You’ve started ranking well within your niche, but you’re running out of topics.
What should you do next? How far should you niche down? Is this niche done?
The answer, as always is – It depends. First, you need to decide whether it’s worthwhile to continue working on your niche site, or if you should start putting your energy into another site/topic.
What I’d like to discuss today is something I’ve been working on that’s allowed me to grow a niche that I had thought was finished.
I call it Semantic Fuzz
Expanding your niche by targeting Semantic Fuzz.
This bolt from the blue came about on one of my YMYL websites which had gained great authority but was tapped out. It has links from Forbes, NYT, Vice, Washington Post, and more, but according to the name that I had stuck it with, it was done. I was number one in my niche, but there was nowhere else to go.
For this Case Study, we’ll say my YMYL site is in the Financial Sector (it’s not), and it’s called Algo Stocks. I’ve niched down as far as I could and am currently the premier source of information about Algorithm Investing & Bot Trading.
What is Semantic Fuzz?
It’s an SEO term for similarly spelled words with different meanings. These are homographs, homonyms, and even words with the same prefix.
Did I just make that term up right now? Yes. But at least I’ll rank for it.
Although you will see benefits on Prefixes or Homographs that aren’t related to your niche you will still have more success with posts that are more closely related to your niche. Here’s a few separate examples of Semantic Fuzz using keywords you might find on the aforementioned example site Algo Stocks:
Stock(The investment vehicle) – Stockpile, Stocked (Resupply), Stocking (For your feet), Stocky, Stockade
Futures (The investment vehicle) – Future (Time)
Trading – Traditional, Tradesman, Trades
Crude (Oil) – Crude (Raw)
Closing Market – Closed (action)
Opening Market – Open (action)
Market (Stock Market) – Action word for affiliate reviews ‘Are you in the market for?’
Dow (Jones) – Dowry (Wedding) – This one is a bit of a stretch, and would require you to move way outside your niche, although it does illustrate my point.
How far should you push this?
Really it depends on what you want to try; ideally you would think about your users first. If you have a lot of subscribers, it would be best not to push unrelated content out to them, but if you’re a pure SEO play, there’s no harm in burying some content deep in your website to test it out.
The best part of this thought exercise is going through your backlinks/current content with an open mind to expand your niche and create new content.
Now on to the Data
My main backlinks to my YMYL site often involve a word ending with ‘ING’, so I created some content that has the same prefix, but different meaning. An example of this would be having backlinks for ‘sampling’ as it relates to music production and then using that link juice to rank for the term ‘samples’ as it relates to tester size items (food samples, perfume samples, trials, etc).
| Semantic Fuzz | H1 Keyword Difficulty | Traffic 3 Months | Traffic 6 Months | Traffic 1 Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exact Match | Easy | 67 | 539 | N/A |
| Semantic Fuzz | Medium | 53 | 894 | 3576 |
| None (Within my niche) | Easy | 15 | 49 | 89 |
Exact match means that the term exactly matches my backlink profile both in meaning and spelling.
Fuzzy is a fuzzy semantic match (think music sampling vs free samples)
None broader niche – This is an article that is within my broader category but doesn’t use any keywords that I have authority for (Think sampling music to orchestra)
One thing that should be noted is that in my example the Fuzzy match (sampling to samples) goes to an entirely unrelated YMYL niche. Think Financial to Medical. While the ones labelled None Broader Niche are decent articles that are written in the same (financial) niche but on unrelated topics that I have not ranked for.
I have some more articles in the pipeline to test out this theory more, but for this exact term, the data might not be as good since I’m now ranking for this term with some backlinks coming in as well.
YMMV and remember your User Experience should come first.
It should also be noted that if Google becomes more adept at identifying this in the future, it won’t matter because you’ll have gained authority and will be ranking naturally for these terms.