’ve already given yourself a head start with an authority site and once you grow the site out it starts to become a contender for the main higher level keyword/phrase theme of the site. Not to mention it’s a great way to boost any niche sites you do want to build, at work I’ve already successfully built and promoted some more niche sites in what I’d call medium sized niches in very little time at all, and they’ve created sales. All given a head start from our authority sites.

I hope this reads well for everyone as right now I have a nest of starlings screeching their heads off just above the room I’m working in so my concentration levels aren’t at their best but I hope it’s got a few people thinking.