When researching a product/market

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rickyjupiter

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Nov 8, 2011
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Found a market i'm interested in, and when doing research i've noticed that most of the results on Google are affiliate sites for the product. Competition doesn't seem to fierce, checked SerpIQ (how reliable is that btw?), and there are only a couple sites that have done good SEO work.

But my question is the fact that those keywords are mostly affiliate sites tell me that the market is saturated and there isn't money to be there, or that there is and I can outrank them and sell?

Thanks.
 


The only way to get the correct answer to that question is to ask them yourself. Either enter the market and kick ass with a quality product, or pick a new market.
 
Honestly, check out the sites on the first page. Are they using meta tags? Do they have the keyword in their url? Basically look at all the things you'd do to optimize your site; if a large majority aren't very optimized it'll be a cake walk to establish your site and utterly dominate the competition.
 
If there are lots of affiliate sites, then there sure is money to be made. You don't see vultures circling an empty spot in the desert , do you? Check those sites' inbound links and pr to get an idea how much effort and money it would cost you to outrank them.
 
Judging from SerpIQ trial results their off page SEO looks weak for probably 7 out of the 10 sites. So I think I could get top 5 on multiple, but how do I check inbound links and PR? Is there a program for that?
 
I prefer to do it manually, ahrefs.com was already suggested, I would give it another bump too. baclinkwatch.com is also a good tool for backlink checking.

Generally I look at two things:

#1: Backlinks (ahrefs.com)
With ahrefs you're giong to be able to see what kind of linking is going on. Is the person still link building? How many links are there? What kind of links does he have? What kind of effort is going into marketing the website? Looking at their backlinks should be able to give you a good indication of this.

#2: PageRank

Some people are going to scream at me probably. But I think PR is a quick easy indication of how Google views the website. If you see a website targeting your keyword that you are wanting to target and they have a PR5, you're probably going to find it fairly difficult to beat them.

The easy exception to this rule is that they may have all their backlinks pointing to a different keyword related to yours. If that's the case, then Google respects them enough to rank them for your keyword, but they could potentially be easily beat.
 
Also when I check Google Keyword, it comes up at 2,000 exact searches a month. SerpIP tells me 400.

Who do I believe?
 
I don't know where SerpIQ gets their numbers from for sure. I've always just used the Google Keyword Tool because I'm confident they have the data available to create such numbers whereas third party software does not.

I'm not knocking SerpIQ, I think it's good for competitor analysis. I've also seen before where I had a keyword that had a huge number like 2K exact match searches... I checked again a week later and Google Keyword Tool showed less than 250. That was a huge difference, but for the most part I've always personally relied on the Google Keyword Tool for that information.

Others may know something I don't...
 
I always find it interesting when people give advice regarding outranking competitors in SERPs. There are SO MANY variables that go along with it that no one can give you a simple answer without you first providing a lot of information.

For example if you wanted to rank for Payday Loans who are we to tell you that you can't and it won't be profitable? We don't know you, or your budget, or your SEO skills or your 100+ SEO Team's skills for that matter because you didn't tell us any of this info. We just know it's not easy, but we don't know if it's worth the effort for you to do or not.

People need to clearly define their goals before asking SEO questions generically.

We also have no clue how you plan to monetize it, your budget, etc.

Some people may make $2/lead/click/whatever while others who have experience may be able to squeeze $5+ out of it. Obviously those who only make $2 won't be able to dump near as much into it as those who make $5+. Thus knowing if you should do it or not is up in the air.

You see where I`m going with this ?

It's like someone who does PPC for the same offer as someone else and wonders how they can pay 2x or 3x as much for the same keywords/ads. Experience, and knowing what you are doing to make money is what it comes down too.

In the end only YOU know if it's worth it for you to try to outrank them because you know all the numbers, and were just guessing based on basic information you provide.

