How do you determine that a niche/micro-niche is good?

[Sunshine]

I started my journey and soon hit a wall, in fact I didn't do enough research before starting, health niche, is hard to grow, to stay on page 1 in shorter terms, maybe is this all possible in long tail terms?

I was instructed to switch niches but I'm having trouble finding something, which makes me fall back to my current micro-niche, is it too bad to stay only in terms of the long tail, or would it prevent me from scaling?

OBS: The ones marked with a blue line mean that I can make an article just focused on them, the unmarked ones are just some repeated keyword

On some other terms in that niche I find around 100 to 3000 volume between $1 - $5 CPC, and most of those terms have a difficulty between 5 to 35 [using ubersuggest].

When I think about money, and niches, I think about volume, cpc, and rpm but I don't know what a good value for them is, I see some articles talking about long tail terms but I only see a cpc that doesn't seem high to me, I only have 1 month of knowledge in SEO so obviously I think wrong things.

Anyway, how did you choose your niche? and at least leave a comment if it worked for you.

If you have any tips for finding profitable niches I would appreciate that too, my goal is $50 in 2-4 months posting about 2-4 articles a day just to keep helping out here at home.

If you want to follow my progress, it's here <-

 

[bernard]

First of all, I think it would be better for you to approach this more manually in terms of difficulty and profitability.

I'm not familiar with Ubersuggest as a tool, but I know for sure, that any "SEO difficulty" metric is pretty much useless. As is the CPC averages.

You would want to do manual keyword research for difficulty, by looking at the search result itself and judging how the difficult it seems. Most people look at things like:

• Domain Rating in Ahrefs - are there sites in the top 10 results with low DR? Low DR is like below 30 or so, but depending on how strong your domain is of course.
• User generated content - are there Quora results, forums, Reddit, facebook etc. If so, that's one of the best indicators that you can do something here, particularly if they're in the top 5.
• Does the intent matched in all results? Intent means what the user is trying to find by searching, so if someone is searching "what are the best water slides in Oskosh?", but the results are mostly about inflateable water slides you can buy, then the intent isn't matched. This is one of the best indicators that you can rank. Google always awards rankings to matching intent in such cases.

As for value of the keyword, this is a bit harder to figure out, because value can both be in the form of display ads which pay pr. view and affiliate sales, which pay per sold product.

Some keywords are only fit for display ads and some are only fit for affiliate sales. Generally, if the overall niche has both, then it can be good value. How much a keyword is worth, generally also depends on how much of a profit the vendor has. Niches that are profitable for the sellers will allow them to spend more on ads, where as something like computers and basic electronics is notorious for low commissions. You might also want to look at the ads being shown in Google for those seaches. Are they relevant? Overall, this is not an absolute science, more something to learn with experience.

 

[Sunshine]

• Domain Rating in Ahrefs - are there sites in the top 10 results with low DR? Low DR is like below 30 or so, but depending on how strong your domain is of course.
• User generated content - are there Quora results, forums, Reddit, facebook etc. If so, that's one of the best indicators that you can do something here, particularly if they're in the top 5.
• Does the intent matched in all results? Intent means what the user is trying to find by searching, so if someone is searching "what are the best water slides in Oskosh?", but the results are mostly about inflateable water slides you can buy, then the intent isn't matched. This is one of the best indicators that you can rank. Google always awards rankings to matching intent in such cases.

As for value of the keyword, this is a bit harder to figure out, because value can both be in the form of display ads which pay pr. view and affiliate sales, which pay per sold product.

Really the health niche I had chosen was horrible, most of the results are high DR, even with some quora results in the middle, even if it wasn't I think it would be hard to go through YMYL alone anyway.

Do you have any idea how to look for a niche? even found on the internet about niche of dogs [what I find the most is z00philia, holy shit], health, and finance, I can't think of anything in relation to the content, I don't even find keywords randomly that could maybe be an opportunity to become my niche, I've been there for about 2/3 days looking and it ends up discouraging me and making me procrastinate

But at the same time, I think it's worth it because if I invested in this health niche I would probably reach my small goal of $50 in much longer than 6 months, google wouldn't trust it so soon to show the questionable public content from a stranger, but if I find a suitable niche I think I can get out of a sandbox much faster and "create the avalanche"

 

[bernard]

I would definitely not do a health niche as your first site after YMYL and all that.

I'd choose a niche that you are either passionate about or know a lot about. That will make it much easier to do keyword research and to write the articles or order them.

Consider that niches are not like hobbies, a niche can be something boring, weird or something that people don't think about. Like pool maintenance. Most people don't think about pool maintenance or like it on Facebook, but everyone with pools need it.

If we're talking pets, which already has tons of content, but then there are also niches that I would think about, like with cats, more people are living in smaller apartments, so Indoor Cat is now a big time niche. How do you stimulate them etc? Geriatric pets. Old cats. People take better care of their pets these days, so their cat gets to be old and have issues with sight, dementia, changes in behaviour etc.

