Find Profitable Niche - 5

Okay, we have found several niches that we think have a lot of potential but now we need to see if they might be profitable. Just because a niche keyword has a lot of searches doesn’t mean it is something we want to create a business around.

The keyword phrase “free online games” is searched for over one million times each month but it is not a niche I would recommend that you pursue. A keyword phrase that has a lot of searches BUT has a lot of competition is a niche I would probably stay away from until I had a lot of experience in marketing.

Competition should not scare you away from a niche but you need to know how to swim before you climb in with the sharks!

Now, for demonstration purposes, let’s target the “work from home” niche. We have used the free WordTracker tool to find out that the keyword phrase “work from home” is projected to receive around 150,000 searches per month. That is a nice amount of searches but is it a profitable niche? Let’s find out!

Test #1 – Go to google.com and type in the keyword phrase “work from home” using the quotation marks. This tells Google that you are looking for that exact phrase. When it finishes it’s search, look at the upper right corner of the search results and it says, “Results 1 - 10 of about 3,520,000 for "work from home". (0.20 seconds)”

That tells us that there are over 3.5 million competing pages that are targeting that keyword phrase in one way or another. That’s an awful lot of competition but there are more tests to perform before we give up on that keyword phrase.

Test #2 – Go to google.com and type in the keyword phrase “work from home” using the quotation marks. The top three links on the page and all the links on the right side of the page are “sponsored” links.

That means people are using Adwords and they are paying to have those links put there. The links that fall under the top “sponsored” links are the organic links, or free, links like we all want to get.

If you look at the sponsored links on the right-hand side, you will see it has a list of links and, at the bottom, it says “more sponsored links.” If you click on “more sponsored links” it will take you to the next page where there are more links.

At this writing, there are a total of 18 sponsored links and that means there is money to be made in that niche but there is also a lot of competition. There are lot keywords that have over 40 sponsored links. Those are very competitive keywords.

If you could find a keyword phrase that had a lot of searches but only one page of sponsored links, that would be a good sign that you MAY have found a good niche. Remember our “free online games” example? Some keyword phrases may not have many sponsored links because there just isn’t much profit in them!

Test #3 – Go to google.com and click on the link next to the search box that says “advanced search.” In the box that says “with the exact phrase” type in the words “work from home” but don’t use the quotation marks. By using that box, it already knows we are looking for an exact phrase.

Go to the line that says “Occurrences Return results where my terms occur” and, in the drop-down box, select the phrase “in the title of the page” and click on the “Google Search” button. By doing this we are checking to see how many of the top-ranked websites are optimized with our keyword phrase in their title.

Bad news!

There are pages and pages of websites that have optimized their website titles for our keyword phrase. This isn’t looking good!

Test #4 – Go to google.com and click on the link next to the search box that says “advanced search.” In the box that says “with the exact phrase” type in the words “work from home” but don’t use the quotation marks. By using that box, it already knows we are looking for an exact phrase.

Go to the line that says “Occurrences Return results where my terms occur” and, in the drop-down box, select the phrase “in the URL of the page” and click on the “Google Search” button. By doing this we are checking to see how many of the top-ranked websites are optimized with our keyword phrase in their URL. The URL is the domain name and the file name where the page is located

As before, there are many pages of sites that have optimized their website URL for our keyword phrase. I would probably have abandoned this particular keyword phrase at this point but we still need to look at a few more tests so we will continue

Test #5 – Go to google.com and click on the link next to the search box that says “advanced search.” In the box that says “with the exact phrase” type in the words “work from home” but don’t use the quotation marks. By using that box, it already knows we are looking for an exact phrase.

Go to the line that says “Occurrences Return results where my terms occur” and, in the drop-down box, select the phrase “in the text of the page” and click on the “Google Search” button. By doing this we are checking to see how many of the top-ranked websites are optimized with our keyword phrase in the text on the website.

Once again, there are quite a few sites that have our keyword phrase in the copy on their websites.

You can do the same thing with the phrase “in the links on their page” in the drop-down box.

Test #6 – If you have the Google Toolbar on your favorite browser, you can perform another test. Go to google.com and type in the keyword phrase “work from home” using the quotation marks. When the list of websites is finished loading, click on the first organic link. Remember, the organic links start right under the sponsored links.

After you website in the #1 position in the search results has finished loading, move you mouse over the green bar in the Google Page Rank. Hold your mouse there for a few seconds and a little yellow box will pop up that tells you Google’s page rank for that particular webpage. Google ranks web pages with a ranking of zero to ten with zero being the lowest ranking and ten being the highest ranking.

Check each one of the websites listed on that first page of results and see what the page rank is for each one. If most of the sites on the first page have a ranking of five or above, you will have a difficult time getting on the first page without knowing SEO.