How to Leverage Shoulder Niches to Increase Your Reach

Did you know that 87% of visionaries consider content as the core of their marketing strategies?

Content is king. It helps you connect with the right audience, get traction organically, and fuel your SEO. For this, you have to cater to topics that are relevant and best represent your respective niche.

But, over time, it's normal for you to run out of content ideas, especially if you've selected a highly specific or narrow niche.

A common mistake many businesses make here is that they start targeting generic queries or keywords not fitting for their niche. And as a result, they end up attracting junk traffic to the site.

A wise strategy would be to start exploring shoulder niches for content ideas to target a relevant audience, boost your reach, and ensure seamless business growth.

Here's how you do it.

Shoulder Niche Defined

A shoulder niche represents a group of topics or queries related to your core niche. For example, if a niche you're targeting is fitness, its shoulder niches can be sports, meditation, yoga, and so on.

Leveraging shoulder niches, you cover topics closely related to your core niche. This helps maximize your efficiency and boost your reach exponentially.

Targeting shoulder niches enables you to be consistent with content creation, explore new ways to generate traffic, and capture quality leads without having to compromise on your content's relevance.

How to Target a Shoulder Niche

The process of identifying a shoulder niche may slightly vary from finding the core niche best suited for your business. Here are a few tips that can help.

1. Keyword Research

The first step to finding the ideal shoulder niche(s) for targeting is exploring the right keywords that resonate with your core niche.

Your objective here is twofold. First, find keywords that have a decent volume to boost your traffic. Second, assess the extent to which the newly explored keywords relate to the ones you already target.

The more closely tied your new keywords are to the ones used in your published content, the easier it would be for you to grow organically.

2. Competitor Research

If you have already done competitor research then skip this and move ahead. But, if you haven't then it's highly important that you identify who your competitors are in your respective niche.

Knowing your competitors can be useful when it comes to the selection of shoulder niche(s). You can't be the only one in your industry who has run out of relevant content ideas. Your competitors must also have faced similar challenges.

So, taking inspiration from your competitors' content strategy and knowing the keywords they target can be of great help.

3. Content Gap

Content gap analysis helps you explore the similarities and differences between your content strategy and that of your competitors.

It's an excellent tactic to compare competitors' keyword targeting strategies with yours to find untapped areas representing your core or shoulder niches.

However, doing such extensive analysis manually can be overwhelming. So, it's best that you use tools like SEMrush to cross-examine multiple competitors and make use of the insights.

4. Content Clusters

Once you've found potential keywords for targeting, the next step is creating content clusters. Here, you'd group similar keywords or topics to identify potential shoulder niches for targeting.

This would help you organize your research and make the niche selection easier. The goal here is to explore the niche(s) that show promise and weed out the ones that don't have much potential.

So, the content clusters with the most number of keywords having the highest relevance to your pillar keywords qualify the criteria.

5. Content Creation

Once you have found the ideal keywords for targeting, you should initiate the content creation process. Content works its magic when you produce it consistently to generate awareness and help the intended audience find fitting solutions.

So, get ready to connect with new people who have a lot of similar characteristics to the audience you currently target and a few unique traits.

6. Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are super important. They help you build authority in your respective niche, get traction, and attract new leads.

As you start covering new topics, you'd need quality backlinks to support the newly published content and enhance its search engine visibility. There are two ways for you to build links for your site.

The first is producing relevant and well-thought-out content to earn backlinks on reputable third-party sites. The second is guest posting to create quality backlinks for yourself without having to violate any guidelines that make you susceptible to link-based penalties.

Quality backlinks would fuel the search engine rankings of the new keywords that you target and help increase your reach when diving into the shoulder niche(s).

It's a Wrap

Leveraging shoulder niches enables you to consistently produce relevant content and grow in your core niche. It's one of the best strategies to boost your reach without having to compromise on the authenticity of your traffic or leads.

So, if you haven't started exploring your respective shoulder niches, it's high time you considered the possibility.