Keyword research for niche sites can be done with Google’s free keyword planner. There’s more tools you can buy too, such as SEM Rush for example, but Google’s free tool will do the job!
When I built this site, that’s where I started. I found the keywords for the domain by typing in “autopilot money making” and other similar keywords. The keyword planner gives you a number of keywords which might be suitable for you to use.
Once you have found a keyword which might be suitable, head over to Google for the “sniff test”.
Choose a keyword with a long tail. The more words in your keyword, the more likely you’ll be on getting your niche website to rank for them. Most two word keyword combinations are too competitive. Plus, you’ll struggle finding a domain with two main keywords in it. most of the best ones are already gone!
So let’s take “autopilot money making websites” as an example keyword. Take your keyword over to Google and type in into the search bar. You should get the results and number will appear at the top of the page (on a desktop computer, not a mobile).
Take a look at the number at the top left of the image above. 1,710,000 represents the number of competing websites/pages for this particular keyword. Anything below 10 million is good. Less than 5 is great and less than 2million is good too. As a comparison, take a look at a hugely competitive keyword such as make money online:
That’s why you don’t want to build a niche website around competitive keywords like these! You’ll never rank your site! Anyway, back to the keyword we found “autopilot money making websites”. Once you’ve done a basic search for your keyword, do another one in quotes “like this”. You should get another number and this denotes the number of pages competing for that exact phrase. As you can see the number is pretty low for this one.
Keyword Research For Niche Sites
Once you’ve found a good keyword which you like, you can head over to Namecheap to purchase your domain name. A well targeted domain name with your main keyword in it has much more chance of ranking for it, once you’ve built out your website. See how this site was built in my article create free website and earn money.
The keyword used here “autopilot money making websites” only gets around 40 searches a month, (see keyword planner image at the top). However, this might be a good keyword to build a site around, particularly if you have an interest in this area and some good products to promote. The “money online” niche tends to be very competitive too so this might be a good domain to use.
If your domain name is available on namecheap, purchase it and buy a hosting package to host your site on. You can learn about putting a site together in this article.
Building Out Your Site – Keyword Research
Building out your site will take some time. You can of course just throw up a small website which only has a few pages. But the more content you put on it, the more likely it will be that it will rank on Google. Ideally write at least one lengthy article with your main keyword as its title. Write 2000 words and stick that post/article on your front page.
You can then use Google’s keyword planner to find other keywords which are relevant for your website. Do this by typing your main keyword back into the planner. If nothing shows, use a shorter keyword. This should give you a number of titles for your blog to write articles on. Using this same example, this is what the planner should look like:
To start with you can pick out the keywords which meet the same criteria as we have just seen. That way, you’re more likely to get found by Google searches more quickly. As your site develops, you can go for the shorter and more competitive keywords to help you create more content.
Use links from your new content to deep-link to your other articles with their main keywords. This will help Google to see what keywords are relevant to which articles. See more in my article create free website and earn money. You can also download my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit below.
Keyword Research For Niche Sites – What To Expect
Building a niche site takes time but depending on how you go about it, you can rank a site fairly quickly. Of course there’s never any guarantee with Google so just make your site as good as you can make it. Trust quality over trickery! You can’t trick Google any more so don’t try.
Sometimes a site will start to rank within a month and sometimes it can take longer. Depending on the niche you choose, your site may not rank at all. This is why it’s important to go for the low hanging fruit, not the competitive keywords which have huge amounts of traffic but far too much competition. It’s much better to have a few visitors to your site for a low-competition keyword, than none for a very competitive one.
You can keep adding to your site by finding other low competition keywords too which are similar to your domain name. As you do this you should see some movement and traffic over time if you’re patient.