Niching is one of those topics we’ve beaten to death over the years. In theory, there are a ton of benefits. But in practice, it’s hard to actually do.
Either we go too broad: “I build websites for small businesses.” Hard to call that a niche when 99.9% of businesses in the US are, by definition, small businesses. None of us thought you built the Apple website 😅
Or we freak out about who we’re excluding: “If I say I build websites for plumbers, what happens when a lawyer lands on my site? Won’t it scare them off?”
A few years back, a plugin I use listed my agency as one of two they recommend for implementing a very specific service related to their tool.
It’s not a flashy landing page or some complex funnel with affiliate commissions. It’s a simple text link buried inside a 4,000+ word, highly technical blog post… surrounded by 170 other links.
Finding it is basically a scavenger hunt. You’d have to be deep in the weeds, looking for this exact outcome, and already convinced you need help.
It doesn’t bring in loads of traffic to my site. But when it does, those are great leads.
They don’t see me as “one of many.” They think I’m one of two people on the planet who can help them.
That, to me, is what niching is about. Yes, it shrinks the audience, but that’s not the important part. What’s important is that it shrinks the competition.
When someone needs a website, you’re competing with thousands of other agencies, DIY platforms, AI solutions, and those damn nephews who are “good with computers”. But when someone needs a very specific solution and you’re the only one talking about it, it’s as if you’re the only answer.
They’re not comparing five proposals, negotiating on price, or asking if you know what you’re doing. They already assume you’re the expert.
At that point, the “sales call” isn’t about persuasion, it’s about logistics.
Getting specific about who and what you help with seems scary because it feels like it shrinks the potential client pool… but I don’t think that’s a rational fear when you think about how small even “big” agencies are.
Launching 2 sites a month is a pretty impressive pace…
Even if you niched into left-handed female optometrists practicing in the United States, you couldn’t serve all of them over the next nine decades (yes, I did some loose math).
The real risk isn’t that our niching makes your audience too small, it’s that we’re not the obvious choice for anything specific. Niching isn’t a box you live in, it’s a door with a big, unignorable, flashing neon sign with your ideal client’s name on it, inviting them to come on in.
