Niche Analysis: Where To Start?

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Where to start a niche analysis? How to streamline this process? Which niche analysis tool to choose? They have become touchy issues for many web masters. How to build your niche site? Let’s figure them out.

Start with finding out who and how strong your competitors are. To analyze a niche, it’s enough to look into Top 10 in SERPs because it is the very aim which most SEO specialists want to achieve. So, what factors to take into account while conducting a niche analysis?

1. SERPs at a glance:

• The number of found results. It’s obvious, the more results the more indexed pages, and therefore, competitors are in SERPs.
• If a search engine shows you that Top 10 results are mostly Home Pages, be sure it means that eliminating your competitors would be a tough job.
• Get results with pages like tags, archives, etc.? It’s a good shot, since it means that your competitors are weak, and to beat them over, you have to do almost nothing. Just make sure that your content pages are well optimized both for search engines and visitors. Done? Your website should appear in Top 10 very soon.
• Pay attention to listing titles, text snippets and URLs. If it comes that there are either no keywords in them, or they are set far off each other, you have a good chance to replace competitors’ websites with yours.
• Sponsored ads. A large number of sponsored ads shows that your niche is highly competitive. Work hard to beat your competitors.

2. Closer look at the competitor’s website:

• What is the website structure? A short note with one keyword? Or a large well-optimized article? Count keyword density in a website content.
• What about tags <h> and <strong>? Definitely, if there are no keywords in between them, then your competitors have overlooked it somehow. Use it to your advantage.
• Don’t forget about considering PR. It’s only a part of the problem, but don’t make a mistake of paying no attention to it.
• Consider average backlink power. Count how many backlinks each page has on average.
• Pay attention to the domain age. If in Top 10 there are only young websites at the age of 3-4 months, it’s obvious, the competition is week. And you can manage to move up you website to the SERPs first page. Alternatively, it’s rather hard to break through 10-year websites.

To conduct a niche analysis, some rely on paid services or software; some use their own scripts; and some prefer to use free online niche analysis tools (the most popular ones I’ll show you right here). It’s up to you which niche analysis tool to choose. All of them are free, comprehensive and easy-to-use:

Niche Analysis Tool by EasySeoTracking – an online service which shows the following SEO parameters of your competitors: Page Rank, number of back links, presence of keywords in a URL and title, number of unique visitors by Compete. It also analyzes competitors’ backward links to let you know how quality they are, and what link building strategies your competitors use.

Niche Watch Tool is a perfect indicator on how competitive your niche can be. It shows number of backlinks and pages in Yahoo, PR; counts the number of keywords on webpage and pages indexed in Yahoo; indicates All in anchor, All in text and All in title ranks in Google.

SpyFu is a very feature rich tool. It performs a niche analysis through Paid and Organic results: lists top PPC domains for any specific keyword and ads, shows Google search results, related search terms and domains. SpyFu

What factors do you take into account while conducting a niche analysis? Which niche analysis tool do you prefer?

This is a guest post by Dmitry Gushchin, creator of Easy SEO Tracking. Follow him at @EasySeoTracking.