Video and Article Marketing for Search Traffic: Should You Go Deep or Wide?
By Anna Johnson on December 16th, 2009When it comes to attracting search engine traffic, a common refrain is to go ‘deep’: write a ton of articles focusing on one niche, covering all possible keyword variations (from the short to long tail) in order to attract highly targeted search traffic.
As WebProNews’ Chris Crum writes:
“That has commonly been considered the way to gain credibility, readers, links, and ultimately traffic, which assuming the blog/site itself isn’t your primary source of income, could lead to sales of your products/services.”
While such an approach makes perfect sense for those focusing on a specific niche, it makes almost no sense for Internet marketers and companies wanting to cater to large audiences. Especially those wanting to generate the kind of traffic that appeals to brand advertisers.
Such Internet marketers are generally better off providing ‘horizontal’ content – content covering a multitude of topics. And that’s pretty much the approach taken by such companies as RateItAll, which provides reviews on a wide range of topics, and Demand Media’s eHow, which publishes ‘how to’ content on a huge number of topics.
Of course, there’s a significant cost to going horizontal. The cost of aiming at large audiences in order to earn big advertising dollars is, among other things, the cost of paying lots of experts and writers to cover all those niches! For the average Internet marketer – who doesn’t have millions of dollars of venture capital in their bank account as does a Demand Media – such a cost is likely much too high.
Consequently, focusing on one niche is just more feasible for most Internet marketers.
But there’s also a third approach: doing one niche at a time. As you achieve success in one niche, you can reinvest the money you’ve made into another niche, applying the same (or similar) formula that worked in the first niche.
This is the approach taken by many successful Internet marketers. And, by taking this approach you can ultimately have a substantial portfolio of niche sites that, overall, gives you the ability to attract significant advertising dollars.
When it comes to creating content and generating search traffic, you are still going deep for each website (or group of related sites), but as you amass your portfolio, you are also going broad (since you have multiple sites in multiple niches). Not a bad way to have your cake and eat it too… one piece at a time!
Source: Chris Crum, “Increase Search Traffic with Horizontal Content,” Web Pro News, December 3, 2009
