Finding niche markets

Finding niche markets can be done with free internet tools. Niche markets are related to the keywords. To find a niche market you must first find a keywords that are relevant for that niche.

A very useful tool for searching keywords is Google keyword search tool. This should be your starting point as it will tell you two very important things:

  • Which keywords are people using to find things on internet?
  • How often (per month) they use them

The first one will tell you if your keyword is relevant and the second one if it has high traffic? The significance of both is obvious. If your keyword isn’t relevant and doesn’t have high traffic, you won’t get many visitors no matter how good your site will be optimized.

Analize your competition

Once you are satisfied with relevancy and traffic of you keyword, you should inspect your competition. Just look first 10 positions on Google result page. Inspect all of them looking for their:

  • Title (text between  HTML title tag)
  • Headings (text between HTML H1,H2 and H3 tags)
  • Description
  • Url

You can see all this information if you look at the source of web page. Page with good onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has the keyword in each one of them.

To obtain offline SEO of your competition:

  • Look for their Google PageRank (PR) using Google toolbar
  • Find out how many back links to their page they have. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer to get this information

To obtain detailed information about how many websites have a good offline SEO for searching phrase, use special search operators in Google search field:

  • intitle:keyword (searching phrase is in the title of page)
  • inurl:keyword (searching phrase is included in web page url)
  • inanchor:keyword (searching phrase is in anchor text of a link to website)

Look for the number of results returned by Google. There is no space between operator and keyword! It is possible to join all 3 operators in the same query:

If you find out that first ten pages have good on site SEO, high PR and many back links with good offline SEO, this niche might just have to strong competition to rival.