The first step to creating a successful blog for a business is by deciding upon a profitable niche. Though, every niche is profitable in some way or the other, there are certain ways in which you can probe deeper into this aspect and zero in on one niche.
How To Find Your Niche?
In order to select one niche, it is first imperative to understand what you are truly interested in. However, if you are feeling lost, there are always certain sites that can guide you through.
RedditList
This site lists out all the topics trending at a particular time frame and thus, gives you an understanding of what interest people. You can browse through their website for free to understand the pulse of the people and acquire some great ideas for your website niche.
Udemy
Another way to generate specific niche ideas is by browsing through the courses that Udemy has for people. You must understand that if people are interested in a particular course, it must have some value.
Barnes & Noble
The site has a ginormous enlistment of books which can be considered while selecting a niche idea. Whichever category interests you the most might be the best place to start with.
Magazines
Another authentic way to look for niche ideas, since if there is a magazine on one topic, chances are that there would be sellers and buyers in the same domain too.
Which Are The Biggest Markets?
It is essential that you remember that health, wealth and relationships draw users in flocks. People usually surf for ways to remain healthy, make money and have strong relationships. Therefore, these could make for excellent ideas for your website niche.
However, these are umbrella topics and it would do you good to narrow down your niche. For instance, if the domain if health intrigues you, you could narrow down your focus to pregnancy diets or vegan diets.
Differentiating Between Niche and Keywords:
Though it might not look like it, but niche and keywords are entirely different. To cite an example, health is a niche and the best vegan diet is a keyword. Niche cannot be used as a keyword since it is too broad and generic.
Meaning Behind Keywords:
In order to excel at niche and keyword research, it is imperative that you understand the meaning behind the search because that is what Google considers while generating the search results. For instance, if you want to target your health niche and one of your keywords is the best vegan diet, then there are slim chances of what is veganism to rank. Instead, the best vegan diets in 2019 or scrumptious vegan recipe has more chances of ranking.
Doing A Niche Research:
Once you are ready with your list of niche ideas, it is time to perform a niche research. Put in your filtered ideas one by one in Google’s Keyword Planner which shall generate a list if suggested keywords for a particular niche. Be careful to keep the keywords that have a high search volume and can result in 50k+ searches per month, once combined with similar phrased keywords. This leaves you with one last step- competition analysis. You have to target a niche that has keywords with a high search volume but not much competition.
Does Ultra Targeted Niche Work?
Ultra Targeting your niche means deciding upon your target audience and thus, should be done with caution. When you are narrowing down on your audience, you are already excluding a major part of the population and attempting to reach out to a specific subset. For instance, instead of targeting a nutrition niche, you would rather target nutrition for growing children. This means that parents of growing children would be interested in your website and not those of adults.
The benefit of ultra-targeting your niche is that you are differentiating your niche from the rest in the market. However, as an SEO, you must tread with caution as ultra-targeting your niche can reduce your audience. Hence, it might be risky enough to ultra-target your niche in a subject that already has little audience. Another benefit is that you’ll have an easier time creating authority SEO content for your ultra-targeted niche to get the ball rolling.
The aforementioned points are something that you might want to take into consideration while building your niche. The next time you go about researching for a niche, think about building on competitive topics like finance by ultra-targeting the niche.
Keyword research forms an integral dimension in ranking your website. However, there are two basic aspects that you must keep in mind while performing an extensive keyword research for your website.
• Is it a research for a new website?
• Is it a research for an existing website?
Existing websites analyse the existing directional data, whereas new websites require more competitor research.
Keyword Research For An Existing Website:
There are three dimensions that you have to look at while performing keyword research for an existing website-
Analytics Data-
You will have to go over the previous 12 months in Google Analytics and look for—
• The highest volume of traffic
• The most valuable traffic, which can be found in the Source/Volume section
Gauging your most valuable traffic shall provide you with an insight into the type of your audience. You would get an idea of where your audience comes from.
Ranking Data-
Looking at this temporal dimension gives you an account of which keywords your website ranks for historically, as well as currently. To analyse this particular dimension, you would have to use one of the SEO tools in the market, preferably Ahrefs.
If you are working with Ahrefs, you would have to enter the domain name from your account and go to the option of Organic Search from the left menu. You can then check all the keywords that your website currently ranks for, from the Organic Keywords option; and also check the movement of your website for your keywords, from the Movements section.
