Picking a niche and determining competition

0mitts

0mitts

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Nov 26, 2009
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Alright after pouring through tons of stickies on this site for weeks, reading, reading, and reading some more, there's just one major thing I can't quite wrap my head around.

When PICKING a niche website, how do you know how saturated the competition is? How do you know how difficult it will be to rank for those search terms?

Once I know what site I want to build I feel confident, I'm just afraid of picking something that I have no chance of competing in.

Some Google searches come up with a Top 10 of just pages like cnet, wikipedia, IGN, about.com, etc. Is it difficult to beat those sites?

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool a lot, so I know how to see WHAT people are searching for and in what volume, I just really don't understand how to determine how difficult my competition would be or how saturated that keyword is.

If someone could maybe take some time to explain this to me, or just direct me to some material on here that I may have missed or passed over I would GREATLY appreciate it. I really feel like this is my last major stumbling block before I can get rolling. I want to build a website, I just don't know what is worth picking! At this point I barely even care if it's monetizable, I just want to put something up and get my feet wet, since the motto of this site seems to be "learn by doing."

Thanks in advance for any helpful responses!
 


I've heard that this isn't always a good indicator, but I still believe it is fairly accurate. I would look at Google's Search Results on a specific keyword. It will tell you how many sites it found for that keyword in the top right corner of the results page. Look around at long-tail keywords too in the niche. You may find a good long tail keyword in a sub-niche that people are searching on and there is little competition for. I would consider anything less than about 100,000 to be a pretty small niche.

Secondly, I would look at the search results themselves too. Sometimes a keyword on Google will only show less than 100,000 results (which would be pretty uncompetitive typically) but the first 10 pages on the results show direct competitors. This could be a red flag.

With the niche I'm in now, it is fairly small, profitable, but only has what I would consider to be 10 direct competitors. I see them in the search results and they are who I'm competing against for SERP's.
 
Thinks I look for are;

allintitle: competition. If you search allintitle: Your Keywords Here, and there's 10k-20k sites showing, I look at that as a positive towards being able to compete in that niche.

backlinks. Do the top sites have tens of thousands of backlinks? If they don't, there's a good chance you can beat them at that game. Another positive.

Are the top ranking spots actual sites that are completely related to that niche or are they just a sub page of a domain? If it's the later, this is a good indication that it's probably not a site that you couldn't beat with a good keyword rich domain name. I hate it when I see an http://www.mycoolsite1111.com/keywords/mykeywords
site taking the top spot for any topic. You can't tell me that there isn't an entire site dedicated to that topic that's better than a sub page of a sub page.

If the top ten search results are cnet, wiki, amazon, etc. Those guys are difficult to compete against, so I might try to find another angle in that niche so you can actually get some decent SERP's, or abandon the niche altogether if necessary.

There's a hell of a lot more to the research than this, but these are the initial things I look at before I go any further. You can do this in a matter of minutes and see if your niche is worth pursuing or not.
 
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re the allintitle bit...

I read somewhere that one should use allintitle:"keywords here" (i.e. with quotes around the keywords) as apposed to the vinilla allintitle:keywords here (no quotes) as this will bring you an exact phrase match--much like google's regular quoted search option--and thus exact, so to speak, competition. i.e. "clown shoes" vs "clown who has very red shoes".

Would the quoted allintitle and allinachor be a more realistic indicator of the number of competing sites in the niche, or are all those other less specific titles contributing to the opposition at large?
 
You have to beat out the top 10 so do some research on them. Do a Yahoo linkdomain search for each page in the top 10 of your KW and see how many links they have. Can you get that many links? Or even close to it?
 
I use a couple of indicators. It depends on how big your site is going to be (how many articles, posts, pages etc). It also depends on how much link building you are willing to put in.

If you want quick and easy go for a keyword term that is under 10K when you search for it in "" in google. They can be hard to find but once you find them there is hardly any work involved to rank on page 1.

If you are comfortable putting in some work then anything under 100K in "" is still fairly easy to rank for.

If you are going to do a large site with lots of pages then under 200K is also doable.

Now for the competition I just check the top 10 results using the SEO for Firefox plugin. The plugin will show how many inbound links the sites have. Anything under 1000 is usually fine. Also check the PR of the sites, you don't want a page of PR5-7 they are unbeatable. You want a page of PR0-4 but not too many 4s.
 
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