Today we welcome Kelvin Mah of HumanProofDesigns (HPD). For the last years, Kelvin’s been building affiliate sites and helping HPD grow their affiliate site portfolio. Today we’re going to dive into one of the biggest debates for SEO affiliates - Niche Sites vs Authority Sites.

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If you’ve been around the block with affiliate SEO then you’ve likely come across the dilemma of whether to build a "niche site" or an "authority site".

It's yet another decision you have to make before mentally preparing yourself for a new project. It’s also something I’d like to help you overcome today and also never think about again...

Here's the truth:

Authority sites are just bigger versions of niche sites. You can think of niche sites as little babies, or starter affiliate sites, and authority sites are the big brothers and sisters.

Eventually you’ll be as tall as them too! One day...

"Wait, but people have told me that I should have a portfolio of niche sites?! "

People say a lot of things. But you should worry about one site at a time. Otherwise you’ll never get anything off the ground floor.

In order to set yourself up fo r future success, you need to zoom out and understand the journey of how a niche site becomes an authority site.

If you’re looking for the definition of an authority site, it’s all about branded searches. Are people searching for your sites brand name in Google?

Hopefully your site isn’t an exact match domain (best-walker-for-seniors.com) and is something short and sweet.

It technically doesn’t matter how many categories you have on your site, I’m sure there are many sites with just 1 category that get tons of branded searches. However, when we’re talking about SEO - we have to break the differences into more technical matters.

So let’s get started with the differences between niche site seo and authority site seo.

Silos For Niche Sites & Authority Sites

Here’s a quick example of what an authority site may contain for its silos.

Your authority site topic is "athletic footwear." Not shoes, but one level deeper into the sports realm.

Your athletic footwear site has several silos (aka sections), such as marathon running shoes, hiking shoes, and tennis shoes.

The menu for your site might look like this: "running, hiking, tennis, about, contact"

Now let's flip the coin:

A niche site, on the other hand, may just have running shoes as their topic (instead of athletic footwear.) But on your site, you'd have running shoes for men, women, seniors, and kids.

Your niche site menu could also be "men, women, seniors, kids, about, contact"

The difference between the niche site and authority site is simply that we've zoomed out with the latter. You can very easily see how the niche site content can be nested inside of the authority site.

Both sites target the same audience, however, the authority site is able to cater to a certain athlete in multiple ways.

You might be asking “why do running shoes have to be the niche site? Why couldn’t it be tennis shoes?”

Well, there’s a really simple answer to that...

On-Page SEO For Niche Sites & Authority Sites

The foundation of your site starts with keyword research right? Now that we can see the grander vision of our niche-to-authority site process.

Let’s talk about why we chose running shoes as the first category over the others.

It's very simple: Low competition.

At HumanProofDesigns, we push for front loading your keyword research and then picking the low hanging fruit to start building upon.

Once you've seen where the low competition keywords lay, then you need to decide how you're going to create content to rank for those keywords.

A general misconception is that authority sites have "better content" than niche sites. Which really isn't true.

It's also really bad practice to put all your efforts into the first version of your site. Here's why:

When you start an affiliate site, you have no idea how it's going to rank. Even if you did all the keyword research (both manually and using a tool) and checked all the boxes for your on-page SEO checklist - it may not matter!

This is what I suggest:

For the first version of your niche site, create content that's "good enough." This type of mediocre content can take you a long way and if you're hiring someone else to create it for you, then it'll be more cost effective as well.

Once your site gets out of the Google sandbox and you can see where and how your site is performing, you can reinvest into the content that needs some extra love.

If you produce 50 pieces of content and let them sit, I guarantee you that not all of them will be at position 7. Some will be on the first page, second, sixteenth, or not even in the first ten pages.

From there you can reassess and take the measures necessary to give your site the "premium" authority content you've been hearing about.

If you're not sure about the difference between "good enough" & "premium" content then here are some simple guiding principles, considered by most:

“Good enough content” is usually written by non-US writers, although we both know that being born in the US doesn't mean you're automatically a great writer. The content is narrowly focused, might have a little fluff in it, and doesn't require more than 3 scrolls down.

“Premium content”, on the other hand, is generally longer (which allows you to rank for more keywords), has been written and edited by US writers, contains less fluff and typically has some sort of real-world experience attached. Giving it that extra touch of trustworthiness.

Premium content can cost $80-250 for 1000 words, while 'good enough' content ranges anything below that number.

The same type of on-page tactics like subheader tags (h2, h3, etc), alt-tags, and keywords in the title/URL still apply to both types of sites. After all, they're fundamental to SEO.

You won't expect to rank either types of content if you haven't implemented the fundamentals.

Off-Page For Niche Sites & Authority Sites

For the most part, off-page seo tactics have no boundaries when it comes to niche sites or authority sites. For example, an authority site could be held up by a PBN (private blog network.) Which would be a grey hat technique. While a niche site could be completely whitehat and conduct only outreach campaigns.

It's hard to give you a fine line to follow for this but I would say that experimentation is at the core of being an SEO practitioner.

If you want to see how things work, then you're going to have to throw sh*t at the wall. I've seen tiered link campaigns work (using blogger, tumblr, etc. to create links) for very old, and now authority sites. So there aren’t boundaries.

The only thing you need to make sure of is this:

If you're going to pay for any grey, black, or whitehat campaigns (yes people pay for whitehat stuff too), then make sure it's from a reputable vendor.

We ran a study over at HumanProofDesigns and saw that the majority of mistakes made by affiliates was buying links from Konker, Fiverr, etc. If it's too good to be true, then it probably is.

You might have in your head that authority sites only utilize whitehat techniques and to be honest, that's for the most part true. However, it's not a rule.

Our little running shoe niche site could start off with an outreach campaign for a guest post, then create an infographic for links, then we might add PBN links for our harder keywords and finally, try our luck with "just-in-time" links using mention monitoring.

Sorry if that might be confusing, but it’s just to give you an idea of how much stuff you really have to try. There is no one-size fits all solution. Unless it’s links… Always get more links!

Also, keep this in mind:

Once a site gets to the #1 spot for a bunch of popular keywords, no matter how you got there, the natural links will start coming in.

If you've had to write a piece of content before (even for school), think of how many times you've Googled something and added the first result into your article. Once the velocity of new organic links come in, then you’ll start covering up your “bad” PBN links.

Is The Showdown Over?

Yes, for the most part. This is the groundwork that's going to take you from a small running shoe review site to an authoritative athletics shoe blog.

Here's the game plan if you haven't started or perhaps want to revise your tactics once more:

  • Start narrow
  • Define your first silo with low competition keywords
  • Build content that's "good enough"
  • Measure your performance once you're out of Google’s Sandbox
  • Adjust your course accordingly
  • Expand silos (categories) when you're ready to get “authoritative”

I want to thank the WarriorForum team for letting us share our thoughts on this subject and hopefully you guys start stressing less and building more. For more info on growing affiliate sites, feel free to reach out to us or leave a comment below.