The Niche Within the Niche
The Niche Within the Niche If you're reading this, there's a good chance you like the idea of building a directory but you're stuck on what to build. Maybe you've had a few ideas but nothing felt right. Maybe you tried one and it didn't take off. Or maybe you just keep going back and forth and never pulling the trigger. I talk to people one on one every single week, and this is honestly the most common thing I hear. A lot of you just want to build something with the highest probability of success. So that's exactly what this newsletter is about. If I wanted nothing more than the highest chance of winning with a directory, this is what I'd do. Take what's already proven and carve out your own corner.Here's what I see a lot of people do. They either go way too broad and try to compete with massive established directories, or they pick something super novel that nobody's ever searched for. Both are tough spots to be in. Going broad means you're up against sites like Care.com and aplaceoformom.com in senior living, or Zocdoc in healthcare. These are companies doing eight to nine figures a year. You're not outranking them for "senior living near me" anytime soon. Going too novel means sure, there's no competition, but there's also no demand. And even if you find a keyword to target, it becomes a guessing game. You still need distribution, which means you're relying on SEO to bring people in. But now you're betting that the people searching for that keyword actually have the intent to care about what you've built. This is a risky game to play when you could just go where the demand already exists. The move that I think has the highest probability of success is somewhere in between. You take a market that's already proven, where big directories are making real money, and you find a very specific pocket of that market to own. But not just any pocket in the market. This is the important part. The variable has to be a deal breaker.I think about this a lot. When you're niching down, the thing that separates a good niche from a waste of time is whether your variable is a deal breaker or just a nice to have. Here's how I figure that out. I ask myself one question: what is the consequence of not having this thing done right? Let's say you're looking at the senior living space. Massive market, tons of demand, proven directories making a killing. If you niched down to "assisted living centers with a swimming pool," that sounds specific. But is that a deal breaker for most people? Probably not. It's nice, but nobody's ruling out a facility because it doesn't have a pool. Now think about "senior living for people with dementia." If your parent has dementia, you can't just put them anywhere. The consequence of choosing the wrong facility is serious. This changes which places are even an option. That's not a preference. That's a deal breaker. Same thing applies in other spaces. Speech therapy is broad. Speech therapy for kids with autism? That's a deal breaker because the consequence of working with someone who doesn't have that specific experience is real. "Yeah, but the search volume is trash."This is where most people bounce. When you look up keywords like "dementia care assisted living albuquerque" in Ahrefs, you see maybe a few hundred monthly searches. But you're only looking at one keyword. When you zoom out to all the variations of dementia related assisted living keywords, it adds up fast. "Dementia assisted living near me" gets 350 monthly searches. "Dementia assisted living facilities near me" gets 300. "Assisted living for dementia near me" gets 150. Across just one keyword cluster, you're looking at over 1,300 total monthly searches. When you start looking at city specific searches, the picture gets even bigger. 'Dementia care assisted living albuquerque' gets 150 monthly searches on its own. 'Kennewick dementia assisted living' gets 40. 'Dementia assisted living denver' gets another chunk. Each city is its own pocket of demand, and there are hundreds of cities. This is what people don't see when they look at one keyword and write it off. Every single city where these facilities exist is a keyword you can rank for. When you add all of that up, the total addressable search market for this niche is way bigger than that initial seed keyword made it look. And here's the thing about this niche specifically. Proven directories in the senior living space earn thousands of dollars per lead that converts. You don't need 50,000 monthly visitors when each lead is worth that much. You're optimizing for traffic with the right search intent > volume. And then there are the branded keywordsThere's a site called Alzheimers.net that's basically doing exactly this. They built a directory focused on Alzheimer's and dementia related senior living. They're getting around 17,000 total monthly organic visitors. When I looked at their keyword data, here's what jumped out. They rank for 6,183 keywords, but 3,848 of those keywords are branded. Individual facility names like "Darlington Memory Lane" pulling 300 searches, "Tampa Gardens Senior Living" at 800, "Mallard Cove Senior Living" at 450. Facility after facility, each page bringing in its own traffic. And these branded keywords? Zero keyword difficulty. Lowest hanging fruit imaginable. This is the part that most people completely miss. They look at the seed keyword, see 500 monthly searches, and write it off. But the real opportunity is in the hundreds or thousands of individual location pages, each one ranking for its own branded keywords and city specific terms. Think about why someone Googles a specific facility name (branded keyword intent)Some of them are just trying to find the website. But a lot of those people are doing research. They want to know if this place is actually good. They want something unbiased, not the facility's own marketing page telling them everything is wonderful. p.s. after talking to Kimi (CEO of Samslist), I learned that this is the exact strategy with Sam's list that took them to 200k+ in revenue - they created the non-biased source of truth for people looking up a specific financial advisor or accountant. If you can be the source of truth that gives families real, enriched, honest data about these places, you earn their trust during one of the hardest decisions they'll ever make. And if you earn that trust? That's how someone becomes a lead. Don't forget that even though dementia care is the initial deal breaker, the research doesn't stop there. People want to know about quality of care, how residents are treated, what kinds of activities and programs are offered. Your directory can surface all of that and set you apart from everyone else. So if you're stuck on what to build, here's the playbook.Find a proven market where established directories are already making real money. That validation is a biggie. Then find the variable within that market that is a genuine deal breaker for a significant group of people. Build your directory around that variable. Create pages for each location, which naturally captures city specific and branded search traffic. And enrich those pages with data that actually helps people make a decision. You don't need to win the whole market. You just need to own the niche within the niche. A saturated market doesn't mean there's no room. It means the demand has been proven. Your job is to find the corner of it where the stakes are high enough that people need a dedicated resource. That's the highest probability play I know. Best, Frey {{ address }} |