It has been long claimed that niche is where the money is. It has certainly been true for a very long time, then the competition got fierce and it became more and more difficult to get returns in terms of online marketing and SEO. This may get more interesting again since there are indications that Google is about to put more value in the niche products and markets.

Searchmetrics made a study, focused on how does Google deal with niche-website and brands, and what can one take from it. The properties in the areas such as E-Commerce, travel, finance or healthcare were reviewed, and the top ten results for thousands of various keywords analyzed.

A more specific branches were selected in order to be able to compare different keyword sets. The good news is – it indeed appears that Google does like Niches and gives these preference. Which of course does not mean that building a successful niche site would be in any way easy.

Based on the findings from the Searchmetrics study, there are five key factors that are crucial to visibility in the search engines, and those are:

– pictures
– videos
– text length
– internal links
– tables

Those that are able to manage all these well should be rewarded with solid SERP’s. Of course, as always, there’s no bulletproof recipe for success and if the niche itself is popular and authentic makes for the most important part. A couple of remarks may be mentioned though.

When it comes to pictures, the broader selections is better and even the loading times may suffer a bit, it is still worth adding a proper and relevant pictures selection. What may be even more interesting is that relevant videos appear to be not so important, as the top ranking sites offer very little in the way of videos.

When it comes to text there are differences in the topics covered, anyway there was no site that would rank very high with less than 1 000 words per page – with some the average was closer to 2 500 words per page. Internal link structure should care for an easy navigation and being able to find the relevant contents as soon as possible.

One step further though appears to be if one uses tables in a relevant and suitable way – for comparison or similar. This seems to provide a nice boost in the rankings.