which is more profitable: topical niche sites or local niche sites?

July 31, 2007

Hello,

I was wondering this:

Until now I’ve only really been into niche sites..as in topical niche sites (you take a generic topic and find an underserved niche within it).

However, I’m starting to take interest in local niche sites. The thing is I live in Germany in a city of a population of 100.000 (the metropolitan area exceeds 1,000,000 though including a city closeby of 500,000).

I was wondering if it might be way more profitable to make a website for keywords such as…well…’my city + Pizza’. The sites that rank #1,#2 #3 for the big city of 500,000 only have around 30 backlinks (maybe 15-20 from different locations).

The keyword tools do show some volume (we dont really have reliable keyword tools for the German market…way less reliable than those for the US market). However, I wouldnt judge by those volumes, but by the fact that many people eat pizza every day and Ive typed in “pizza + my city” before to order a pizza online. So I guess such a site could at least have some potential to sell adspace to a local pizza delivery service (preferrably one that has few clients).

What do you guys think of this idea? and…to get back to my original question:

which have you done better with: topical or local niches?

As in real estate it’s all about local, local, local.

I’d say go local, based on my experience.

Pizza München would probably be more popular than Leberkäse München or Marzipan München. Ha!

Are you going to rely on ads?
Pizza may not be a high money value.

I’d get out a phone book (if you still own one) and study the more valuable markets.

plastic surgery
weight loss
dentist
cars
rentals
hotels

got it? and a nice thing about a local niche is that you can do some promotion and for low cost reach your target audience. Get your bike out and do a advertising flayer promotion drop. Not possible with a global niche where it’s serps or mass media option.

Another one would be gym + city of 500,000 (right next to me)..the #1 spot ranking on under 100 links.

Plus I’ve always wanted to do a site on working out, weight lifting, etc. (I know quite a lot about this one having worked out regularly for 7 years) but I could never find a niche (and you can imagine how hypersaturated the weight lifting market is hm?;().

Would it be a good idea to make a site for gyms out of my city and then try to get links by making such content that’s appealing to bodybuilding/weightlifting sites?

Is it important to get links from local sites, too? (as in not just topically related sites but also sites from similar locations?)

How would you guys go about doing this? Making the theme of the sites “gyms + my city” and creating subpages for link bait pages..or making a site with great unique content and creating a subpage for the “gym +mycity” thing? Usually Id say this one is a no-brainer, but isnt it pretty hard to get people interested in linking to a site if the homepage looks completely commercial..no matter how good the rest of the content is?