Mal Darwen describes how to find and prioritize profitable niches with keyword research in Wordtracker's Keyword Tool
Read the transcript:
(By the way, I use the word 'niche' a lot in this video. I'm English, so I pronounce it "neesh" rather than "nitch". Please bear with my pronunciation!)
Hi there,
Thanks for tuning in. My name's Mal and I'm going to show you how you can identify and prioritize new niche markets to target from keyword research.
There are three things to consider when you're looking for a new niche:
1 - Demand
The search volumes in Wordtracker can give you an idea of the relative demand for each niche inside a larger market - for example, if I'm searching on a head term like 'gardening', the keywords at the top of the list can be considered as niches (and I'll show you how to explore those in more detail later).
2 - Profitability
Google's a really useful tool for establishing this. If there are people advertising on Google around your chosen niche, then that suggests that there's enough demand to warrant investment in advertising to capture those searchers and bring them into your marketing fold.
3 - Competition
It's all well and good finding a heavily searched market with lots of clues around its profitability - but we shouldn't just leap in there without establishing how much competition there is out there vying for the same attention. Wordtracker can show you which keywords have lots of competition, and which have less. Ideally we're looking for less competition, as too much competition can make it hard to rank for a keyword.
I've been hearing lots of chatter lately about organic food, organic clothing, organic farming and even organic shoes - so I'm going to start looking around that market to find a niche that I can work on to attract traffic and sell some products. Looking at [www.magazines.com](http://www.magazines.com) is a good loose starting point (but I'm sure you'll have plenty of your own ideas about where to start), so I'll just put 'organic' into their search box to see what comes back - and 'organic gardening' seems pretty popular.
I'm going to head into Wordtracker now, and with the 'gardening' word in my head, I'm going to start there. Gardening is the market, and I'm looking for the 'organic gardening' niche - but there are going to be plenty of others there.
I just create a new project, and then start a search for 'gardening'.
Many of the keywords at the top of the list here could be contenders for a new niche - so I'm going to do a little general research here, which Wordtracker makes really simple. Just clicking 'search' and 'search & save' by each keyword means that I can build up a really quick assessment of the search behaviour for each of these niches - and the search volume for each of the keywords expresses the relative size of each of those niches.
I can find more by putting my seed word into the related tool - and using search and save in exactly the same way.
These keywords reveal a searcher's needs and desires - and by finding out what those needs and desires are, you can satisfy them by publishing great content which guides them to the products or services they're looking for.
Now that I've got a few lists saved, I'm going to head back to my main project page, and I can see all of them in an easy to read way. I can see at a glance which lists (think of a list as a niche) have the most keywords and the most searches - this tells me which market niches have lots of demand. It's fairly safe to ignore the actual numbers at this point - it's the relative values which are really important.
I've opened a list to look at the keywords (which in turn can even represent new niches) and find those which have lots of searches (demand) and not too much competition (supply) - those keywords can give me a way into a whole new market niche. Once I've established a keyword which I think I can build a niche from, I'm going to check if it's profitable.
In Google, I type in the keyword I'm interested in (using quotes so that I get more specific results). I can see that there are people already advertising on the search pages, which tells me that advertisers feel there's enough value in that niche to start trading - and that's all three elements of our research satisfied.
So once you've found the keyword that you want to build a niche from, try seeing who ranks for that keyword already - and take some of the keywords that they themselves are using on their pages to find the ones that will be most effective for you.
Once you've been up and running with your new niche for a while, you'll probably be faced with one of three results from your analytics reports:
1 - Not enough demand for my niche (low traffic)
In this case, try a niche a bit higher up - for example, if you're trading with 'organic gardening supplies', then perhaps that market isn't quite ready - so you could experiment with 'gardening supplies'.
2 - Too much competition for my niche (low search engine rankings)
In this scenario, you might need to niche down into a smaller market area and start from there - once you've built authority and trust for this smaller niche, you'll find it less of a challenge to get back to (and beyond) your original target niche.
3 - Traffic and conversions are great for this niche!
If you reach this point with your marketing, congratulations! Don't sit back, though, because there's more content to be written, more outreach to do on social media and more links to be built so that you can build up your brand and move into more competitive areas.
So now we've looked at how to identify potential niches, and assess their levels of competition in Wordtracker, and how to get a rough idea of whether a niche can be profitable from Google's search pages, it's time to take over the world (I mean, get to work...)
That's all for now. Drop us a line at support@wordtracker.com if you have any questions.
Bye for now
