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 scroll down the page and you'll see a table, with a list of words and phrases in the left column. The first word is parenting.

In the next column, you have "advertiser competition." The more green there is in the box, the higher the competition. In the third column, you have the approximate search volume for the previous month. For parenting, the July 2008 figure is 823,000, so that's how many Google searches there were for the word "parenting" that month.

Just to the right of that, you have the approximate average search volume. That's the average monthly search volume. For parenting, it's exactly 1 million (I'll bet you think I was exaggerating in my Goldilocks story). ;-)

You can ignore the last column. That's for someone who is planning to use AdWords, and that's not our purpose here.

Now you can see why parenting is too broad

Can you see how parenting has too much competition to be a good niche? And of course, it's a very broad topic, and easy to narrow. Let's do that now.

The first thing you may want to do is sort the information by one of the fields. If you click on the label "Advertiser Competition" the fields will be sorted from most competitive to least competitive.

If you click on it a second time, it will sort in the opposite direction, from least competitive to most competitive.

You may want to sort by competition, or you may want to search by "Approximate Average Search Volume."

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

Chapter 2 of Goldilocks

So let's sort by "Advertiser Competition." Click on that word. Now scroll down the list until you find some blocks that are only half filled with green. There are quite a few results with average advertiser competition. In the midst of them, you'll find Goldilocks' second keyword, "parenting young children."

Now look at the average search volume. Only 720 searches per month. That's a bit low.

In fact, the keywords near it have better results. "parents and kids" has good results, but I know it's the name of a publication in my area, plus I don't know how it boils down into a niche. So I'd personally avoid that one.

If you scroll through and observe, you'll note that several keyword related to teen parenting have average competition and high search volume. This could be an excellent niche, if you have a sincere desire to help teen parents along with the ability to offer content and resources that will help them.

A Niche That's "Just Right"

Finally, if we're observant (and you will be more observant when you're researching a niche you're passionate about), we find "older parents." With average competition and 5,400 monthly searches, this too is a good choice for the right person. For one person teen parenting would be a great niche, while for another, older parents would be ideal.

But Can I Make Money with This Keyword?

That's an important question. You can get some important information on this without leaving the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Let's narrow down our list first, to make this easier.

Go back to the box where you first entered the word "parenting." This time, enter "teen parents." Click on the "Get keyword ideas" button and wait a few moments. Then scroll back down to look at the list.

Most of the results are irrelevant, as there is very little search volume. So click on "Approx Avg Search Volume" to get the keywords with the higher search volume up to the top of the page.

Now this is a very cool trick I learned from Market Samurai:

Go to the top of the search results. Not the top of the page, but the top of just the search results.

You'll see a box to the right, and just above it, the words "Choose columns to display."

Click on that box and choose "Show Estimated Avg. CPC." CPC stands for "cost per click." This will tell you how much an advertiser using Google AdWords needs to pay to get his or her ad in a high position on the search results.

For the keywords that have good search volume, the average cost per click is close to or above a dollar. That's a good sign!

It's hard to say exactly what numbers are good or bad, but if people are willing to pay about a dollar every time someone clicks on their ad (doesn't buy anything, mind you, just clicks to get to the site), you know that there are some profits involved.

This is a lot of information - a treasure trove, in fact, especially considering this is a free market research tool. You may need to play with it 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 don't take any action on them until you've completed this step.