Reality Check: How Many In Your Niche?

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Reality Check: How Many In Your Niche?

tangor

7:33 am on Oct 24, 2017 (gmt 0)

Broad descriptions only (no specifics, no urls).

Site: Entertainment, specific to single author
Site size (current): 1,008 pages, 1280 images
Competitors when started (1996): < 30
Competitors now (2017): 24,730
FB encroachment: >1000
Twitter: <100

Commentary:

Competitors are identified by domain/urls, not number of competing PAGES

Site selected is earliest I started, hobby, continues (and will continue as it is a hobby), but the numbers (and the scrapers of my content is immense) of competitors has grown significantly in the last five years. More noise, more competition, falling traffic as the pie gets sliced smaller year on year.

Early EDU backlinks and many COM keep the site page one or two, but ranking within those pages filp flops like crazy and getting worse. New content, move to responsive, leaning down js/special effects, etc. has kept the site fresh.

What is your experience and general response to the competition?

tangor

7:47 am on Oct 24, 2017 (gmt 0)

Clarify what domain/urls means: These are competing domains identified in SERPS. I take snap shots of the first 10 pages on a monthly basis for a precise query and run those through a script to put that info into a database. G and B both. 99 times out of 100 they prove to be direct competition. Fun thing is most don't last but sadly there is just as many NEW coming in. HOWEVER, turns out those that don't last are STILL THERE years later (when I click just to check), enough to make it problematic they aren't still in competition.

Side note: B has more entries than G in the above scenario.

martinibuster

1:18 pm on Oct 30, 2017 (gmt 0)

I'm only mildly interested in what competitors are doing. I'm disinterested in competitors in my top ten, that kind of thing.

I'm mostly interested in what others in my niche are doing right. Some of what they do that make them successful, I won't be able to reproduce, so I don't go there. So I focus on my strengths, especially on building something different and hopefully better that people find enough value in that they recommend it to their friends. I'm only partially focusing on ranking sites. I'm equally if not more in it for building destinations. That's why I'm not overly curious about the top ten.

So my reality check is focusing on how well I've done in becoming a destination, less so about Google rankings.