The keyword research for niche sites is probably the key factor in whether it will be successful. Having researched your keywords properly you will be better equipped to know how many people are searching for your term and the relative competition for building a site around a certain keyword. Perhaps a better question to ask is perhaps should you build a site this way and will it be beneficial?
Keyword Research For Niche Sites – What Is A Niche Site?
A niche site is basically a website built around a key word or phrase. A few years ago Google gave preference to websites built with their keywords in the domain name. Now this strategy is not as effective because many would-be marketers built sites in this way to take advantage of this ‘loop hole’ in Google’s organics search results. Google is smart though and needs to keep reinventing itself to bring the very best content for its users. If it doesn’t keep doing this, another internet search engine may take first place and they will lose money.
Niche sites do still work however and choosing your niche is best done after you have thoroughly researched your keywords. You can do this using Google’s own keyword planner or even one of the many other keyword research tools available to buy. Google’s planner is a free resource though and can still give you a load of information.
Keyword Research For niche Sites – What Do You Do?
Firstly you need a topic. Think about something which you can write about for a long, long time. You can still do niche sites based on something you don’t know about. Pat Flynn did this with his Security guard training niche site. Read more about this in creating niche sites. He found the security guard niche to be searched for over 2000 times a month using the Google keyword tool (or planner as it is now called).
Simply plug your main keyword into the planner and click on “get ideas”.
Keyword Research For Niches Sites – Step 1
You should then get a list of relating keywords together with the number of monthly searches for your term. As you can see at the time of writing this “security guard training” gets a massive 9900 monthly searches. When Pat Flynn was creating the site it was much lower – around 2000 I believe. Ideally when looking for a search term to build a site around you should have at least 2000 monthly searches for it to be worth your while. Otherwise you simply won’t get enough traffic to turn a profit.
As you can see in the image below, beside the search terms is a monthly search number. This shows how many people search this term every month. Next to that is a suggested bid amount. This is for if you are placing adverts on Google’s Adwords platform. You would need to pay up to this amount per click if you ran an advert for this particular keyword. With niche sites however, we are not concerned with paid advertising. Niche sites are built to rank on Google in the free search results.
Keyword Research For Niche Sites – Step 2
So if you have found a keyword combination for your chosen subject and it has over 2000 results per month then the next step is to determine how competitive your niche is. To do this simply type your keyword combination into Google’s search bar. As you can see below, security guard training is now a massively competitive niche with over 3 million results. To find a niche we can rank for you need one ideally with less than 1 million results.
You can also place your main keyword “in quotes” to get more feedback as to how difficult it would be to compete with other sites on Google. Ideally your keyword would bring back less than 10,000 results for “phrase match” when doing this. The phrase match search tells you how many other websites are using this term on their websites. The lower the number the better your chances of ranking your website become.
Keyword Research For Niche Sites – Finding Your Niche
This research takes time so don’t expect to find a keyword term immediately which fits the bill. Also, don’t rush this process. Rushing ahead and choosing a keyword which doesn’t fit the criteria can mean your site won’t rank. All your time will be wasted if you choose a bad keyword which doesn’t meet the criteria. You can be a little flexible with the numbers and they are meant only as a guide. However, don’t be too flexible with them or you could find your site doesn’t rank.
You can also download my ebook “Niche Blogging For Profit” which goes into more detail on this and show the exact method I use to get targeted visitors to my website.
Keyword Research For Niche Sites – Found Your Keyword?
Let’s say you’ve found your keyword and it fits all the criteria set out in this post. You can find various keyword simply by plugging in various themed keywords into the keyword planner. Test the ones which will most likely make a good themed site. Once you have found your keyword and it meets the criteria you are ready to go! Just make sure your site is the best there is. Don’t think that just because your site has a great keyword that Google will rank it and keep it ranked. It needs to be a cut above the rest for it to last. Ideally your website should stand the test of time and will bring in a nice passive income for years to come. But unless you create a resource which people will want to come to, it simply won’t happen. Do your research on content too.
Google has a number of factors which it uses in its algorithms. You can’t and shouldn’t ‘trick’ the search engines. It simply won’t work long term. Create an awesome site and keep building it.
Keyword Research For Niche Sites – Other Methods
It’s worth mentioning here that there are other ways which offer more certainty than aiming for the top place in Google’s free search engines. Ranking on Google has always been a tricky process. It’s not an exact science. I worked very hard on several sites and eventually dropped the whole idea of niche sites several years ago. You have to have a passion for your site/s or they can fall off Google very fast when you don’t keep up with them, or if they aren’t good enough.
Aiming to rank a site and keep it ranked is a very tentative business model. A lot of people have been burned following this path. Even those who have done exceptionally well out of it have fallen foul to an algorithm change which meant their website falling off the searches entirely.
To build a sustainable business online you need the right model and multiple streams of traffic to your products. Learn more and access a free video series here.