Broad authority website or niche specific, which is best?

Question

There are 2 schools of thought on the best approach to choosing a domain name and building a website. They are (1) build an umbrella site that is broad and authoritative, based on one higher demand keyword or (2) build a niche site that is of course, specific to one or two keywords, with far less demand.

Which of these do you think is best, in relation to seo and making money? Please give reasons for your answer.

Answer 1

There are a number of pros and cons

BUILD AN UMBRELLA SITE

Pros:

- can grow to become an authority site, which means great search engine rankings for a wide variety of keywords

- can be a one-stop destination of target audience where everything they need is on one site

- if you lose some keywords, the site still has hundreds of other keywords

- huge traffic potential

- faster to get links as other sites are more likely to link to this big site

Cons:

- requires more resources to create, develop, and grow

- when you get hit with a search engine penalty, your entire business falls

- it's like putting all eggs in one basket

NICHE SITE

Pros:

- easier to create, develop as it has a smaller scope

- allows you to dominate a segment, especially if the field is hard to crack with lots of authority sites

Cons:

- limited traffic

- hard to grow and get traffic

- to earn more, you need to have more of these smaller sites

For years, we've followed the broad authority website approach, and it works great for our business model (advertising). It is easier to attract advertisers to the site, and even using third party ad programs such as Adsense yields extremely good results because it is harder to be smartpriced, it has more diverse keywords, and traffic is better.

BUT -- we got hit by a Google penalty 3 year ago, and lost 80% of Google traffic. That hurt big time, so we are adding other smaller niche sites to at least provide some backups for the main site.

Answer 2

For making money, if you are working on your own ie do not have employees, then build several niche specific sites

Answer 3

When people are visiting the web they are looking for specific information, fast. It makes snse then to target the audience very carefully and then become the authority that the audience wants.