What are niches and primary niches, and how do they shape my plan?

Sound familiar?

"What counts as a niche?" "Where do I declare one?" "Why does the plan keep suggesting vestibular content?" (Almost certainly because someone on your team declared it.) "Does it matter how specific we are?" It matters enormously, and it is the single most powerful connection between your team and your content plan.

What's happening

A niche is a clinician's declared expertise: the specific things they actually treat, recorded in their profile. In the profile editor at https://content.co-kinetic.com/my-clinic/clinic-profile, niches live in three sections:

• Conditions you most often treat: the three to six conditions they see most, specifically named ("rotator cuff tendinopathy", not "shoulder pain").
• Treatments and techniques: the techniques that set them apart (dry needling, McKenzie Method), not the baseline repertoire.
• Patient groups you specialise in treating: the populations they have focused experience with (postnatal mothers, adolescent dancers, runners). This section used to be called "specialist niches".

When a clinician declares a niche, it activates the matching topic area for your clinic. That topic area is a whole structure: a comprehensive hub page plus a set of supporting pages, each answering one specific patient question. Declared expertise we have already curated activates with all that quality pre-built; declare something rarer and the platform builds a complete topic area for your practice on the fly, same architecture either way. Your assessment can also propose a niche your site clearly shows but nobody declared, always subject to your confirmation: nothing activates behind your back 🔒.

Why it works this way

This is the core principle of the whole platform: the plan cannot recommend content your clinic has no one qualified to author. Every topic area is anchored to a real clinician's declared expertise, because when the content is published, that clinician's name and profile will stand behind it, and AI search will follow the pathway from the article to that named profile to verify them. A clinic publishing on topics nobody there demonstrably treats is exactly the pattern AI search has learned to distrust.

And strength matters, not just presence. The plan's scoring weighs whether a topic matches a clinician's declared expertise and how strongly. A topic that sits at the centre of a profile (specifically named, with its short depth detail filled in: who they typically see it in) counts for far more than a bare entry in a list. That central, best-evidenced specialism is what we mean by a clinician's primary niche: the thing they are most known for. Making a topic a clinician's primary niche is one of the two real levers for pushing that topic up the plan 📈 — the plan reads the strongest clinician evidence for each topic. (The other lever is a practice priority; they stack.)

Specificity is the multiplier on all of it. "Shoulder pain" scores the same to an AI as every other clinic's "shoulder pain". "Rotator cuff tendinopathy, mostly overhead athletes in their 40s" is a clinician an AI can confidently recommend for a specific question.

What to do now

1. Open https://content.co-kinetic.com/my-clinic/clinic-profile and open each clinician's profile.
2. Check the three sections above cover what each clinician genuinely treats, named specifically. Anything missing is a topic area your plan currently cannot build.
3. Fill in the short depth detail on each entry: a sentence is enough, and it is what turns a mention into evidenced expertise (it earns bonus points too).
4. For a topic your practice wants pushed up the plan, make sure the clinician who genuinely carries it has it properly evidenced, then see "How do I push a topic up my content plan?" for the full playbook.

The question behind the question

"Will this over-influence my content — am I going to get pigeonholed into that topic?" No. Declaring a niche, even a primary niche, just gives that topic slightly more weighting in the algorithm; it is one factor among the many the plan weighs, not a takeover. Your plan stays balanced across your services, your conditions and your whole team's expertise — a primary niche tilts it, it never floods it. So declare what is true, declare it specifically, and the plan builds around your actual team 🙂.

The next question is usually...

• How do I push a topic up my content plan?
• What do practice priorities actually do?
• Why does my clinician's profile matter so much?
• How are profile scores worked out, and how do I raise mine?

Still stuck? This usually means...

• A declared niche has not produced any plan content. Check it is specifically named with its depth questions answered — a bare entry sends a weak signal — then wait for the next plan regeneration ("When does my content plan change or refresh?").
• The plan keeps suggesting a topic nobody wants. Someone on the team probably declared it: check each profile's three niche sections, and mark unwanted suggestions "Not relevant" meanwhile.
• You cannot decide what counts as a niche versus a routine part of the job. Ask "would a colleague send this patient to this clinician specifically?" If yes, it is a niche. Declare it specifically and answer the depth questions.