Niche Keyword Research For Beginners

Choosing the right keywords when you start your niche site is one of the most critical skills that will give you the best chance of early success.

When I am asked to review struggling niche sites, the number one thing that holds them back is poor keyword selection.

Choosing the right keywords is the difference between getting traction on the SERPS or being stuck on page 2 or 3.

In this article, I will show you the keyword strategies I used to take my niche site from 0 to over 200,000 monthly pageviews in a little over a year.

What makes a good keyword?

The details of what makes a good keyword change as your site grows; for this article, we will concentrate on what keywords to select when starting your niche site.

When planning your first keywords for your brand-new site, you should target low-competition keywords for which you can rank in the top 3 positions.

An approach similar to KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio) yields the best and quickest results to get visitors onto your niche site.

Good keywords can get you ranking high early, giving you the confidence to move forward, grow the site, and tackle higher volume and more competitive keywords when the time is right.

The image above shows the early progress of my site.

I had a CTR (Click-Through Rate) of 6.1%. The main factor driving that stat was picking the right keywords initially.

The keywords I chose were low competition, and I could rank consistently in the top 3 positions.

How I Do My Keyword Research

Unfortunately, there is a prerequisite to following my keyword strategy.

Since starting my website, I have only used SEMRush as my tool of choice for niche keyword research.

I know this tool is not affordable to everyone, costing $119 monthly.

But you can get a free trial* (This is an affiliate link)

Once you have access to the SEMRush Tool, you want to head over to the Keyword Overview area is, which will the base of the keyword research operation.

Niche Down and Find a Seed

When hunting for keywords, you should take the high-level topic of your site.

For this example, we will use Pets and niche down to find a seed.

What is niching down?

The term niching down alludes to finding your own sub-topic or niche within a niche.

Generally, this approach will allow you to focus on a niched-down topic and build topical authority within a small area, enabling you to rank more easily.

Example of Niching Down to find a keyword/cluster

Below, I have created a table of the different levels we travel down to get a seed keyword.

I always recommend that you dig a little deeper than the surface topic of Pets.

This will enable you to find a bunch of keywords that are long-tail and low-competition that you can easily rank.

Industry	Pets
Initial Overall Site Focus	Dogs
Niche	Golden Retreiver
Possible Cluster Topic	Golden Retriever Diet

From the table above, you can see that we have settled on Golden Retriever Diet. This will now be the seed.

Method 1: Using Seed Keyword Research

Now that we have our seed keyword, let’s put this into the SEMRush Keyword Overview search box.

Once you hit enter, you will get the result for the keyword “Golden Retriever Diet”.

Note: Golden Retriever Diet is our seed keyword, not the keyword we intend to target.

seed Keyword Result Page

Now, the seed keyword result page will appear.

You want to ignore this, as this search term is way too competitive for those just starting out or not established in the niche.

What we are looking for here is the Keyword Magic Tool.

You can find the Keyword Magic Tool by navigating the sidebar.

When I hit the Keyword Magic Tool, I set the following parameters.

• Related
• KD – Very Easy
• Sort by Volume

You should now be able to see a bunch of potentially easy, low-competition keywords.

This list has a bunch of killer low-completion keywords that are just ready for taking.

Now, look at the keyword “worst age for golden retrievers.”

We can see that it has a KD (Keyword Difficulty) of “0.”

It also has a Search Volume of 110 (This is usually underestimated by 5-10x)

Let’s click on the keyword and see what it shows us about the keyword.

There are three primary things that I look for on the Keyword Overview page.

Volume	Here, we will look at a couple of things: the global volume gives a figure of 190. As discussed earlier, this is likely underestimated by 5-10x. Another thing to note is that most of the traffic comes from the US, which is excellent for RPM / EMPV and potential affiliate income, as US traffic is the most lucrative.
Keyword Difficulty	This looks great as it’s at 0%. This metric is just a data point and is more a suggestion than a fact. It would help if you analyzed the SERPs, as shown below. This enables you to get more insights into the difficulty of any given keyword.
Trend	The last thing that I look at is the trend. I want consistent blue bars to show that the searches are steady. When you see only 1 or 2 bars in this section, it may suggest that it’s barely searched and has the occasional surge in searches.

The next and most crucial step on this page is to scroll down and review the SERP Analysis.

The SERP Analysis shows the search engine result page for “Worst Age for Golden Retrievers.”

There are two primary things that I look for on the Keyword Overview page.

Exact Match Keyword Presence

Our search term is “Worst Age for Golden Retrievers,” I actively look for this within the URLs of the websites that show on the first page of the results. I can see that in the example above, only two pages target this keyword. This is a really good indicator that we can rank for this search term with the right content. The more websites targeting the keyword, the more competitive the search term is.

Page Authority / Ref Domains / Backlinks

Another gauge of how competitive a keyword is is the amount of backlinks any given page has. When you have a combination of a site targeting the exact match keyword and having many backlinks to that page, it makes for a formidable opponent. In our example above, we have a great combination of only two sites targeting the exact keyword, and both have 0 backlinks to their respective pages.

This gives a good overview of how to use keyword seeds to find easy, low-competition keywords.

Now, let’s look at the second method I use.

Method 2: Keyword Gap Analysis

The following method I use for keyword research involves choosing four competitors and accessing the easy keywords they rank for.

A great benefit of this method is that you can also find higher value low competition keywords that your competitors rank for, but they are not intentionally targeting.

Let me explain.

Use the Keyword Gap Tool

You can select “Keyword Gap” from the navigation and input competitors.

For the example below, I have used four competitors from the SERP analysis we got from using the “seed” method above.

Once you hit the compare button, it will take you to the results page.

Please apply the following filters to get the results we are looking for.

We are making two changes, and we will filter KD: Very Easy and then choose ALL for the keyword list.

When you scroll down the page, you should have an excellent list of easy keywords you can target. (Note: You should sort by volume!)

This method is repeatable by inputting competitors in your niche to find other lists of low-competition keywords.

Final Thoughts

These are straightforward tips to help you unlock the power of SEMRush.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but when you first start using such an in-depth tool, it can be overwhelming, and you may not figure out a process that works for you.

This method works across the niches and has helped me scale my website past 200,000 monthly visitors.

If I haven’t convinced you already, then please check out SEMRush and try these methods.

Let me know in the comments if you had any success.