Image: freepik.com
Niche marketing has really taken off. With more and more marketers and business owners exploring the best ways to utilize niche content in their strategies, the perennial question arises: how can we find the right keywords to use for these niche pages?
Let’s take a look at niche marketing and niche content as a whole, and then determine how to find the best keywords to ensure success.
What are niche marketing and niche content?
Niche marketing and niche content focus on a smaller, highly-targeted audience segment. Instead of marketing to everyone, you target a specifically selected audience to which your products or services are highly appealing.
The key benefits of creating niche content and niche strategies are:
- It allows for a high level of personalization
- It enables you to address the specific pain points of your target audience
- It lets you delve deeper into the questions and issues that preoccupy this audience
With niche marketing you’re looking beyond traditional audience segmentation, at much smaller, specific personas.
Facts about niche keywords
Whether you’re launching a new product or service, an affiliate site, or even if your business is of a more general nature but offers products that can be marketed to a niche target, you need to find the right keywords to appeal to these audiences.
Niche keywords are usually long-tail keywords, highly specific and very narrow. They often drive less traffic than broader and more popular search terms, but their very targeted nature also usually means they’re fertile ground for higher conversion rates.
Now let’s see how you can find these niche keywords.
1. Jot down some ideas
When looking for keywords many people reach for an online resource immediately. They jump into a tool, start researching different terms, and then start analyzing competing websites.
However, there’s a simple step that can be taken before that, and this step often proves to be surprisingly lucrative: brainstorming.
Start your keyword-amassing process by writing down every single idea that comes to mind about the niche you’re going to target.
If you already have a website, you can go page by page and catalog all the keywords you think someone would type into a search engine to find what you are offering.
Remember to use both shorter phrases and plenty of long-tail variations. Think in terms of the questions someone might ask to find the solution you offer.
Don’t forget to look at your Analytics and check which keywords people are already using to find you. Use this information to inform your brainstorming.
This process can be valuable even if you don’t yet have a website. Collecting your ideas gives you a starting point for page mapping and copy creation.
The same brainstorming rules apply here: all ideas are good ideas at this point.
2. Use a keyword research tool
Now that you have a general direction you want to go in, you can get started with a keyword research tool. This will show you the terms with the best potential, and you’ll also get more ideas through a broad search and related terms, which you can further research.
Two key factors are:
- search volume – which tells you how many people search on a keyword, and
- competition - how difficult it might be for you to rank for this term
Ideally, you’re looking for terms with high search volume and low competition.
Wordtracker also has a very nifty Niche Explorer that can help you uncover trending keywords in a niche.
The filters in Wordtracker’s keyword tool will also let you focus on questions. It's a great way of honing in on the problems people are trying to solve in your niche, and for which you’ll be able to create a helpful piece of content.
If you want to brainstorm questions, Answer the Public is a free tool which shows you the questions people are asking in online searches. It’s another good way to generate keyword ideas you can then go on to research.
Source: Answer the Public
3. Use Google suggestions
Google will always try to help you out and suggest all kinds of popular searches when you start typing in your search bar. Other search engines are just as helpful – so why not make good use of their data and grab some keywords from there?
Just start typing and note the keyword suggestions that sound promising.
You can start from the broadest of terms, then work your way down to long-tail and very narrow variations of the subject you’re trying to cover.
Don't forget, Google remembers your searches, so an incognito search will always yield better results.
Wondering “How to make a candle burn evenly”?
Luckily the National Candle Association has created the perfect article which answers just that question.
Source: National Candle Association
4. See what your competition is writing about
Checking out the competition is always a great way to get some ideas going. Their pages might just spark an idea you can take further.
Make sure you’re looking at competitors who are successful – you don’t want to be guided by something that’s not working.
Also check out competitors for niches above, below, and next to yours. They don’t have to be doing the exact same thing, it can be tangential. They just have to have pages that target the same audience as you, and do it well.
If you’re selling bedding your audience may well be interested in sleep issues. Many large sites in this niche have content on this, so the natural thing for this company to do is to provide a post of their own - preferably one that’s better than their competitors’ or has a unique angle.
Source: eachnight
5. Ask the community
Niche audiences like to hang out in their niche. So why not take a look at these spaces and see the kinds of discussions that are being had?
Communities on social media, forums, Q&A websites, and how-to websites are all full of questions that require an answer. They’re also often naturally focusing on a very specific niche set of keywords, around which you can create your content.
The best thing about finding keywords here is that you will actually be solving an issue someone in your target audience has. This is the beauty of niche content; you can help actual people solve actual problems, if you do it right. So, you’re being useful and at the same time increasing your authority on the subject - which is a win-win in terms of your audience and also your Google rankings and E-A-T.
A DIY post like this one, for example, can be sourced from Quora, but you can go much more niche and find all sorts of questions, niche-specific and relevant to your business.
Source: Home Hardware
Final thoughts
Remember always to look at the data for the keywords you’re aiming to target. A long-tail keyword may be getting a lot of attention on a forum, but it may not be getting that many searches or sending that much traffic.
While it’s always good to address a pain point and provide some relevant answers, you also want to focus on keywords with little competition and decent potential traffic. Happy hunting!
