How To Analyze Niches and Research Keywords

Lynn Terry’s webinar this week dealt with analyzing a niche using keyword research. Many people feel overwhelmed when starting to research a niche because they don’t know how to do it properly or what a successful niche consists of.

I’m going to show you how to successfully analyze a niche doing simple keyword research. For the purpose of this post, I’m going use “jewelry” as my example niche.

First of all, choose a keyword which is of interest to you. It could be a current trend or maybe a hobby you’re interested in and want to monetize. Use the free keyword suggestion tool to see how many other searches are being done each day on your particular term. Click on the keyword you want to use in your niche to get different variations of it.

From here you can go to Google and research your niche by entering your keyword. What you want to look for here is competition. Check to see how many sponsored links revolve around your niche, as well as the number of search results. Don’t feel discouraged if you see 6,000,000+ results. You’re only going to want to compete with the top 5 sites listed on the results page.

While you’re still on Google’s results page for your keyword, add + affiliate to your search phrase (example: jewelry affiliate). What this will give you is a list of sites that offer jewelry affiliate programs which will help you monetize your niche.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is another tool that will come in handy while doing your research. Enter the URL of the first site listed in Google for your keyword. Under the ‘Results’ heading, click ‘Inlinks’. Using the first drop down menu option, select ‘Except from this domain’. What this does is show you how many other sites are linking to your competition. Ideally, to be able to compete with the top 5 sites shown in Google, you should have at least 100 inlinks.

Once you’ve decided on a niche and a targeted keyword, you can begin building your site and competing to get within the top 5 results on Google for your keyword. It’s not uncommon to see this happen within one year, but I’ve seen some sites go right to the top in as little as 3 months. It all depends on how well you do SEO and how many sites you can get to link back to you.

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