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Getting traffic to non-niche site?

by Crashrat
13 replies
Hi guys,

Utter newbie question. What would you do with a fairly large site tackling a non-niche topic like movie reviews to optimize on-site content?

Should I try to find a niche / specific keywords in the general topic of movie reviews and somehow apply them or rewrite the reviews themselves using targeted keywords to try to get traffic? (That is, find the keywords people use when looking for a review of Garden State, for example.)

I have around 350 pages on this site going all the way back to around 2002, but get no search engine traffic at all at this point. I know this is going at this assbackwards for IM - where finding your niche (and an affiliate product) is often the first step - but I'd like to get something out of all these reviews.

Thanks,

Randy
#nonniche #site #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author imwebmasters
    If you have 350 pages with content and not getting any traffic and have a domain from 2002, then your content is bad and the only thing you could do is improve the content you have (make longer and better reviews, add pictures or embed trailer clips etc..) or write new reviews. You should focus more on writing good reviews instead. You don't really need to worry too much about keywords. If you are writing a review about a movie, its name and proper keywords would be mentioned several times naturally.
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  • Profile picture of the author Crashrat
    Thanks, but these reviews appeared in newspapers so I think the content is ok.

    The domain was registered in 2007. Before that the reviews were syndicated in different weeklies. I let the site go for a number of years and just re-launched it about six months ago on a fresh template.

    I get around 100 visitors from social media when I ping on my FB and other accounts, mostly Stumbleupon, but between this I get very few visitors. (I am writing new reviews at a rate of about three a month. It's harder to sit down and do them without the deadline pressures of writing for a paper.)
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  • Profile picture of the author Crashrat
    To clarify: The REVIEWS go back to 2002. The domain was registered in 2007, I think. The site was up for about two years -- mostly promoting a book -- and then I let it go.
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  • Profile picture of the author imwebmasters
    In that case, have you done any proper backlinking? It's a competitive niche so, it's not very easy to get high rankings.
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  • Profile picture of the author Crashrat
    I used to post links in sigs on forums and have listed it with many blog directories, but I know my linking is weak. The thing is, I'm not sure what my linking strategy should be since I don't really have any specific key terms or niches. I say there’s a generational and cultural theory theme, but that was mostly to try to cross promote the book.

    To be honest, I was sort of hoping I would see key terms appear in my analytics that I could optimize future reviews to, but the queries I’ve gotten back have mostly been nonsense.
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  • Profile picture of the author vcd0304
    Try doing some keyword research, sometimes you don't get much results writing what everyone else is writing. Do some long tail keywords research, the keyword maybe less US monthly search but much less SEO comp. Aim for those ones. If you do keyword research first, it will save you some time writing content that has way too many competition.
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    • Profile picture of the author Rymen1993
      Hmm, my suggestion is YouTube Promotion. ( create few videos about your niche and upload them)
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    • Profile picture of the author imwebmasters
      Originally Posted by vcd0304 View Post

      Try doing some keyword research, sometimes you don't get much results writing what everyone else is writing. Do some long tail keywords research, the keyword maybe less US monthly search but much less SEO comp. Aim for those ones. If you do keyword research first, it will save you some time writing content that has way too many competition.
      The problem isn't really about keywords. If you are writing a review about a specific movie then you have those keywords to work with.

      Have you tried running your reviews through Copyscape? If they are published online elsewhere then your reviews might be seen as duplicate content.
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  • Profile picture of the author WeavingThoughts
    If these are direct from another review website, then this should be expected.
    Signature
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  • Profile picture of the author Crashrat
    I know that the last two years worth of reviews were posted on a paper’s website, but they went under and their site is gone. Another paper turned into a shopper and is also gone. I guess this is the story with newspapers these days, but long story short I don’t think the content is living anywhere else at this point besides my site.

    This is mostly my hobby / dream site. I’ve started a couple more traditional IM niche websites. This one isn’t even particularly well monetized.

    Would it make sense to revolve out some reviews / rewrite them and set up microsites on a niche and try to feed back to the main site? I also like the youtube idea… That would be well outside my comfort zone, though.
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  • Profile picture of the author Crashrat
    Hi WeavingThoughts -- No, these are all original reviews. As I say, some may have been on a couple of newspapers' websites, but those sites are no more.

    This is also on a Joomla site and I suspected that Google wasn't crawling it right -- and I do see that only 208 out of 453 pages have been indexed -- but I'm starting to wonder if you can reverse engineer a site to get traffic in a broad niche like movie reviews.
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  • Profile picture of the author imwebmasters
    I'm not going to lie, I think it's better if you spend time on something more worthwhile. Some things should be dropped and left where they are.
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  • Profile picture of the author Crashrat
    Thanks for your honesty imwebmasters.

    In news they used to say, “You have to be willing to kill your children,” meaning that you couldn’t fall in love with a line if it didn’t add to a story. That’s sort of how I feel about this site right now… It’s too bad because I really enjoyed writing movie reviews, too.

    I’ll keep the site going – my hosting plan supports it – but as far as IM I think I’ll push my other projects first.

    Thanks again.
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