🔎 Struggling with niche research? Here's what to do

Welcome to Niche Site Digest!

Here’s what happened last week:

• 🔎 How to find a niche (as a complete beginner)

• ✅ Got hit by a Google update? Here’s a practical checklist to follow

• 📈 How to mine Google Trends for keywords and topics

Let’s dive in!

🔎 Niche research for beginners

Struggling to find the right niche?

You're not alone.

I want to create a solution that helps you find a profitable, beginner-friendly niche without wasting time or money.

Which of the following would you find most useful?

📹 Short Video Course: A concise course teaching you how to analyze and validate any niche. (Estimated Price: <$100)

🗄️ Niche Database: Access to a searchable database of profitable, low-authority websites across various niches. (Estimated Price: <$100)

📄 Profitable Niches Report: A detailed report listing the top 25-50 niches for 2023, ranked by profitability, competition, and more. (Estimated Price: <$50)

📰 Paid Weekly Niche Newsletter: Ongoing insights into one beginner-friendly niche per week, complete with competition analysis, keyword opportunities, and monetization strategies. (Estimated Price: $10/month)

Have multiple preferences or a different idea?

Reply to this email!

Your feedback will help me create the best product for you.

🤯 Google Core Update released on August 22nd

Brace yourself - the Google update dropped a few days ago.

By the time this newsletter is out, you should have already seen some movement on your sites (hopefully up and to the right!).

If your traffic has dropped, don’t panic.

These updates usually take a few weeks to roll out, and often there is a partial reversal 2-3 weeks after the initial update.

If you want to dig in and analyze the effect this update had on your sites, go to our featured snippets section and look for the checklist resource.

🗺️ Topical Authority

Topical authority is the hottest buzzword in SEO today. And the main “guru” behind it is Koray Tuğberk.

However, his delivery style can be a bit difficult to follow, and that shows in this interview as well.

Honestly? I recommend just skipping to the 1:29 mark on the video and getting the TL; DW from Gael. If you get value from that, consider watching the entire video.

🔍 Site Spotlight

We’re back with another site from Flippa, this one in the drone niche. But is it a good investment? Or should you stay away?

Let’s dive in and see the good, the bad, and the ugly of YourDroneReviews.com.

At a glance:

• Niche: Drones

• Traffic: 12k pageviews (in July)

• DR: 19

• Monthly profit: All over the place ($240 L6M average)

• Asking price: $9,500

• Multiple: 39x (based on the last 6 months of profit)

With that out of the way, let’s dive and take a closer look at the site and the niche.

💪 Strengths

• Site age: The site has been created in 2016, making it 7 years old. Older domains are seen as more trustworthy by Google and are out of the infamous sandbox. Looking at the Wayback Machine, the seller has created and owned the domain the entire time, which is great because it means that the domain hasn’t been dropped (resetting its age in Google’s eyes).

• Domain authority: The site has a DR of 19, which isn’t too high, but it still gives them some advantage over lower DR competitors (more on this in the opportunities section)

👎 Weaknesses

• The top 3 pages get 30% of total traffic: This represents a big risk to the potential buyer because if a Google update happens and those pages get hit, it will impact the site traffic and revenue disproportionally.

• History of getting hit by Google updates: The site has been hit with multiple Google updates over the years. That makes predicting future revenue and traffic more difficult.

🎯 Opportunities

• Adding comparison tables: The site is ranking for some lucrative affiliate keywords like Exo Drones Review but has no comparison tables on those roundup reviews. Adding those tables and putting them at the top of the post would immediately increase revenue without doing anything else.

• Sniping competitor keywords: The site has a few competitors (example 1, example 2) that have a much lower DR (we’re talking DR of 1 - you can’t get lower than that) but have a lot more traffic than this site. A surefire way to get more traffic is to find the competition’s top pages and then just create better, more in-depth content. You’re going to take their rankings because you have better content AND higher DR - a killer combo.

• Building strong, niche-relevant links: The site has a DR of 19 but very few drone-related links. One of the priorities for the new owner would be building strong links from drone websites.

• Content update: The seller has published over 300 posts related to drones, but most of those aren’t getting any traffic. You’d need to do a proper content audit, where you would analyze all posts and divide them into categories: keep, update, repurpose, or delete.

⛈️ Threats

• The drone niche is shrinking: The drone niche peaked in December 2017 and has been rapidly declining since then. This means this website is not a good long-term asset for most people. Why? Well, even if you improve the site and rank higher on Google, its traffic and revenue will continue to shrink.

Personally, I would buy this website only as a short-term flip.

Add new content, build some links, improve monetization, then resell it 6-12 months later for a handsome profit.

The path to 3x traffic/revenue is relatively straightforward, but I wouldn’t want to own any website in a niche that has peaked and is on its way down.

🚀 Featured Snippets

• ✅ SEO Traffic Drop Investigation & Checklist: If you got dinged by an update, don’t panic. Take a deep breath, grab a cup of coffee, and then dive into your site’s analytics following this checklist.

• 🧑‍🎓 Blogging Tips For Beginners: Starting a blog as a complete beginner can get overwhelming pretty fast. That’s why I like having a clear checklist of things to follow when starting a new site, and this list of tips from Ahrefs is a great choice.

• 🧰 Underrated SEO tools: Is it just me, or is everyone else also addicted to trying out new tools? If that’s you, you’ll love this thread.

• ✍️ SEO Blog Outline Example: Struggling to start writing? Here’s an example of a blog outline to get your creative juices flowing.

• 🔗 3 Ways To Get Traffic Without Link Building: I get it - link building is tough. That’s why finding ways to grow your traffic without links is a great strategy for beginners - and this video explains how to do it.

• 📈 How To Mine Google Trends For Keywords: Google Trends is an awesome tool for getting keyword and topic ideas. In this thread, Tony explains his 9-step process on how to use it to its full potential.

🛠️ Tool of the week

Here's how I use Reddit to find niche ideas, keywords to write about, popular topics to cover, and more.

Just type in the main subreddit of your niche, and let it find all other related subreddit (by comments). Click on the subreddit, and you'll get the basic stats. Double click, and it will do another search for that subreddit.

It’s highly useful if you want to see the questions your audience is asking and where they are hanging out on Reddit.

That’s it for today - see you next week!

Niche Site Guy