Niche Research Questions

February 11, 2008

Well, I recently purchased Wordtracker so that I could further research my niche ideas. I figure I should be sure of the niches I want to pursue before buying the domain names. So I have a few questions for Mark and the other experienced BANS users. How many searches are enough, and how many are too little?

For example, for my “effects pedal” search on Wordtracker, most of the keyword results (and virtually all of the high KEI ones) showed well under 10 searches (I think that’s over the past 90 days). In addition, “effects pedal” produced under 100 total results (on the other hand, “acoustic guitar,” one of my other niche ideas, produced at least 1000 results). Now, this of course provides a few great KEI phrases, but is the search volume too low? I also tried a few other starting phrases such as “guitar effects pedal” and “stomp box,” with similar results.

Also, another question I have is this. What if some or many of the high KEI phrases you discover are about things that you really don’t know anything about? For example, although I like using effects pedals, I don’t know a thing about repairing effects pedals.

I guess what I’m trying to do is get a feel for whether I should even pursue this niche. Considering that many of the keywords for effects pedal with high KEIs are barely searched for (4-6 times), does this suggest that it’s not a good niche to pursue? As someone new to all this, I’m trying to figure out what the right balance is between popularity and specificity. For example, I just did a very quick Wordtracker search for “acoustic guitar” and ranked the results by Google KEIs. Glancing at the first page, I can see that “acoustic guitar” has several more high KEI results than “effects pedal,” and that among those results, there are several terms which are searched for more frequently than the terms I got in the “effects pedal” result. Of course the competition is greater in acoustic guitars, but maybe the presence of phrases that are searched for regularly with high KEIs would nevertheless make it a more profitable niche than effects pedals. Any thoughts on this? This leads me to one last question. If you do make the decision to pursue a particular niche (”acoustic guitar” for example) and are researching on Wordtracker, what is the lowest number of searches that you are looking for on a particular keyword result (among high KEI results I mean)? For example, if a keyword has 26 searches in the past 90 days and a KEI of 264, I am sure the answer is, “target that keyword!” However, if a keyword has, say, five searches in the last 90 days and a KEI of 8, would you still want to target it? The KEI is great, but again, is the search popularity too low?

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