Niche analysis as part of SEO

If one of the main reasons you’re creating a new site or blog is to make money then there’s an important process to complete before you touch any html. Picking the right niche or market is essential because entering any market where you can’t get to No1 is pointless.

So when I say niche what I really mean is keywords because if you want to make money from your site you need a specific type of traffic from Google and that demographic is people who want to buy.

I know that many webmasters are desperate to just dive in and start creating content but unless you analyse the market before you start it may be impossible to get to No1 or even worse when you do you may find the traffic is worthless. Here are a few main tips to help with the planning process if you’re new to SEO.

Finding the niche 

Whilst you may have an idea of what your site is going to be about you won’t know which niche the real money is in. For example say you built a site all about laptop reviews, that isn’t very niche at all and regardless of your SEO skills you’re unlikely to rank for “laptops” or even “laptop reviews”. Also laptops is a very broad term, a hundred people could type that into Google but each could have something different in mind, you need to understand visitor intent if you want to market the right advertising to them.

If on the other-hand you built a site centred around “laptops for students” which had reviews of cheap notebooks that were ultra-portable you would know exactly which affiliate ads to show them. In fact the conversion rate for the niche site may be twice that of the general laptop blog, and conversions equal money in your pocket.

Working out the competition

When you analyze a keyword like “laptops for students” you may be worried about the low volume of searchers looking for that. Whilst this is true, the fact that there is also much less competition for the phrase more than makes up for it. Would you rather be No1 in a small niche or on the third page for a larger term (only 2% of queries go past the 1st page)?

It’s not always easy working out how strong the competition is in any niche though, sometimes even with a low volume phrase another marketer has beaten you too it (especially if its product related).

There are some easy checks you can do though for the top few sites:

– Do they have the target keyword in their title tag?
– Is their whole site dedicated to this topic or just a single page?
– How many unique domains (find out using opensiteexplorer) are pointing to the page listed?
– How many of their backlinks are anchored to this phrase
– How old is their site

It’s not an exact list but then working out your competition isn’t an exact science either. Another point is that not everyone has the experience/resources to rank for each niche keyword, so it’s impossible to give a definitive list of what equals a niche what doesn’t.

However when in doubt the best bet is to start small and build up your SEO skill set, it’s the only way to learn. I hope this article has provided a little insight on niche analysis and how proper planning is the difference between making money and not.

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