A Free Market Research Tool to Help You Find Your Niche

Google (TM) has a free market research tool that will help you find a niche that's popular enough to attract visitors, yet not overly competitive.

It's intended for use by people who use a Google service called AdWords. This service allows a business to put an ad on Google's search results and pay a fee each time someone clicks on its ad.

But you can use this tool for your niche research.

Just go to:

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Let's try an example together

At about the middle of the page, you'll see an empty box, with the words "Enter one keyword or phrase per line:" just above it.

Remember the Goldilocks story from the Niche Research page? Let me show you how I found those results. This is the tool I used. Of course, those results will change over time, but this should give you an illustration of how this works, although the numbers may be different when you view the page.

Our topic was "parenting" so in that empty box, I want you to type in the word "parenting" (without the quotation marks).

Now click on the button that says "Get keyword ideas." This could take up to a minute.

Now, before you do anything else, look at the left column and scroll down until you see a box labeled "Match Types." The word "Broad" will be checked. Uncheck it. Then check the box marked "Exact." This is important. It will give you more accurate results, and if you compare them, you'll see a big difference in the broad results versus the exact results.

Now you're ready to look at the list of keywords (titled "Keyword ideas").

The left column is the keywords themselves, and the first word is parenting.

In the next column, you have "Competition" (this refers only to advertiser competition). The more green there is in the box, the higher the competition. This is important if you're planning to use AdWords to advertise. If not, organic competition (that is, the number of results that come up on Google when you search for your keyword).

In the third column, you have the "Global Monthly Searches" for the previous month. For parenting, the broad 12-month average number of searches is exactly one million (I'll bet you think I was exaggerating in my Goldilocks story). ;-). The exact number of searches is 40,500, which is still very high.

Just to the right of that, you have "Local Monthly Searches," the approximate 12-month average number of searches for the country or language you may have chosen to search.

If you look just above the headings, to the far right, you will see a button labeled "columns." By clicking on it, you can choose to show other results, or hide results you don't want to see.

Now you can see why parenting is too broad

Can you see how parenting has too many searches to be a good niche? And of course, it's a very broad topic.

The great thing about this tool is that is is easy to narrow a subject. Let's do that now.

If you click on the column heading "Global Monthly Searches" the results will be sorted from highest number of searches to lowest. If you click on it a second time, it will be sorted by lowest to highest.

If you can find a keyword phrase with about 3,000 searches per month (that's about 100 a day) organic Google results of under a million, you're in pretty good shape. Of course, higher search volume and less competition is even better.

How do you determine organic competition?

This is easy. Find the work "parenting" again in your search results. Click on it and the Google search page will come up - the same page that would come up if you simply searched for the keyword "parenting" using www.google.com.

Just below the search box, it will say (as of today anyway) "About 84,100,000 results (0.10 seconds)." Wow, that's a lot of results! You'll be looking for a lot less than that. Under a million would be good. Keep in mind, too few results probably means there isn't enough demand, but you'll be able to determine that from the number of searches.

A Niche That's "Just Right"

Now that the keyword tool is sorted according to exact global monthly searches, scroll down until you get to keywords that get about 3,000 searches.

Note that "Parenting Skills" gets 3,600 monthly searches. Click on the keyword. There are about 1,080,000 results. "Parents Quotes" gets the same number of searches but 104 million results. So "Parenting Skills" has the makings of a very good keyword.

But Can I Make Money with This Keyword?

That's an important question. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing for sure if a keyword will be profitable without trying it out.

Google's keyword tool used to have a column that told you the cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. That offered great insight into how profitable the keyword and its related market was. There may be other ways to determine the CPC. Frankly, I'm not aware of what they are.

But you will be able to get a good idea of how profitable a keyword is by looking at how many AdWords ads are in the right column of the organic search results.

Look, for instance, on the "Parents Quotes" search results. There's only one ad. So it's just as well that you won't be competing with over 100 million organic results.

On the other hand, look at the results for "Parenting Skills." There's a full page of ads. While this is no guarantee of profitability, it does show a likelihood that this keyword is profitable. If you track the ads for several months and find that the same advertisers are continuing to post their ads, that's good indicator that they're making money with the keyword.

This is a lot of information - a treasure trove, in fact, especially considering These are free resources. You may need to play with the keyword tool a while to get used to it and all the information it provides.

Take your time with niche research and have fun with it. This decision will have the most impact on whether or not you make money with your website.

Meanwhile, it's a good idea to browse the other topics in this website to get a broader understanding of the various steps in building a website. But if you want to make money with your website, don't take any action on the other steps until you've done some serious niche research!