Ecommerce | Ecommerce News

Building a Niche Site Within a Larger Site

It usually is considered an unwise move to try to be all things to all people in business. With your site, however, this may not be entirely true.

There are many different ways to categorize websites on the web. One is the global versus niche site. A global site is one that offers products or services across a wide range of subjects. A niche site is one that sticks to a very specific subject matter and seeks to dominate a smaller pool of competitors. In most discussions, these two concepts are considered mutually exclusive, but are they?

If you take a minute to think about a global site, you should realize it is really a collection of niche sites. Let’s assume I have a site similar to REI, to wit, I am offering general products and services related to the outdoors. While outdoors products can be considered a niche, it is a fairly large one. Within this large site, however, I have the opportunity to build out sub-niches.

Any outdoors site selling products is going to offer product SKUs that are easily categorized. In this case, these categories might include backpacking, camping, rock climbing, fishing, and so on. Each of these categories represents a sub-niche within the larger site, which means you have an opportunity to build them out and compete just like a small, defined niche site.

So, how is this done? I personally build out each category as though it is entirely separate site. The “home page” is the link from the home page of the larger site. Within the sub-niche home page, I then focus on building out pages for the products as well as articles and such. The pages are all designed to incorporate keyword phrases for seo and so on. Any PPC ads related to the specific sub-niche then are directed to the internal pages of this section.