SerpIQ, PageRank, # of Backlinks, etc are just metrics you need to learn to understand over time so that you can estimate the challenge of passing up the existing sites in SERPs. What might be hard for you might be not so hard for someone else, and vice-versa.

If you provide us with a budget (one-time / monthly), SerpIQ, PR, Backlink Info, domain EMD or not, domain age, site goals (thin affiliate or kickass unique content quality site) then we can help out more.

Keep in mind backlink info != simply quantity of links. You need to REALLY analyze the other competitors backlinks and start to understand the entire backlink profile so you can profile competitors in the space you are researching and plan it out.
 
I was mostly wondering if it is seen as a general good thing or bad thing whether the results pages are flooded with affiliate sites. I'm new, and it was a question I had. I'm not asking you to tell me if it will be easy. I'm only asking if i'm looking at the right indicators, or fighting windmills.

Another question....say I want to start a site about a part of the body with content about that body parts health, then a page for each ailment with an affiliate product linked to help said ailment. Am I going about it wrong? Should I stick to only EMD's? Not all the sites for the keywords i'm interested are EMDs.
 
rickyjupiter said:
Another question....say I want to start a site about a part of the body with content about that body parts health, then a page for each ailment with an affiliate product linked to help said ailment. Am I going about it wrong? Should I stick to only EMD's? Not all the sites for the keywords i'm interested are EMDs.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a fine strategy. EMDs are nice for a little boost on whatever that keyword is, but they're not a magic bullet.
 
PHPGator said:
I don't know where SerpIQ gets their numbers from for sure.
Click to expand...

our search volume and cpc data comes from SEMRush, which ultimately comes from Google. They have an enterprise parthership with Google for the data and update their own databases about monthly. Google generally mixes together a few different data sources to get their volume numbers (toolbars, mobile, etc) while SEMRush is just going to give you the total web search volume, so you'll get conservative values from SEMRush but that is actually preferred to inflated values.
 
dchuk, that is interesting to know. I'll have to start keeping that in mind in that case! I would rather have a conservative number as well, inflated numbers are never a good thing when you are trying to determine what to market.
 
So how can I tell i'm hitting for my keywords? Made the site, installed Wordpress, have the keywords on the site, multiple posts with the different keywords, put meta tags in my header, made categories....but when I run it on ahrefs.com it says no keywords listed.

Is that because the site is freshly made? Do I have to create some backlinks first? Just confused a bit on that, trying to make sure I am doing it right.
 
rickyjupiter said:
Do I have to create some backlinks first? Just confused a bit on that, trying to make sure I am doing it right.
Click to expand...

Yes. In very, very low competition niches a Wordpress site could end up in the first few pages of Google with no work other than good content. But that's rare. You'll need backlinks of some sort to start ranking. You could do some manual blog commenting, social bookmark submissions, or just submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

I'm not sure but you might need a different rank tracker to start with (since ahrefs might not have crawled your site yet.) One where you tell it to specifically look for your site based on a keyword. Do yourself a favor and sign-up for a free account at MicrositeMasters.com to do this. They'll let you track 10 keywords for free.
 
rickyjupiter said:
So how can I tell i'm hitting for my keywords? Made the site, installed Wordpress, have the keywords on the site, multiple posts with the different keywords, put meta tags in my header, made categories....but when I run it on ahrefs.com it says no keywords listed.

Is that because the site is freshly made? Do I have to create some backlinks first? Just confused a bit on that, trying to make sure I am doing it right.
Click to expand...

I think you were looking at the "SERPs Analysis" at ahrefs.com. This is all about backlinks. If you want to know what Google may rank your site for a quick and easy way to do it (beyond Google Webmasters) is just to do a word cloud on your website.

You can use this one here: Wordle - Create

It is just a quick and easy way to make sure your content is organized around words that you want to rank for.
 
Perhaps throw a small social bookmark package at your site with your kws as anchor text . This is a great way to have site indexed and
Get a nice boost for kw
 
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