This is just to say, if you're interested in pets as a niche, dogs, then don't necessarily target dogs right off the bat, but find some angle that others aren't doing, then grow your site and go into more mainstream topics with time.

 

[KhairujjamanS]

I started my journey and soon hit a wall, in fact I didn't do enough research before starting, health niche, is hard to grow, to stay on page 1 in shorter terms, maybe is this all possible in long tail terms?

I was instructed to switch niches but I'm having trouble finding something, which makes me fall back to my current micro-niche, is it too bad to stay only in terms of the long tail, or would it prevent me from scaling?

OBS: The ones marked with a blue line mean that I can make an article just focused on them, the unmarked ones are just some repeated keyword

On some other terms in that niche I find around 100 to 3000 volume between $1 - $5 CPC, and most of those terms have a difficulty between 5 to 35 [using ubersuggest].

When I think about money, and niches, I think about volume, cpc, and rpm but I don't know what a good value for them is, I see some articles talking about long tail terms but I only see a cpc that doesn't seem high to me, I only have 1 month of knowledge in SEO so obviously I think wrong things.

Anyway, how did you choose your niche? and at least leave a comment if it worked for you.

If you have any tips for finding profitable niches I would appreciate that too, my goal is $50 in 2-4 months posting about 2-4 articles a day just to keep helping out here at home.

If you want to follow my progress, it's here <-

If the niche is profitable, has enough low-mid competition kw I can write about for at least 12 months, and has good enough SV then I usually pick it. A few new sites doing well in that niche is also a good sign to me.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The guidance to avoid YMYL was good guidance. Even seasoned veterans should probably stay away from it without large teams and large budgets.

If you haven't noticed our Digital Strategy Crash Course, check that out. Day 2 is all about Choosing a Niche & Direction.

Looking at micro-niches is fine but don't box yourself in. This allows you to expand and gives room for buyers to expand if you choose to sell your site, and it allows you to absorb some failures and make those failures support the next thing.

An example might be that you want to make a website about roller blades. Had you chosen "skating" in general, you could have failed with roller blades and moved over to those skates with 4 wheels in a rectangle instead of in tandem. Then you could probably add in skateboarding and scooters eventually.

In my opinion, this is the make-it-or-break-it decision to make, but at the same time I think saying things like that causes people to get analysis paralysis on the decision. There's a lot you can do to lessen the risk, such as choosing a niche instead of micro-niche. Or choosing a vertical instead of a niche within a vertical.

Choosing a micro-niche will kill your ability for vertical expansion. Choosing a niche gives you horizontal expansion. Choosing a vertical provides mobility in both directions. You may not be ready to try to tackle an entire vertical and that's not necessary. In fact Google may favor you if you choose a niche (and maybe even more so if you choose a micro-niche, but it's still pretty limiting).

As far as validating a niche, most of the times it's not that necessary if you're not a dummy who's going to fail regardless. Sometimes we'll get questions like "how do I validate the weightlifting niche?" Gimme a break. There's a gym on every street corner and inside many houses. It doesn't need validation. The real question is can you compete.

And another question is, would you rather have a 75% slice of a 100 thousand dollar pie, or a 1% slice of a 50 billion pie. And how hard will you have to work to get that 75% versus the 1% slice? Often it's just as hard to make $75k as it is to make $800k or whatever. Dominating a sector or even a piece of a sector is hard, no matter the sector. The question is how much cash is flowing through it.

For general SEO, which it seems like you're concerned with, my suggestion is to think about the big verticals. Semrush provides a pretty nice list of them:

Then, find a way to brand yourself for the entire vertical as to not box the business in. Then choose a niche, and start building out the entire niche starting with micro-niches. Finish one at a time and grow horizontally. Then tack on the next niche and repeat.

Or maybe you don't want to expand at all. That's fine but branding yourself in such a way that that remains a possibility is smart. But by starting big, mentally, you won't need to do a bunch of validation. If you then start choosing a sub-niche so tight that there's a concern, you need to either zoom back out and up to the niche or you need to accept it's small with the understanding that you'll cover 5 micro-niches ultimately (or 30 of them or more), and that it's okay.

Just remember that reducing the potential income doesn't necessarily reduce the competition levels.

 

[bernard]

Yeah, what I meant by niching in, wasn't to limit yourself by branding or domain name, but to simply start creating content around a micro-niche or subniche.

If you did weightlifting, you could become the expert on frontsquats, before tackling squats, then tackling deadlifts, overhead press and then going into bodybuilding etc. While doing the reverse, going into general bodybuilding content would be incredibly difficult to even make a dent.

 

[Sunshine]

Thanks everyone, I've already chosen a vertical to follow, it's not really something I'm passionate about but it's cool, it's big, it has a lot of niches and subniches to create content, for now I intend to focus on a subniche and build "topical authority" before moving on to the next sub niche.

I'm working on the keywords and will focus on the domain design later, let's keep progressing here.thanks everyone again.