Ranking for ecommerce keywords with micro niche site

[pitbully]

Basically every ecommerce keyword is dominated by well known brands. But their store sells many other things, which could easily be beat on relevance by making a store which caters specifically to that keyword/product type.

All things considered, can you outrank big brands with a micro niche site if you do it the right way and offer more selection, better optimization and put in the time and hard work to get there? Or are ecommerce SERPs dominated by brands and that's the way it's gonna stay?

 

[safeSEOboost]

can you outrank big brands with a micro niche site if you do it the right way and offer more selection, better optimization and put in the time and hard work to get there? Or are ecommerce SERPs dominated by brands and that's the way it's gonna stay?

yes you can outrank big sites, if you are very focused on a particular sub-niche, you put the effort; this is what many people do here with review sites and other affiliate sites. do your keyword research first to see if the results on page 1 can be beaten or not.

 

[pitbully]

yes you can outrank big sites, if you are very focused on a particular sub-niche, you put the effort; this is what many people do here with review sites and other affiliate sites. do your keyword research first to see if the results on page 1 can be beaten or not.

I don't want to do a review site or affiliate site though, I want to have an ecommerce site that does a better job than the big brands do when it comes to that one specific niche or sub-niche. I'm told that the big brands, although they sell many unrelated products, have so much domain authority that most of the time they can't be beaten without a massive SEO budget that most entrepreneurs don't have.

I think outranking a well known ecommerce site for a product related keyword with an affiliate site would be pretty much impossible. Unless it was for a really really niche product with low search volume so no big brands care about it, and therefore there's no real money to be made. But I guess I could be wrong.

yes you can outrank big sites, if you are very focused on a particular sub-niche, you put the effort; this is what many people do here with review sites and other affiliate sites. do your keyword research first to see if the results on page 1 can be beaten or not.

I'm not talking about a keyword like "best coffee grinders" or "coffee grinder reviews"...I'm not talking about a direct product keyword like "coffee grinders" where there is clear buyer intent and only stores are listed in the results.

And that's basically what I'm asking...How do I know if I can beat the big brands ranking in the first 5 spots. Even searches for small products are dominated by big brands. How do I know by analyzing the SERPs if I can outrank a big ecommerce site with a lot of domain authority?

 

[nakamura]

I tried that. It is hard if your competition is ebay, Amazon, etsy, aliexpress and so on, but you can do it. First you need to become an authority site by yourself. This means you need some really strong backlinks. Simple Web 2.0 and maybe even a few PBN links won't make it. The best bet is to go after longtail keywords and then slowly get ranked for the big keywords.

 

[pitbully]

I tried that. It is hard if your competition is ebay, Amazon, etsy, aliexpress and so on, but you can do it. First you need to become an authority site by yourself. This means you need some really strong backlinks. Simple Web 2.0 and maybe even a few PBN links won't make it. The best bet is to go after longtail keywords and then slowly get ranked for the big keywords.

I was thinking about doing mostly white hat for this project since an ecommerce site should be a long term goal. It's good to know it's possible, but I wonder how hard it would be. It's tough to know if I should put in all the time and effort ranking a micro niche store against the big boys. I know I can kill them on overall relevancy, but it seems like being a big brand is what's important on Google for ecommerce type keywords.

 

[pitbully]

Has anybody here successfully outranked the big brand stores for their main product-keyword with a very specialized store?

 

[script-scripts]

Not yet. In fact, if I want something to rank fast I simply post it on one of the big ecommerce websites.

An ad on gumtree will rank top results straight away for any medium to longtail keyword for a product.

I am building an ecommerce store so am looking to build strong SEO for it. I'm targetting a specific keyword niche though. And I am not doing it on a standalone site; its under the wing of a larger network of sites so I have half a chance.

I think you CAN do anything. You probably CAN successfully outrank a big brang store for a main product keyword with a very specialized store.

I think it would take A LOT of effort and there are much easier ways to rank to sell the same products and/or make money...

If you have any success or get any leads/positive progress please do let me know. I'll watch this thread just post here.

 

[troxion]

this is what I explained yesterday to someone who had a similair questions about ranking keywords:

Check the keyword on volume, I would go for 70-500 (higher is mostly competitive)
Search the keyword on Google and see if the top 10 postions has the keyword in the:
URL (domain.com/keyword)
Meta tag
Meta description

Now also check the websites and do the following:
Check if they have an article
ctrl+f and search for 'keyword', if it only appears 0 or 1 time they are not targeting the keyword (Article or not).

You can also check the DA etc... but if they have almost nothing of the above described it is not critical.

Now if all of the above mentioned is not the case you should rank it easy with a website that has some age, remember to do onpage SEO.

gl

 

[script-scripts]

this is what I explained yesterday to someone who had a similair questions about ranking keywords:

Check the keyword on volume, I would go for 70-500 (higher is mostly competitive)
Search the keyword on Google and see if the top 10 postions has the keyword in the:
URL (domain.com/keyword)
Meta tag
Meta description

Now also check the websites and do the following:
Check if they have an article
ctrl+f and search for 'keyword', if it only appears 0 or 1 time they are not targeting the keyword (Article or not).

You can also check the DA etc... but if they have almost nothing of the above described it is not critical.

Now if all of the above mentioned is not the case you should rank it easy with a website that has some age, remember to do onpage SEO.

gl

Very good advice. Cheers.

 

[infocraze]

In short it all depends upon the actual keyword competition. You can outrank big players on some keywords and never on others.

 

[GregFromMoonsy]

Basically every ecommerce keyword is dominated by well known brands. But their store sells many other things, which could easily be beat on relevance by making a store which caters specifically to that keyword/product type....

An example:
You not will outrank brands for keywords where brand is part of keyword, it's because they have tons of links with this partial/exact anchor text.
But if we talking about other things, yes - you can outrank them - especially when they have tiny amount of links with given anchor text, or even no links at all.

 

[nakamura]

I was thinking about doing mostly white hat for this project since an ecommerce site should be a long term goal. It's good to know it's possible, but I wonder how hard it would be. It's tough to know if I should put in all the time and effort ranking a micro niche store against the big boys. I know I can kill them on overall relevancy, but it seems like being a big brand is what's important on Google for ecommerce type keywords.

First of all you should build a brand. When it comes to price you CAN'T compete with Amazon, eBay or any random chinese manufacture/reseller. There is one way out of this problem: Build your brand. Give the user a full experience. Apple is a good example. Why should someone choose an expensive iPhone over a chinese smartphone or other brands like HTC and Huawei? Because of the user experience and brand. I know this is a bit offtopic, but if you don't have a brand and you rank in the Top 5 between Amazon, eBay, Aliexpress and Etsy you won't have any chance. Keep this in mind. People won't visit a random site called "Electronics24.com" or something like that, if they can get the same product from Amazon or eBay, which are trustful, reliable and have buyer protection etc. Think about this first before starting out.