This particular section comes in handy as it gives you an idea for which keywords you lost your rankings, or for which keywords your site currently ranks. Looking at these metrics can help you analyse where your site lacks and then make up for those in the most holistic way possible.
Contextual Data-
You will need to use Google’s Keyword Planner to investigate this metric. Go to the option of “Search For New Keywords and Ad Group ideas”. You have to then enter your website’s URL in the “landing page.” You could then use the tool to get a decent idea of how Google is contextualising your page. The data generated by the tool can be then downloaded and used for future references.
All the information that you obtain from analysing your existing data serve as brilliant reference points for you to pursue later and optimising your website.
Keyword Research For A New Research:
Keyword Research for a new website requires you to build from the information you can get from other websites, since you do not have your own website to analyse. For this, you need to begin by placing a seed keyword that explains your site the best and then keep investigating by slightly varying the keywords. Once you have a list of websites to look through in the same niche, you have to examine them one by one.
Seed Keywords-
You need to begin by entering your seed keywords in the “Keyword Explorer” section of our preferred tool of Ahrefs. Ahrefs is then going to generate a list of keyword ideas based on your seed keyword. The best way to go about looking into keywords is by placing informational seed keywords in the tool. For instance, keywords like tutorials and tips might just do the trick. There is a huge market and conversion rate for informational websites, which is why using informational keywords is the best approach to building a successful website.
Understanding the Search Intent-
There is a precise rule to targeting keywords and that is, understanding the search intent of the searcher. For instance, if the keyword used for search is bowling, articles on how bowling shoes are made will not rank. E-commerce websites that sell these shoes would probably rank as Google will consider that anyone who looks for bowling shoes has the intention of buying them. Therefore, understanding the search intent is essential for your website’s ranking.
Understanding the Keyword Intent-
Understanding the keyword intent is yet another crucial metric that determines the ranking of your website. You have to target your keywords depending on the search intent of the searchers. There are essentially four types of search intent-
• Informational
Covers the largest type of keywords; for instance, “who is XYZ?”
• Navigational
This is the type of search where a searcher is looking for a destination; for instance, “Facebook”.
• Commercial
This covers the keywords where answers to queries are given that can help in some transaction; for instance, “the best SEO tools of 2019”.
• Transactional
This covers the keywords that leads to some kind of a conversion rate; for instance, “buy Samsung A7”.
Therefore, it is essential that you understand the search intent and the keyword intent of the searchers to be able to plan the content for the site.
To brush up your knowledge, AIDA stands for- Awareness (A), Interest (Interest), Desires (D), Action (A).
How Does the AIDA Model Help?
If you have been thinking how this particular piece of knowledge can help you in ranking your website, well, it gives a great understanding about how to target a market effectively. We shall now move on to examining each of these aspects individually.
Awareness Level
In this level, the customer is completely unaware of a product and their search is informational. Your job would be to entice them using infographics, images, video and other media files and provide them with all the information they require.
Interest Level
In this level, the search is navigational. You need to target keywords that shall lead your target audience to get information on the features of the product, enough to pique their interest. Your keywords should land them on a page that provides solution to their problems.
Desire Level
In this level, the pages where your target audience should land should be ones which discuss about the benefits or uses of the product. The search intent here is commercial and emotions of the audience come into play, which is what you must target. Surveys, polls and emails might be used as a strategy in this stage that would capture their attention and make the product saleable.
Action Level
The last level is the Action level and the search intent is transactional. Therefore, you must target your keywords in such a way that it takes your audience towards conversion. One way to do this is by probing deeper into the benefits of the product and convincing the customers that product ‘XYZ’ is the best thing to invest right now.
How To Use The AIDA Model?
You can use the AIDA model to plan and create effective content for your website. The best way to use the AIDA model to your advantage is by linking the Interest pages to the Awareness Page, and then linking the Desire Pages to the Interest page, and finally linking the Action page to the Desire page. This way your customer can move from page and page, starting from a single content. It is important that you understand which level the searcher is at in the AIDA sales model to be able to target the keywords.
For instance, for an e-commerce site, in order to show up on Google’s search results, it is important that they target the searchers at the Action level and use keywords as such. For affiliate websites, the content should be planned in a way that targets audience at the Interest and Desire level, which can then successfully take them to the Action level.
