By now you’ve got a great list of possible niche topics for your web site and a pretty good idea of the visitor pool (total searches) for each main and sub-niche keywords. What you don’t know yet is just how competitive the keywords in your niche are.
First of all you need to find out how many other web publishers are competing for the same keywords. Whilst a highly competitive niche may still be worth entering – it’s important to know the size of the challenge you face.
One way you could do this is to just look at the organic results pages for Google. Enter your main keyword and your sub-niche keywords and then look over to the top right hand of the screen just under the toolbar. Google shows you the list order of the pages and the total number of pages for the search.
With these results, you can now combine your figures for searches on the keyword with those for competitor pages to give you an overall measure of demand/supply in the niche.
Just divide the number of competitor pages (Results) by the number of searches to produce an overall R/S ratio.
Now technically speaking - the lower the R/S ratio the better. Its common sense – you want a high number of searches and not much competition in an ideal world. A must-have highly profitable niche would score in the lower single figures.
Enter your R/S figures into your spreadsheet and sort again best to worst – does that change your view on which niche to go for? Don’t worry if the R/S ratios don’t look as good as you want.
If Steve Pavlina had done some keyword analysis on ‘”personal development”, he would have found out that the number of searches was 18,000 and the number of competitor pages was a massive 30,000,000.
So the R/S ratio for his niche would be 1666 (30,000,000 divided by 18,000) and he’d have given up before he started.
As we’ve already said – numbers are not the whole story. You need to go look at what your potential competitors are actually doing in the niche. This is the second stage of analyzing the competition and it’s something a lot of web publishers just don’t bother to do.