How to Use Niche Marketing Research to Find Profitable Niches for a Profitable Website
It is advisable, before you actually start creating a website or marketing a product, to check whether there really is enough demand for it, how these people are searching for it, and what aspects of it interest them.
This enables you to create your website or offer products to meet this market's specific needs, and position so that this niche market can find you. Hence the term niche marketing.
By doing this research you are able to target profitable niches, and build a profitable website.
So how do you do niche marketing research? One way is through surveys. The other easier way is to find the key words (or more often, key phrases) that people use to look for your topic or product online, and the numbers of people searching for them.
It's quite easy to do, for the following reason. People who surf the Web are looking for information and solutions. But they don’t know exactly who or what can provide it. So they enter words or phrases into Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN, hoping to find what they seek.
The search terms they use, and a sampling of the number of times each is searched on, is collected into databases. There is software which allows you to do keyword research by tapping these statistics, which provides a good indication of what the market wants.
Keyword Research: How To Do It
Here is a list of the most popular software, called keyword research tools, for finding niche market keywords. (Right-click on any of the links, to open in new window.)
Paid service for niche marketing research. Enter a seed keyword or phrase, and the tool will show all search terms found containing the seed keyword or phrase. Has the largest database.
This free keyword research service shows not only key words or phrases containing your seed word, but also keywords or phrases of similar meaning. Differentiates between singular and plural.
Table 1: Keyword Tools for Niche Marketing Research
They more or less operate the same way, so the following example, using the free tool at KeywordDiscovery, will give you a pretty good idea of how to go about finding niche market keywords.
For example, let's say the market you are targeting are those preparing for weddings. One of the search terms you can use is "wedding favors", which you type into the 'Enter Keyword' search box.
Niche Marketing Research Step 1: Enter Keyword
The search will bring you to a page like this, with results showing a list of search terms used that contain your keyword, and the number of times people searched on each:
Niche Marketing Research Step 2: Get Search Terms & Numbers
What the Search Terms Found Tell You
The search terms found will tell you, within your topic area, what aspect of it people are interested in, and whether they are shoppers looking for products, or surfers looking for information.
A general guideline as to whether a searcher is looking for information or to buy products, is the number of words he uses in his search term. When he has decided on something, he refines his search with more specific words.
Compare for instance, searches for 'camera' vs 'canon camera' vs 'Canon Powershot 520A'. People searching on the last term are likely more ready to buy, than for the first 2 terms, which would include many searching merely for information.
Similarly in the example above: those looking for 'cheap wedding favors', 'discount wedding favors', and 'wholesale wedding favors' are possibly looking to buy. Whereas those looking for 'homemade wedding favors' and 'do it yourself wedding favors' are probably looking for information.
What the Niche Marketing Research Numbers Tell You
The results show not only the number of times the keyword you entered was searched on last month, but also number of times related searches were made containing your keyword. They represent the 'demand' figures.
Bear in mind that the results are taken from a sample database, not from all searches done, so the actual number is likely to be higher. Even then, 45,690 searches for 'wedding favors' shows a respectable market. If demand figures look too low, try broadening the scope of your keyword.
(WordTracker shows average per day results from their sample database, so the numbers will differ, but the trends should be similar.)
You will be using these demand figures to do analysis of profitability, by comparing against supply for each of the terms, in the next step. The best approach is to skim quickly through this page and the next to understand the concepts, and then do the research, which will be an iterative task looping back and forth between these 2 steps.
From this exercise, you will be able to shortlist likely profitable niches for a profitable website.
Niche Marketing Research for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Besides using keyword research to find profitable niches, the other very important reason for doing it is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) use.
SEO basically involves doing those things that help as many people as possible find your website through the Search Engines. We will explain SEO fully in another page. If you don't need traffic from the search engines, you can ignore this part.
How keyword research helps you do SEO is in this way: the research not only tells you the demand for something, but also the search terms used to look for it. Those terms are important to know, because embedding them into your web pages will allow the search engines to find and list your pages to searchers looking for those terms.
There is, of course, more to it than that, and we will talk about exactly how the search terms must be embedded in your web pages, in detail in the SEO section.
For the moment, when doing keyword research, think 'specific key phrases' rather than 'keywords'. That's because competition is too intense for the general words, such as 'wedding' or 'car' or 'fishing' and so on.
There're literally millions of pages on the internet that search engines can list for each general term, and chances of a website appearing anywhere near the first 30 listed (which is about the max most people look at) are practically nil, at least until that website ranks highly.
Your aim is to appear as near to the front of search results as possible, and you stand a much better chance with more specific terms. In general, the more specific your keyword, the less the competition. Such as 'wedding reception favors' as opposed to 'wedding favors'.
The resulting traffic is better quality too, being highly targeted to what you offer. Of course you have to balance this against demand. The more specific terms normally have lower demand.
This brings us to the concept of 'Long Tail Keywords'.
Niche Marketing Research: How to Find Long Tail Keywords
Marketeers often recommend that you go for the 'long tail keywords'. What is this, and why is it recommended?
The term is derived from the imagery of a comet. Think of Halley's Comet, for instance: there is the massive, dense head in front. Trailing behind, less densely, is a long, long tail.
Similarly for any topic or niche, there are the heavy demand keywords or phrases in front. Which looks good at first glance - until you realise there is correspondingly intense competition, which is very hard to make much headway against.
It's often more viable to look for the long tail keywords, those at the rear where demand is lower, but you've much less competition to fight. There is also a larger number of those keywords, and they are more specific. This works to your advantage as you can target your market more accurately.
To do this however, you'd probably need to subscribe to a paid keyword research tool, as the free KeywordDiscovery version only gives the highest volume search terms, whilst the paid version lists all search terms found containing your seed keyword. (That's how they can sell subscriptions even when they offer a free version!)
From the above, you would have realised that knowing demand for the search terms alone is not enough – you need to compare with supply, your competition. Here's how to Check the Niche Competition
