How Does Online Marketing Work in Restricted Categories?
In e-commerce and online publication, there are certain categories in which some traditional marketing methods aren’t available. In restricted categories, you can’t advertise and draw traffic to your website in the same way that you would in other niches. That changes the online marketing game completely and forces you to think outside the box.
In this guide, we’re going to explain exactly what you need to know about marketing a website in a restricted category. There are many things that you can’t do, but there’s a reason why many people operate sites in these categories: The rewards can be great. That means it’s worth the effort to learn how to work within the restrictions.
What Is a Restricted Category, and What Are the Restrictions?
A restricted category is any category in which traditional online advertising avenues are not available. If you have a website in a restricted category, you usually can’t bid for keywords on search engines such as Google and Bing. You also generally can’t promote your content on major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. These restrictions remove two of the biggest online marketing strategies that websites in traditional niches use.
If you owned a furniture store, for example, you would simply go to Google Ads and bid on a keyword like “furniture in (city name)” to bring paid traffic to your site. That’s not possible in a restricted category.
A restricted category is generally any category in which one or both of these things are true.
Advertisements would be inappropriate for children to view because the products advertised can only be purchased by adults. These categories typically include adult content, online casinos, hemp products and tobacco-related products such as nicotine pouches.
Advertising in the category is regulated by state and/or federal laws. These categories might include businesses like payday loan companies, debt settlement services and bail bond services.
SEO Matters More in Restricted Categories
If you can’t advertise a website in a restricted category through traditional avenues, how are you going to get traffic when the site is still new? Your primary marketing method will always be search engine optimization (SEO). In essence, SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to ensure that it appears as prominently as possible on the results pages of Google and other search engines.
SEO has on-site and off-site components. Here’s an overview of what they entail.
On-Site SEO: On-site SEO consists of improving the content on your own website in a way that helps to signal the site’s relevance to Google. The biggest component of on-site SEO is the quality and helpfulness of your site’s text content. It’s also important to optimize your website for machine readability because it helps to ensure that your site will be understood by traditional and AI-enhanced search engines.
Off-Site SEO: Off-site SEO consists primarily of placing links to your website on sites other than yours. This is also called link building. A website’s backlinks – both the quality and the quantity thereof – factor heavily into how authoritative and relevant a website looks to Google’s ranking algorithm. A good way to build links is by reaching out to owners of other websites and asking what it would take for them to add a link to your site. Having great content that people want to link to also helps.
Direct Advertising May Still Be an Option
You can’t advertise on most major platforms if your website is in a restricted category, but that doesn’t necessarily make all advertising avenues unavailable to you. There are many independent publishers who sell their own advertising space instead of displaying automated ads from services like Google Ads. These publishers will sell space to you if their sites are related to your niche, and the best part is that their audiences may be particularly interested in what you’re offering.
Some examples of publishers who might have advertising opportunities for you if they’re related to your site’s category include:
Blogs and newsletters.
Magazines and newspapers.
Trade publications.
Discussion forums.
If a website’s audience consists primarily of people interested in your business’s category, that’s hugely beneficial because it could mean that your ads will attract more of a response than they would have on a general-interest site. Also, placements might be surprisingly inexpensive to obtain because niche sites often serve smaller audiences. You want to be completely certain, though, that the site actually does have an audience and isn’t just reporting fake traffic numbers.
Work With Influencers, but Vet Them Carefully
Working with an influencer isn’t extremely different from placing an ad with a traditional online publisher, but it’s different enough that it merits its own section in this guide. An influencer is a person who uses an image- or video-based platform to reach their audience. Influencers exist on many different platforms, but the people with the largest audiences today are typically on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. They usually monetize their content through sponsorships or by posting pictures or videos that are explicit advertisements.
Influencer marketing has changed a great deal over the past several years, but it remains as relevant as ever. You need to approach it carefully, though, because working with an influencer isn’t as simple as just paying someone to talk about your product if you want the campaign to produce results. These are the three most important things to keep in mind.
People understand that an influencer’s primary job is to drive product sales. You need to be very careful about the way your campaign is executed because you don’t want the influencer’s followers to ignore it.
You also need to make sure that the influencer actually has followers. People can buy fake followers on social media platforms, and AI makes it easy to create fake engagement. If an influencer doesn’t have engaged human followers, the campaign won’t be successful.
If the product that you sell is only for adults, the campaign needs to be configured so that it’s only visible to adults. All major platforms have this feature.