A modifier is a term or cluster of words used to accentuate the meaning of a word. Adding modifiers to a keyword can add clarity to the keyword and help Google understand what the searcher is looking for. The most common types of modifiers that are added to keywords are discussed below.
Informational Modifier:
This kind of modifier aims at providing information to the searcher who is looking only for information. This caters to the resolving informational queries and is non-commercial in nature. There is no question of any purchase involved here. Some of the common informational modifiers are- “more information”, “learn”, “benefits” etc.
Navigational Modifiers:
These modifiers should tend to the needs of searchers looking to land at a specific destination. They use search engines to locate a specific page, website, product or service.
Commercial Investigation Modifiers:
These modifiers should look into the needs of searchers who are looking for extra pieces of information regarding a product or service that they are already familiar with. Therefore, the best examples for such modifiers would be- “medium”, “large”, “in-depth comparison” etc.
Transactional Modifier:
Transactional modifiers cater to the transactional needs of the searchers. These searchers are looking to make a purchase and shall move to pages that offer such services. The intent that these modifiers need to look into is that of immediate action. Therefore, these modifiers are longer and are usually the ones like, “buy”, “sale”, and “order”.
Using Ahrefs To Analyse Modifiers:
Ahrefs can prove a wonder tool if you want to analyse your modifiers or get your hands on some brilliant ideas on the same. Use the Keyword Explorer in Ahrefs to go about the process.
• Enter some seed words in the Keyword Explorer.
• Use the option “having same terms” from the left menu to find out some keyword ideas.
• Now Copy-Paste the modifiers in the “Include” box and choose the option “Any Word”.
• This will generate a list of keywords that show one or more of those modifiers.
While looking for modifiers, be smart enough to not rely solely on modifiers to analyse search intent. You might be missing out on several important keyword ideas this way. It is always a good idea to keep an eye out for the “Featured Snippets” of Google to get a hang of the searchers’ intent.
Scouring for the best keywords to target might be quite a confusing task if you do not know the difference between short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords and medium-tail keywords. It is crucial that you understand which keywords to target for your website lest you might lose out on ranking.
What Are Short-Tail Keywords?
Short-tail keywords consist of 1-2 words and have no specific meaning to them. Take for example, the word fitness. There is no specific search intent that can be acquired out of this keyword. It is too broad. Therefore, it is pretty difficult to create content out of a short-tail keyword. Another drawback of targeting short-tail keywords is that, they are usually always dominated by Wikipedia and beating Wikipedia to it might be challenging.
What Are Long-Tail Keywords?
Long-tail keywords are exactly the opposite of short-tail keywords. They consist of 5 to 6 words and are thus, very specific. An example of a long-tail keyword would be what are long-tail keywords. The keyword in this example is extremely specific and there is clarity of search intent. Long-tail keywords come handy for inner pages. However, it would not be a great idea to make a pillar post out of them. They can be very helpful in competition analysis, to look for easy targets among your competitor’s keywords.
The Medium-Specific Keyword:
The medium-specific keywords strike a balance between long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. Take for instance the keyword bowling tips. It has a specific search intent and can be expanded upon. This means that it is a good enough idea to target such keywords while creating content for your website.
Using Ahrefs to Find Medium-Long Tail Keywords:
To find medium-long tail keywords using Ahrefs, these are the following steps that you have to follow-
• Place the seed keyword in the tool
• Select a report from the menu on the left
• Filter the search volume to what is considered minimum in your niche
• You can also set the word count filter to get queries for that particular word limit only
You could also go a step further to receive more suggestions on long-tail keywords-
• Choose ‘Questions’ in the Keywords Explorer in Ahrefs which will give you an idea of the kind of questions people are asking in your niche
• You could even look up social forums like Quora and Facebook groups and run a quick check on the words used by people while asking questions
• Also check the long-tail keywords that your competitors are ranking for using Ahrefs
• Using modifiers in ‘Phrase Match’ report to filter the search queries can also serve as an excellent idea to dig around for keywords
Conclusion:
The bottom-line of the article is that you must avoid using short-tail keywords for your pillar posts. They are too generic and shall not be of any profit. Over a period of time your website’s ranking for such short-tail keywords like bowling or beauty might improve, but shall be of no use when you are looking to create content for pillar posts.
