Before we get into the article lets explain some of the technical words that are included in this article for the new readers that are in the first steps of internet marketing and making money online.
SEO = Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of optimizing your webpages to rank better in the search engines.
SERPs = Search Engine Ranking Pages, the pages you navigate through with your preferred search engine after you perform a search query.
Niche = A niche (or in this case a niche market) is a subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing.
If you are into internet marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) or simply want to make money online then you do know how much harder it is to rank a website in the SERPs for a specific term if that term has high competition.
OK, just in case you got confused let me explain what competition means in search engine rankings, competition is the number of webpages that tend (or already do) rank for a specific term or in other words, webpages that have included the same keyword that you are about to target somewhere in their webpage, could be in the body text, title or even meta description.
Making money online not necessarily means it is going to be easy like 1 2 3, but neither it does mean that you have to take the hard road to make money on internet, this is what this article is about, to help you identify these unsaturated niches (aka, low competitive niches) and lets see how we do that.
1). Finding the niche keyword
This process includes keyword research as main thing, you can use any free tool such as the Google AdWords tool, WordTracker or other free keyword research tools you can find out, the rest of this tutorial is based on Google AdWords Keyword tool research.
To end up into the perfect niche you need to start your research from the top keyword, in this example I will use the keyword: car to then digg deeper into the alternative keywords and find a niche for my new website. Once you have made the keyword research for “car” with AdWords keyword tool you get a list of keywords with global monthly search, local monthly search and competition in AdWords (which shows how many people are bidding for that specific keyword). You then want to list the keywords based on Global Monthly search by simply clicking that button in the results page, this will help you identify keywords by search volume, scroll down to the list and then we see a new keyword “car seat accessories” which I would consider a great niche and it has over 450k searches a month, it is a keyword that includes products for sale, products are relatively cheap (mid price I would say) and you have loads of car lovers that do take care of their cars and constantly improve the look of their car.
Identified that keyword, we perform another search but this time we use the keyword that we found, “car seat accessories” and we get another list of keywords that are related to car seat accessories and they are all with 18k + of search volume monthly (which means, the keyword with the lowest volume, aka 18k, has an estimate of 600 searches a day (if we divide 18000/30). Excellent, isn’t it? Now we got the keywords for our new niche, what we need to do is check the competition for this keyword.
2). Finding the competition for our keyword
To find more regarding the competition for your keyword we head over to Google.com and perform 3 searches, one would be the regular search for our keyword, then the exact match of the keyword and finally we will perform a search to find out which websites use these keywords in their title.
Regular search
To perform a regular search we simply write down our keyword in the Google input search box and we get to know that there are a little over 17 million of websites that do mention words that are contained in our keyword somewhere in their website, pretty tough you might think right? Well not exactly, as this websites might have used the keyword “car” then “accessories” and “seats” in their website but the words are not in the exact order as our keyword, hence we get this much of results. What we do need to do now is refine our search and see how many websites use those words in the exact same order as our website.
Exact keyword order results
To find out how many websites do use our new keyword in the exact same order we need to perform a search in Google for “exact match”, we do this by wrapping our keyword with quotation marks (“car seat accessories”). Once we search on Google for “car seat accessories” (include quotes) we do see that there are actually 192000 websites that use the exact order of the keywords in their website, so from 17million there are just little less then 200k websites that use the exact key phrase anywhere in their webpage. Now we need to see which websites are trying to rank for this particular keyword.
Finding Competition that tend to rank for our keyword
The best indicator that can show us which are the websites that are trying to rank for this keyword is to see how many websites have included this keyword in their title. To do this we will use a specific search query that will give as result only websites that have included the keywords in the title, I repeat this is a strong indicator that those websites are actually trying to rank for this specific keyword.
The query we will perform looks like this: allintitle:+car + seat +accessories, by just performing that search we can see that there are just a little less then 900.000 websites that use the exact keyword in their title, which indicates that in the Google SERPs there are less then 1million of websites that are trying to rank for that keyword.
Now we got most of the data that we needed to figure out, but unfortunately our research is not done yet because our real competitors are those 10 webpages that are already in the first page of Google SERPs for our keyword. So what we do need to know now, for webpage, is:
- Webpage PageRank (indicator of authority of the page that is ranking, which is determined by the number of quality inbound links)
- Inbound links to the page that is ranking (are they from authority sites or low quality ones)
- Total inbound links to the homepage of the site
- On-page optimization of the site (use of keywords in title, meta description, body)
- Anchor text used on inbound links
And we need to run these tests for all 10 websites if we really want to have a wider picture of who we need to outrank, but my best suggestion would be to check only the last 5 at the moment, until you start getting close enough to the first page since the last 5 are the weaker ones and could be easier outranked rather then the one in first position.
