Everyone says that the riches are in the niches. In this article, I’m gonna be sharing with you a free tool that you can use to research tons of successful websites and see what might be working for them. By the end of this article, you’re gonna know exactly how you can start to research your own niche and find out for yourself whether or not you should pursue building a website.
The Niche Finding Tool
The tool for today is created by a backlink building agency based out of the UK, and it’s called the Niche Finder Tool, created by Search Intelligence. It’s a free tool that you can use to find niches. But let’s go ahead and take a look at what this tool is all about.
So once you go into their niche finder tool, which is gonna be found at search-intelligence.co.uk/niche-finder you’re gonna come across this respective database. And the reason why this database is really, really cool is because they have scraped over 315,000 websites from a variety of different sources to essentially compile everything that you might need to find a particular niche.
Digging into the Niche Finder Tool
So let’s say, for example, we were creating or interested in creating some sort of food blog. Well, what I might do is on the left-hand side, under the domain section, I might go ahead and type in food. From here, you would see how it goes ahead and filters through all the respective instances where there are domain names referencing food. So just like that, what I’ve done is I’ve gone through over 315,000 websites, and I’ve found that specific domain names related to food.
But from here, another thing that I can do that’s really cool is that I can look at how many referring domains these sites have, what their domain rankings are, as well as what the traffic looks like for these respective sites.
I can even look at how many pages these sites have. The reason this is super valuable is because it’ll help you start to understand how big or how competitive this respective niche is. So you can see here with respect to the food side of things, there’s obviously a lot of websites out there around food.
Finding a more specific niche using the Niche Finder Tool
Maybe we need to be a little bit more specific, so maybe we want to explore, for example, the Instant Pot niche. Well, in that case, what I might do is I might search Instant Pot, and by going ahead and applying that search, what we show here are all the respective domains that have an explicit reference to Instant Pots.
And what I like about this tool is that you can actually just directly open up the websites that are related to the database. So here, if I wanna just look at what instantpoteats.com is all about, I just click right there and you can see how this respective website is being built with Media Vine as its primary display ad network.
And then you’ll also see that there’s an Ezoic site called Easy Instant Pot that is also targeting this niche. So one of the first things I’m looking at is how many sites come up for the respective niche that I have an idea for. In this case, for Instant Pots, there’s really not that many websites. There’s the Primary Instant Pot website, which is for the entire brand. There’s this big Instant Pot eat site, and then an easyinstantpot.com site.
Now, that’s not to say that there are not other instant pot websites out there on the internet, but it means that with respect to this database, there’s really only three websites that come to mind here. So that’s a good sign for me because it means that there’s not necessarily too much competition right out of the gate for this respective niche.
But the other thing I’m looking at is I’m seeing that in this particular example, Instantpoteats.com has close to 14,000 referring domains. Whereas the next Best Site, Easy Instant Pot in this pool only has about seven. And so what that tells me is that there’s probably a big disparity between the different Instant Pot websites and which ones are more established, as well as which ones are earlier players to the game.
And then you’ll also see that the domain rankings are quite high for the first two websites. Again, the first one is obvious because that’s related to the actual brand. But the second one is also impressive because if this is what we believe it to be, which is a site around Instant Pot stuff, well having a domain rating of 55 is pretty, pretty good.
And what you’ll also see is that from a traffic standpoint, this site is on average on estimate getting about 62,000 visits based off of this respective pool. So this is already telling me so much information about this instant pot niche. It’s telling me that based off of this data pool, there may or may not be too much competition in this space, but that of the competition, there is a big gap between the different websites.
You can see here on the second site, there’s 2013 pages, whereas the next site in this database is just two pages right. So what I’m doing from here is I’m taking a look at the high level before I decide to then visit the websites and learn a little bit more. And that’s always gonna be the first step you’re gonna take is take a look at the high level results for the respective niche you’re interested in, and then see how many results come back to you.
From here, what we can do is we can open up those websites like I’ve done, and now you can get a sense of what these websites are all about. In this case, you can see the Instantpotseat.com site is all about having an instant pot, loving food and dedicating that to creating delicious recipes. And what I love right out of the back gate is that you can see how they’re delivering on that value.
This is a very common sort of approach to food blogging, in which they have all sorts of different recipes, ideas, meal plans and things like that that are related to instant pots. And as you can see, what was in that database comes back here because I can see that there’s 54 pages worth of a post on this respective site. So right out of the gate, what I know is that this is probably something that has been a continuous website that’s been being built on for several years, and that’s proven actually when I look at the about page, because I can see that this site was founded in 2016.
On the flip side of things, we can take a look at that third website. And when we do that, you can see how this is probably a student of income school and what they’ve done is they’ve started creating an instant pot website to compete. And what you can see here is that they have a couple posts and whatnot, but as we saw in the database, they only really have two primary pages here.
I mean, they’ve got a couple pages, but for the most part, there’s a bunch of demo, blog post, there’s some basic sourdough bread topics and things like that, but you can just tell that this is not as seriously fleshed out of a site as the other site that we just saw with Instant Pot Eats. So what does this tell me?
Well, it tells me that just based off this preliminary research, there might be a big opportunity because maybe there’s some sort of angle around Instant Pots that Instant Pot Eats hasn’t really targeted that I could potentially come in from. And when I look at the other sites around the area, you know, I can see that they’re not really doing all that hot or they haven’t really gone way too deeply into the respective niche.
