What's the Best Way to Narrow Down the Focus of a Blog?

Excellent observation!

If you haven't already, do some online market research into nutrition. See which topics are currently hot. See if you can narrow the broad topic down into a logical bite-sized segment that gets a lot of interest. The idea, of course, is to find a segment or "corner" within the broader nutrition marketplace that gets a lot of attention.

In addition, look for sub-topics where there is a lack of information or other sites that cover the topic. Find an under-served population that you can take on.

Go to Amazon and look at the topics under "health" or "nutrition" - you might find a good niche there. See how many books are available on the subject. It will help you to know the interest in a niche.

Be sure to niche down as far as you can. Nutrition is a huge marketplace.

It's also important to have a monetization plan. How are you going to make money from your blog? If it's going to be promoting affiliate offers then you need to choose a niche where there are good affiliate products available. If you're going to create your own product, then of course you need to choose a topic that you can intelligently write about or talk about. If you're going to sell something, make sure you have several suppliers to work with. All these things should be researched and set up prior to making your final choice of a niche so you are sure you can have all your ducks in a row when you start.

As to whether or not you should keep your current domain or start over, I would say it depends on how much traffic your currently getting. If it's minimal, I would say find a new domain that is appropriate just for your tightly niched blog topic. Put your best keyword(s) in the domain name if possible. Stick to a dot com extension - there are plenty of great dot com names in every niche if you use your brain and get just a little bit creative (use impossibility.org to help you). Be sure to copy all your current nutrition posts and move them to the new domain if they are relevant - take advantage of what you've already written.

The best to you,

Steve

If you've got some nice back links I'd stick with the domain, plus if the Google sandbox does exist I'm guessing you'd be out of it by now.

Niching down a website isn't just about Google. Last time I looked, big G has never bought anything from me. Real people, on the other hand, have. As much as SEOs like to focus on the technical aspects, even Google's stated mission is to deliver the most relevant results for the person doing the searching.

So you start with people. You want a group of people with similar interests. You want the group large enough for you to make a living, but small enough to effectively reach and relate to. Depending on your business model, this could be only a few thousand people.

You mentioned nutrition as a broad market to start with. Let's work through an example.

I spend a fair amount of time on Quora.com (a great place for 'people' research). In the nutrition area, one of the hot areas is vegetarianism/veganism. You are also interested in this, and you have quite a bit of experience (in our example - I have no idea if this is true).

In surveying the questions asked over a fairly long period of time (like a few months), you notice that one of the problems that keeps coming up is how to get enough protein in a vegetarian/vegan diet.

You do some searching and find that this is what Steve calls an underserved market, or a gap in the market. You narrow your niche down to ways to get enough protein in a vegan diet.

On the blog, you can tackle things like scientific studies, vegan foods with high protein, cooking methods, vegan recipes - basically anything to do with getting enough protein with a vegan diet.

One of the benefits of this kind of focus is that Google can better match your content to searchers' intent and deliver serps that bring you the kind of visitors that will do you some good. You can start building a relationship with these people, as opposed to the kind of one-and-done visitors very broad sites tend to get. You also start showing up for long tail terms that may not even show up on your site.

While I profess to be no expert in the SEO department, I recently purchased an expensive SEO training course that outlines 'categories' or 'sub-niches' on a larger scale websites, whereas, you create what is known as; "silo's".

If you Google the terms: SEO Silo Templates and browse through some of the images... you'll see how it works and probably find some blog posts that better explain how to structure everything.

In the short version...

You would be grouping your 'pages' as your 'main topics' or 'categories' - and then house all the relevant content you have under that 'silo' - and you do this this for each category or topic... creating silos for each sub-nich or main category (i.e. Nutrition - Fitness - Weight Loss - etc.)

Again, since I paid to access this info, there is more to it, but if you start with searching the terms above, it might help you salvage and restructure your existing articles and content while making the blog more user friendly and get a better overall SEO ranking to boot.

You would simply need to restructure the content, create internal links within your silo's and separate each main topic (or page) to house that topics, articles, content, reviews, etc... under each silo. It's a win/win as it makes the user experience better, plus gives you a better chance of ranking in the SERP's (and it's mainlly just how you structure the content.) ..and as you add new topics or categories, simply create another silo to house that relevant content.

Hope that helps.

Art

That's interesting! I've never heard of silos with regard to website structure. I'll Google it and see what I can find out. That would be easier than start de novo with a new blog and domain. Sounds like that course taught something unique and was worth the money. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll certainly look into it. Best of luck with your silos too. :-)