We were having a team meeting in the pub the other day (seriously dude, that’s how we roll) about what work we had done in weird niches. One of our team members, Mark, brought an ex client who sold mechanical seals and o ring seals (link provided but brand shall remain nameless) and what the creative / SEO approach was for this particular project.

You see tackling obscur niches can be tricky for all marketers, you may well already know this.

The conclusions that we reached are:

• Search volume needs to be taken very lightly, your client may be selling something very valuable and therefore even a single sale could produce an Return On Investment (ROI) for them.
• Some businesses like the mechanical seal sellers have a customer who does not tend to Google for things, they either have a trade catalogue or they go to a local supplier for parts – a car garage is a good example.
• This shouldn’t deter you from still trying to do your best for the client, after all in the instance of selling O ring seals once the connection is made from seller to buyer that relationship is forged so as long as there is SOME volume you should go for it.
• Don’t trust search volume anyway, valid in other ways. If you selling mechanical seals to engineers then maybe they tend not to search for your product directly. They probably have their own obscur interest in O rings such as “what is the heat bearance of a 2 inch polymer O ring when used in a rocket system” or something crazy like that (we made that one up). So dive deep into your research, go speak to the seller AND buyers and ask nicely if they will talk to you about their industry. You should also leverage forums, YouTube, Reddit etc because these can be great sources of information when it comes to the type of information these guys really want to know.
• Sometimes it’s more important to dig deep into the technical information and provide this data for engineers (which is what Mark did in the case of the mechanical O Ring guys). Engineers then share this in their forums etc and you get a win.

This obviously is just a single case which was brought up in our conversation and if have some suggestions of your own then we’d love to continue this discussion with you in our comment section below or on one of our social media platforms.

We hope this has been of use – see you soon readers!