Taking a look at the competitiveness of the respective website
So the second step that I take here with respect to using this free tool is I take a look through all the respective websites that came back to me and then get a sense of how competitive or how large is their digital moat. If they only have a couple pages or so, it’s not that big of a deal. I can potentially compete in this space, but if I’m looking to really beat something like an instantpoteats.com, I have to understand that before I even start building my website, I’m probably gonna need to find a way to rapidly expand as quickly as possible, because they already have over 2000 pages to compete with. And these are the sorts of questions you want ask yourself as you’re digging through a niche.
Plugging in the niche websites into SEMRush
The third step that you want to do, though is you wanna plug these niches into a tool like SEMRUsh, Ahrefs, or whatever your favorite digital marketing tool is. So what we’re gonna do at this point in order to really dig into our research here is we’re gonna plug both of these websites into SEMRush.
In order to do so, I need to pull up SEMRush, and then I need to plug both of these respective sites in. So let’s start with the smaller site because I don’t think there’s gonna be as much interesting information there. And then we can look at the bigger site. So when I’m in SEMRush, I just go ahead and input in easyinstantpot.com.
You can see how their authority scores three, they actually rank for pretty much nothing on this site. And this is not surprising to me. This site is so new and so nascent in terms of its development that I’m not surprised that there really isn’t much here. But all you can see is that they do have a single placement or so, which is on rotisserie chicken stock instant pot.
They rank 56 right now , and that’s not surprising because they really don’t have enough content to tell Google what they’re about. They also don’t have any authority on their domain compared to the next site we’re gonna look at instantpoteats.com. So my conclusion when I’m just plugging in easyinstantpot.com is “Hey, it’d be really easy to actually beat these guys”, but let’s take a look at Instant Pot Eats, because I do believe that that is going to be a lot harder to compete with.
So when I put in Instantpoteats.com, first thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to look at the domain analytics. Here you can see the authority score is 48, and organic traffic is close to that 65,000 mark or so. You can see how over time this has changed, and it’s taken quite a bit in order for this site to get to where it’s at. It reflects the about page in that really they’ve started seeing traction almost two years into their development. In fact, because they said it was founded in 2016, but you can see how in a SERP standpoint, they didn’t really start getting organic traffic until maybe two years into their journey.
So right off the bat, what this is telling me, If I were thinking about entering the Instant Pot niche, I should not expect any immediate results. In fact, I should probably project that it’s gonna take as much as a year to two years to even get a little bit of traction. And you can see that here because it took them going into 2017 in order to start even getting around 5,000 organic traffic, estimates based off of SEMRush.
But the other thing that I like to do from here is I like to look at the organic positions for their keywords. And from here, what I can start to do is I can start to get a sense of what are the sorts of kind of keywords that I could potentially rank for if I were to enter this niche and how competitive are they.
Well, when I look at this, the first thing I always look at is what does the overall traffic look like for the site? From an organic standpoint, I can see that the overall traffic estimate is around 54,000. But what happens if I start to isolate by just the low competition keywords? What I can do in that case is I can filter by anything under 30 in terms of keyword difficulty.
And now you can see how that bigger estimate of over 50,000 or so has now gone down to just under 3000 in easier traffic, right? But this is good because what this tells me is that in this particular example, if I were to create a competing Instant Pot website, well, there’s a lot of opportunity that are super low hanging fruit, potentially, that have really low keyword difficulty scores, which may make it easier for a newer site to rank for.
So from here, what you would do start to prioritize those ideas. Just from looking at these two example websites, I’ve been able to learn a lot. And I think this niche is potentially interesting. Now I probably need to dig a little bit deeper into the keyword research and really think about the sub niche within the niche of Instant Pots itself. Since instant pots have kind of been all the rage in the last decade or so in terms of kitchen appliances.
But what this tells me is two different stories. A story of a new website, easyinstantpot.com, that’s still kind of getting their footing and would be really easy to beat. And then the story of another website in which instantpoteats.com has been around for more than six years. And so what this tells me is if I’m really, really interested in the instant pot space, I probably could pursue this respective niche. It’s large enough for everybody.
3 Questions to ask yourself when identifying your niche
And this leads me to the three questions that you want to ask yourself when it comes to identifying your niche. The first thing that you’re gonna wanna do is ask yourself, am I even interested in this particular topic? The reason why is because if you’re not even interested in the niche you’re going into, you’re gonna find it really hard to get that motivation come years three through six and beyond. It’s easy to start a new website in years one and two because you’re still interested in just generally site building, but it’s way harder to stay motivated if you don’t care at all about the topic that you’re writing about.
And the second question that you wanna ask yourself is, what does the competition look like? We took a very cursory look at what the competition looked like just based off of the search database tool that I shared at the beginning, but there’s still a lot more research that I need to do and can do in terms of taking a look at different angles of other Instant Pot websites.
And then the third question to ask yourself is, do I feel like this is a big enough opportunity or the right opportunity for me? And what I mean by that is if you’re just starting your first website, maybe this is too big of niche for you to actually pursue, but in the case where you’re maybe on your fourth, your fifth, or even your sixth website, maybe this is the right opportunity for you because it’s a big enough total addressable market in that you and 20 other Instant Pot websites can succeed all together as well.
So these are the sorts of questions I would be asking myself when you are looking to pursue a niche or not pursue a niche. Hopefully, this was helpful for you, though, to give you A: a free tool that you can use to just research other websites that are successful right now, and then B: to show you the sort of questions that you can look at in SEMRush in order to really take the next step from the initial tool.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to find niches quickly.