How To Find Hidden Niches and Keywords By Using Young and Weak Websites

by Lewis Ogden | Last Updated: January 19, 2023 | Traffic

I’ve spoken to many people who are just getting started with niche sites, who struggle to find niche site ideas.

The thing is they make it all too difficult on themselves. Which leads to procrastination, which leads to zero action being taken.

Instead of hammering the Google keyword tool or scouring blogs for little snippets or information, there is a tool you can use, which is one of the favorites in my arsenal, and one that will make your life much easier.

First up…

The Key to Finding a Great Niche

Back when I first started with niche sites used to think CPC was the be all end all. I would use a keyword CPC as a guide to indicate what was a good/bad niche to be involved.

I quickly learned that was a terrible way to choose a niche as if I was going for the high CPC possible I would end up with “mesothelioma”, “payday loans” and other niches dominated by blackhat SEO.

What you really need in order to find a great niche are just two things:

1. An evergreen or emerging niche
2. Low competition keywords

With just these two things you set yourself up a success in the very beginning. Let’s take a look at these two items in detail.

1. Evergreen or Emerging Niches

An evergreen niche is one that has been and will be around forever. Examples of this include health and fitness, finance, beauty and property to name a few. Basically, anything that can stand the test of time and will not go out of fashion any time soon.

An emerging niche is one that is just coming into popularity. Some great resources for these emerging niches are news outlets, social media groups, and forums.

Essentially anywhere a group of people gathers to talk about their hobby or passion.

By using these groups, you learn not only about the existing products but new products that are about to hit the market, which you can jump ahead of.

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about launch jacking here, but simply being aware of new products, new keywords and new trends in your niche, and getting ahead of them by creating content that people will be searching for in the future.

2. Low Competition Keywords

There are many tools that can help you find low competition keywords such as longtail pro and KWfinder, however, these tools are simply guessing at what is a low competition keyword.

They use their own algorithms to define a score for each keyword which is based on the top 10 search results for that keyword.

Now they can be a great resource for finding new and possibly low competition keywords, but these are NOT the best tools you can use.

So what do we mean by low competition?

There are many elements we need to look for when finding low competition keywords, you can check out my keyword research guide for more information on those elements in much more detail.

Essentially it boils down to finding identifiers of low competition, things such as forums, social media sites, article platforms such as HubPages, and sometimes e-commerce sites, many of which are not optimized for SEO.

When you find a keyword with one or more of the above attributes ranking in the top 10 search results, we know that is a low competition keyword and we have a good chance of ranking for it.

Now, over time, you will learn more about what constitutes a low competition keyword, but for now, those are some of the simple things to look for.

So what is my favorite keyword research tool?

I’m sure you’ve all heard of SEMRush? It is without a doubt my favorite keyword research tool ever. If you’ve not got an account you should take advantage of the SEMrush Free Trial.

So how do you use SEMRush and in particular which web properties can we use in order to find a super easy-to-rank for keywords?

I’m not going to beat around the bush here. I’m literally going to give you 15 of the top resources I personally use. Just one or two of these will yield hundreds of keywords which you can take, create content on, and published to your website.

Even using just one or two of these will yield hundreds of keywords which you can take, create content on and rank for pretty easily.

1. Alibaba.com
2. Amazon.com
3. Gumtree.com (UK site like craigslist)
4. Craigslist.com
5. AliExpress.com
6. Yell.com (for local search terms)
7. HubPages.com
8. Instructables.com
9. YouTube
10. EzineArticles.com
11. Yahoo Answers
12. FlipBoard.com
13. StumbleUpon.com
14. Facebook.com (Pages & Groups)
15. [INSERT NICHE] +Forum

How to come up with your own weak competition web properties?

The trick is to find lookalike websites. What do I mean by that?

You are simply looking for other websites that rank well for keywords in your niche that are:

1. A similar age (less thank 12 months old)
2. A similar/low DA (typically less than 10 is great)
3. Looks and smells like a Niche site

Once you have found a website and meets some or all of the above criteria, we can then add this into SEMRush and get every keyword that they rank for in the top 100 results of Google.

Once you’ve completed the above and found a few great sites in which to steal keywords from, here are a few filters to apply which will greatly reduce the number of keywords you have but improve the quality (where Quality = Low Competition)

1. Filter for position 10 or less
2. Where keyword contains “Best” or ”Review”
3. Keyword difficulty less than 50

The last filter is a metric that is somewhat new and I have no idea how accurate the keyword difficulty score is on SEMRush, however, it is nice metric to use once you’ve applied the other filters. I typically use this filter once I have found keywords that are ranking on the first page and contain the words “best” or “review”.

Once you’ve applied your filters, export the list and add to a Google Doc. What I then do is to simply add a few additional columns such as “assigned”, “drafted”, “published” and “comments”.

I use the last field “comments” to make additional notes on the top 10 search results, such as “forum exists” or “Facebook pages ranking” or “top four is dominated by one website”.

This helps me to rank the keywords into some form of order, from which I can drive my content production.

So when my writers are ready for some work, I can simply sort the keywords by the rank I have given them and send them straight to the writer. I then mark those as “assigned”, then when the content is returned and added to WordPress it is marked as “drafted”, and finally when it is edited and published it is marked as such.

I hope you enjoyed this quick tip and the list of weak sites from which to scrape awesome keywords.

I’m sure you’ve seen other articles around using SEMRush in the past but this is how I have done it for a couple of years now, as it is a great tactic to find those low competition keywords and it will hopefully help you to find your niche if you are struggling.

Tags: Keyword Research, Niche Research