Broad niche vs laser-focused: my two coffee sites

Broad niche vs laser-focused: my two coffee sites

Month 1: Two bets. Site A: "coffee" — everything from beans to machines to cafe culture. Site B: "espresso machines under $500" — laser-narrow.

Month 5: Site A struggled to rank for anything specific — too unfocused, Google couldn't tell what it was about. Site B was already top 5 for its narrow terms. Focus won early.

The turn: Month 8, Site B hit a ceiling. I'd exhausted the topic — only so many "espresso machine under $500" angles exist. Traffic plateaued at 9k and stayed there. Too narrow to grow.

Meanwhile broad Site A, once I'd built topical clusters, kept finding new room to expand. Slower start, no ceiling. Month 14: A at 34k and climbing, B stuck at 9k.

The takeaway: laser-narrow wins the first six months — easy to rank, easy to become "the site" for that thing. But narrow has a ceiling you'll hit. Start focused enough to win early, but pick a niche with adjacent rooms to expand into. "Espresso machines" had no second act. "Coffee at home" did.