You have great, high-quality and authoritative content which you need to drive traffic towards, but you may be writing in a niche which does not traditionally get much attention. How do you optimize your content and increase your website’s ranking? The answer is to include shoulder niches, which are a little-known search engine optimization (SEO) trick that can really drive results.
What are shoulder niches?
Shoulder niches are subjects related to the core content of your website or blog. They sit alongside the central message you are trying to convey. Shoulder niches can expand your content into new audiences and bring more traffic to your site, increasing your presence and authority on the internet through a neat SEO trick.
The key to success in this strategy is choosing interesting subject matter that complements your existing conten. Say you have a pest control blog – choosing “dogs” as your shoulder niche would not be a good choice, unless you were, say, creating content around flea killers. However, that would be a bit of a stretch.
How to choose a shoulder niche
Now you know you need to include “shoulder” content alongside your central content, how do you go about choosing what to include? The first step you want to take is to brainstorm your ideas. Let’s take that example of a pest control site again. What shoulder niches would work? Some subjects that would sit alongside this kind of content would be gardening, entomology, or DIY. From there, it is an easy step to create relevant content if you are smart.
Or, say, you have a blog based around your makeup line. There are hundreds of competitors out there, so what would be a good shoulder niche? By brainstorming, you could come up with such content as hair products, Instagram influencers, and the history of beauty standards since the 19th century.
You may be able to think of a hundred shoulder niches for your content, or just a dozen or so. As long as they are relevant to your content, they will help increase your potential customer base. If you are not sure which shoulder niches to go for, a quick Google search using your commonly utilized keywords may help.
Advantages of using the shoulder niche approach
Apart from the aforementioned boost to your search visibility, shoulder niches can help you get backlinks from authority sources and other bloggers. You are constantly competing with other sites in your own niche, so by providing content which moves away from your competitor’s subject matter, even slightly, you will invite more backlinks. This, in turn, will increase the visibility of your content in search engines since high quality, relevant backlinks are one of the things their algorithms look for when ranking websites in search results.
Shoulder niches can, and should be, used as part of your content outreach strategy. Once you have identified the content you wish to include and have written it (if it falls outside your area of expertise, you can employ freelancers to write it for you), it’s simply a case of finding other bloggers who write about the same subjects. Merely send them an email or message politely bringing their attention to your new content and ask if they would link to you. By doing so, you will drive traffic to your site and give it the boost you need to get it on the front page for your industry niche.
The lowdown on shoulder niches
Providing high quality content is the cornerstone of your online strategy. By thinking about the shoulder niches that relate to your central content, you can increase your traffic and organic click through rates with relative ease. Get your thinking cap on, brainstorm subjects which can easily fit alongside your main content, and in no time at all you should see your site’s profitability increase considerably.
