Step 1 – Researching Your Site

The first thing you need to do BEFORE you create a website is to decide what the website will be about.

Now this might seem easy, but think about it for a moment. You like dogs and you have heard that the dog training niche is very lucrative so you decide to set up a site about dog training. Now unless you have a lot of money, time and know-how your dog training website is not going to make you any money! The niche is just way too competitive!

So what should your website be about?

Most people would advise you to start a site on something you have an interest in – a hobby maybe? Creating content about something that interests you will be a lot easier. However, your hobby might not be a profitable idea. How will you monetize the site? Will people spend money on their hobby? How many people are interested in your hobby? You get the idea.

The best idea for a site will be a hobby where your answers to the above questions are positive, but they are few and far between. So you will have to do some brainstorming. Look around your house or work place and look for things that people buy. Maybe something they need? A popular toy?

The idea is to develop a website in a narrow niche, as competition is normally much lower. It is all about demand and supply – I bet you did not expect an economy lesson

Let’s go back to the dog training niche as an example. Creating a profitable website on dog training is going to be extremely difficult. Sure, there is the potential to get loads of traffic to your site, but that is only if you rank well on the search engines. Let’s see what Traffic Travis says about demand (how many people search for the phrase dog training):

 

Wow, Traffic Travis estimates 92,533 searches PER DAY for “dog training” (see the above screenshot).

Now for the bad news. Let’s look at supply (competition) for the phrase “dog training”:

If you type in “dog training” (in quotation marks) in Google you get more than 6 million results! NB – your results may vary depending on your geographical location. Why use quotation marks? This will normally show you the web pages you will have to directly compete with for the phrase. Do you want to compete against 6 million sites?

I thought not

So let’s narrow down our market and drill down into the dog training niche. What about training for a specific breed? Maybe Golden Retriever training? Let’s see what the demand and supply is for “golden retriever training”:

 

Traffic Travis estimates 582 searches per day. That is a lot less than the 92,000 for dog training but it still means that more than 17,000 people look for golden retriever training every month! Do you think you can make money with 17,000 potential customers every month?

However, let’s not get too excited yet. What about the competition?

Google throws up around 18,000 results for “golden retriever training”. That might seem like a lot, but how many of the results are strong competition? Let’s use Traffic Travis’s SEO Analysis function to analyze the top 20 websites for golden retriever training.

 

What am I looking for?

In order to analyze competition I generally look at the following things:

Google PR
Although I don’t put a lot of weight on Google’s Page Rank, it is a useful tool to see what Google thinks of the web page.

Backlinks To Page
Search Engine Optimization (SEO – or how to get a high ranking in the search engines) in its simplest form consists of two things – (1) good on page optimization (covered later) and (2)backlinks (how many other websites link back to your web page). The more backlinks to the specific page, the harder it will be for us to rank for our phrase.

Backlinks To Site
Generally web pages rank individually, which is why backlinks to the specific page is more important. However, if you have a website with thousands of backlinks to the site Google might see it as an authority site and the authority of the whole site will influence individual pages.

On Page Optimization
On page optimization covers everything done on the web page that will help it rank well. Good examples are to include your keyword phrase in your web page title and description, as well as use it in headers (H1 html function), mentioning the phrase in the content on the page, etc.

Analysing the competition

The first thing that I noticed is that the domains are generally old, but the PR (Google’s Page Rank) is quite low. This is good.

The first two results are from the same site and although they don’t have a lot of backlinks to the pages, the site itself has a lot of back links. This will make it difficult to beat them.

Let’s look at the third result. It has a PR of 2, the page has 10 backlinks and the site has 261. “Golden Retriever Training” is NOT included in the title, description or H1 tags. Hmmm, this looks promising.

Now at this stage you can decide to create a website on Golden Retriever Training and with a little effort you can easily outrank the 3rd place webpage.

If you are still concerned about your ability to outrank the 3rd place webpage you can analyse the backlinks to the page with a brilliant piece of software called SEOElite.

So let’s analyze the backlinks using SEOElite for the 3rd result:

 

 

Very interesting! 2 of the 10 links come from .edu domains. Generally links from .edu and .gov domains carry more weight than the .com, .net and .info domains. Also, a lot of the links are not valid anymore and of the ones that are still valid only one links back with the anchor text “Golden Retriever Training” (anchor text refers to the text of the link).

This is just getting better and better! In fact, I was stupid to have used this example as it would have made a brilliant little website for my portfolio!

So there you have it. A quick and easy way to find key phrases with lots of demand but little supply. The next step is to create your website.