As we march forward every year in the digital marketing world, SEO takes on an even greater importance than ever before. Ranking on Page 1 is paramount no matter what industry your brand operates in. Years ago, it was that only 50% of visitors clicked through to Page 2. That fell to about 33% by the middle of last decade, with the rate nowadays being approx 25%. And, it’s not going back up anytime soon. No matter what study you put your faith in, the trend is undeniable…Organic Page 1 is everything, and anything less hurts your opportunities.
The challenge of course is that every other brand and their digital team/supplier knows this as well. The competition is fierce, whether it be for niche keywords right up to the keywords that are competed over on a national and/or international basis. Every digital marketer out there is chasing the big 3 aspects of Discovery, Relevance and Authority. They’re all executing tasks every week in Backlinks, Blogging and Directories, and they’re all maintaining and monitoring their websites for Onsite SEO and measuring SERPs either weekly or monthly. Indeed, we do the same around here…but for us, it’s not enough. Around here, we’re always looking at ways to separate ourselves from the pack, so to speak.
Big Data scientists (including the ones at Google and similar) often use a process called “Topic Modeling” when analyzing a subject. Without getting into a lengthy academic article here, topic modeling is the process of analyzing articles in bulk and picking out common subjects in these articles, and then being able to assign them to one or more specific categories. For example, the words “dog” and “bone” will frequently together, just as the words “cat” and “meow” are often associated together as well. Google and the other major search engines all use topic modeling to some extent in their SERP calculations, and any good SEO program must account for this in their marketing. In short, your website must bring in certain terminology that puts the site within the same topic modeling judgements that the major search engines are recognizing.
Here’s where it gets interesting…
If you adjust your website strategy from only having a single site to that where you have a series of one-page “microsites” all related to a niche aspect related to your company then in effect you’re essentially creating your own topic modeling framework for your brand…a network of websites if you will that strengthens the relevance factor of your brand…and ultimately increases the SERPs for your main website.
The “secret sauce” if you will for these Niche Landing Pages boils down to the actual URL names. Note that most main website URLs aren’t named strategically, and are more along the lines of a company name as opposed to a name that fits into a top modeling subject. For example, a restaurant is more likely to be named something like giovannis.com as opposed to bestmanhattanitalianrestaurant.com. This is fine of course, as the name fits into the specific branding effort for that company. However, the name of the URL certainly does not fit into a subject that Google would need to define in order to rank for whatever Keywords that the company is trying to rank for. To define as such, Google has to dive deeper into the website by having it’s crawlers analyze your Onsite SEO, the text from your H1, H2 and other similar tags, your frequency of Blog updates…and go into its index to pull in the analysis from all the Offsite SEO indicators about your site that are out there on the web. The actual name of the URL is still a massive indicator for Google to categorize your site within the context of topic modeling (ask us about how we took an Ottawa Wedding Photographer to #1 on Google for Local SEO by securing the URL ottawaweddingphotography.com).
Accordingly, the next level of SEO is implementing a series of Niche Landing Pages that surround and link back to your main site with strategic URL choices designed to fit into a Topic Modeling framework.
Companies would benefit from URLs such as .com, where region is a variable that can be changed to both the main city in question as well as the surrounding towns & villages (as is common in any major metropolitan market), and can be changed to the specific name of the desired niche.
Here at Digitera, we’ve had extraordinary success since Sept 2021 using the Niche Landing Page success, with more than a few Local SEO victories and even a couple of International SEO Page 1 rankings. We invite all of you to consider this approach…if a Page 1 ranking for your desired keyword will increase your business revenues, then perhaps it’s worth the investment.