Brand Digital

Growth Through AI and 1 to 1 Digital Communications

Site/Blog Naming Question – General or Niche?

brand digital home - Search Engine Marketing - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Site/Blog Naming Question – General or Niche?
by

This question was submitted by Tim who is working on developing a new site around a particular topic – college football. My response and is below – feel free to comment. If you have questions on anything SEO, SEM, Landing Page or Internet Marketing related – drop me an email from the contact page.

Scott,

I am working on creating a college football blog and have been brainstorming various names. My initial idea was to use the keyword “college football” with some other word, or maybe use “Saturday” with another word. However all the feedback I am getting from friends and colleagues is why limit myself to just college (or Saturday) by specifically naming the blog something that suggests only college football, when I could instead name it something related to football (in general) and then have the ability to expand in the future by adding the NFL.

Which do you believe is the better course of action? At this moment the blog (and my interest and expertise) is 100% focused on college football. However I have already received inquiries from others who would like to contribute NFL content.

Thank you for your time,

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Hi Tim,

 Thanks for the email. You have several considerations here:
1) Putting critical keywords into your blog name will help you with search engine visibility on a lot of levels: inbound links, the power of the works in the domain and the clarity to the engines and visitors about what the blog is about.
2) While it is always tempting to go as broad as possible to get “as much traffic as possible”, it’s really hard to break into multiple keyword/content markets. The more you can focus on a single niche, especially for a new, small site – the faster you will find success.
I think focusing on a blog name that includes college and football in the name is the best approach unless you are ESPN :-).
Category: , Tag: , ,

Showcase Your Agency

Give your agency, business, or brand the sharp image it deserves with Mai Reach theme from BizBudding.

Buy Mai Reach Now

About scott

Scott has over 30 years experience in building successful businesses in a variety of industries including: enterprise grade machine learning (SigmaIQ), Qualitative Market Research (Discuss.io) E-commerce (Amazon.com), Online Subscription (Rhapsody – RealNetworks, Optify), Digital Marketing (Avenue A, Optify & Brand Digital, Inc.), Online Games (WON.net), Consumer Entertainment Software (Sierra) and Recycling/Solid Waste Management (Rabanco Recycling).

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Terry

    While I agree focusing on a single niche is preferable to a broad based approach, ultimately isn’t the site’s content going to be more important than the site’s name?

    Therefore wouldn’t a name you think readers would find compelling and easy to remember and type be just as effective as using college football in the name? Something witty and memorable would also help you stand out.

    Reply

    • scott

      Hi Terry, something descriptive (collegefootball.com?) is preferred in a small content publishing site because the domain name is a huge influencer in search rankings. It helps with the focus keyword, links that you get and clarity to user for branding.

      The brands that have been really successful at scale with non-descriptive names like Google and Yahoo are much bigger sites that had a unique business that went viral and exploded.

      Thanks!

      Reply

  2. web page

    Hi! I know this is somewhat off topic but I was wondering which blog platform are you using for this site?
    I’m getting tired of WordPress because I’ve had issues with hackers and
    I’m looking at options for another platform. I would be great if you could point me in the direction of a good platform.

    Reply

    • scott

      Hi Web Page,

      You may be a comment spammer, but it’s a good question so I though I’d answer: Branddigital.net is on WordPress with the Genesis 2.0 framework. I run a series of plug-ins including several for SEO, WP3 Cache, and several special Genesis plug-ins.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *