When it comes to niche research, the ideas that most people have are dead wrong. One of the biggest lies, that even many experienced marketers buy into, is that competition is determined by the amount of pages that are optimized for the term you are thinking about attempting to rank for. If you explore marketing bulletin boards, you will find endless back and forth debates about the relative validity of determining the number of competing pages using the phrase in quotes versus searching the phrase preceded by the allinititle modifier. What rarely seems to get brought up in these heated debates between these two different methods is the following – neither of those really matter, in the final estimation. Everyone agrees that ranking is important. For instance, if you want a career in personal training, you need to rank in order to gain clients.

That’s right. That’s what I said. Neither of them should be your final determiner. Yeah, they can give you some information. Obviously, a site with one million competing pages (whichever way you judge the competition) is going to be more difficult to rank for than a site with one hundred competing optimized pages. When you look at it in those broad strokes, it seems obvious. However, success in niche marketing rarely comes from the broad strokes, but rather the small details.

However, where the grey area starts to appear is when you consider that a term with five thousand competing sites where the top ten are very well optimized can be much more difficult to rank for than a term with fifty thousand competing sites where the top ten are pretty poorly optimized. There are a couple of things you can look at to determine how well optimized the top ten sites are. Of course, none of them alone is going to give you the total picture, but taken together, they can provide a decent guide.

The first thing to do is scan through for bold in the content that’s showing on the page. Remember, Google highlights the keywords in that were searched for in bold. If there is bold in the title, in the content snippet, and in the URL – that is very good optimization for that keyword. This could be a difficult competitor, taken on that aspect. Next, take a glance at the Google Page Rank of each listing. If you are really serious, you can even look at the Page Rank of the individual page that appears in the rankings, as well as the Page Rank of the home page for the site it appears on. The higher each of these are, the more solid that makes their position in the rankings. There are plugins for Mozilla Firefox which are freely available which help you quickly and easily determine Page Rank. Two of these are SEO for Firefox and SEOQuake. My personal preference is SEO for Firefox, but SEOQuake is also quite useful. Lastly, look at the backlinks each page has pointing to it – both to the individual page as well as to the home page of the main site. There are Mozilla Firefox plugins to help you determine this as well, but it is equally easily determined by conducting a simple custom search in Yahoo. You will want to put “link:” into the search box and then the domain name.

This extra effort in niche market research will pay off huge dividends. A little bit of extra effort in the beginning looking at these keywords will pay huge dividends when your sites skyrocket to the top of the listings!

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