Finding A Profitable Niche Through Keyword Research

Keyword Research is identifying a specific word or phrase that searchers would use to find what they are looking for.  Although there are tools that can be purchased to do this research, it can easily be done with Google’s tools for free.

In our tutorial we’ll be searching for a profitable keyword for a blog we are building in a specific niche market.  In this case our niche market is “Little League Baseball” with our Micro Niche being “Little League Approved Bats.”

Micro Niche keywords most often consist of “Long Tail” key phrases that are targeted to a specific group of searchers, and have far less competition than the broader keywords.

A good niche keyword, or key phrase, must contain three main ingredients, high demand (high number of searches), low competition (low number of other sites competing), and commercial intent (are searchers who use this keyword spending money or not).

Keyword Research

To find the demand, or search volume, we use the free Google Keyword Tool.

For good demand you want a monthly search volume of at least 1000 per month.  Always use the local monthly searches and have it set to exact match.

Below you’ll see a screenshot of the tool itself with the results of the keyword “Little League Approved Bats”, a phrase we’re going to build a niche blog with.  As you’ll see the monthly search volume is 4400, well above the 1000 minimum.

Again, it’s important that the “match type” is set for EXACT.

Since we are happy with the demand, the next thing we want to check is the competition.  We use Google Search to find that information.

The process goes like this…

Type your word or phrase into the Google search bar.  Be sure to put it in quotes like the screenshot below.

As you can see it’s showing there are 37,400 results.  But this is inaccurate because they are including all results that contain every word in the phrase.  We want to know how many of these results are using the phrase exactly how it is written.

The way we do this is by going to the last results page.  In this case the results produced three pages (we have our preferences set at 100 per page) so we clicked on the 3 to get to the last page. (shown below)

Now if we go back to the top we’ll see that the actual number of sites we’ll be competing with is only 234. (shown below)

The best chance to get ranked on the first page of Google is if the number of competing sites is below 500.  I usually try to get below 300 if possible.

Determining the commercial intent for a keyword is fairly easy.  Go to the Google Keyword tool you used to find the number of searches.  Activate the CPC (cost per click) column, if it’s not already. (see screenshot below)

The CPC is an estimate of what it would cost a Google Adwords advertiser every time someone clicked on their ad.  A higher number is better because the more an advertiser is willing to pay, the is evidence that people are spending money that search that particular keyword.  A CPC of $2.00 is ok, but $3.00 would be a lot better.  And, of course the higher the better.

If you look at the screenshot below you’ll see that the CPC on our keyword is lower than we’d like.  But the fact that our monthly search volume is 4400, way higher than 1000, and we know of several Affiliate Programs for this product that pay generous commissions, we’ll give it a shot.

So, now you’ve seen how to use keyword research to analyze a niche.  If the research resulted in low demand or to much competition, simply go back and find another niche.

If it looks good, the next step is to learn how to set up an Affiliate Marketing Blog.