SEO Strategic Planning
When considering a niche for a new website, based on SEO factors, one of the first things to consider is the number of monthly searches you hope to be able to drive to your site. The first step I would suggest is to find the 50 keywords you feel are most relevant to your niche and insert them into a spreadsheet.
In order to find these top 50 keyphrase opportunities I suggest you use Google’s Free Keyword Tool and base your search on the average number of monthly searches each phrase has been receiving. The next thing you want to figure out is the relevance of your niche topic in relation to each of these keywords. Relevance here refers to the possibility that two distinct niches could be competing for the same keyphrase.
For example, if I was considering starting a new website about training guard and attack dogs, one of the keyphrases I might select would be “protection training”. The problem is that when I search for this term on Google, I receive search results for both “executive protection training” as well as “K9 protection training”
So what is a Search Engine Optimizer to do? One option is to check the first page of Google rankings and simply count up the number of results which relate to your chosen niche. In this example seven out of nine links and one out of two videos where related to K9 protection training.
I like to count each link as ten percent and each video as five. So in this example I will say the relevancy of the keyphrase “protection training” to my niche is 75%. At this point in my spreadsheet I will multiply the total monthly traffic by the relevancy to estimate the subset of that traffic that is likely to be interested in my niche.
The next step is to try to make an honest appraisal of where you think that each of your top 50 keywords might wind up. You can use the following statistics to estimate the percentage of the searches traffic that will click on your link depending on its ranking position for a given keyphrase.
For each of your 50 keyphrases it is helpful to look at the Google search results based on PageRank, domain relevance, number of backlinks, etc. Let’s say that for a given keyphrase you think you can wind up in 4th position then, you might want to ascribe that .6% of the relevant traffic. I like to be super conservative in these types of estimations so in this situation I might round this down to about 5%.
So the idea is basically to make two cuts out of the total amount of monthly searches, the first based on niche relevance and the second based on your estimated landing position. By taking this information and multiplying it by an estimated value-per-visitor you can get an idea of how much keyphrases would be worth to you per month. This type of estimation is enormously valuable to determine-not only how viable a niche is, but also to begin to figure out how you will structure your on-page SEO strategy.
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