How I Chose the Niche of my Latest Authority Site

As part of my strategy to reach my goals of 2017, I will be launching new authority websites throughout the year. In this article, I will tell you the process that went behind picking up the niche of my latest authority website, Canine Well. You will learn how I picked up the niche, from the initial brainstorming stage to actually validating the niche idea.

The idea for authority came by accident, while hearing about the business that a friend is currently running, which is selling probiotics online. I knew that the probiotics/supplements space is already really crowded, so I thought about niching it down, or in that case modifying it slightly: what about making an authority website about probiotics/supplements for dogs?

After having the initial idea, I quickly ran some tests. I checked the competition to see if there was no big player already in the space. Check. I also checked that you could actually promote such products via Amazon. Check. Finally, I made sure there were writers in that space on sites like UpWork or TextBroker. Also check. I had my initial idea, now it was time to actually validate it and see if it would lead to a profitable niche website.

The first step that I always do after the initial brainstorming is keyword research. Here, I want to make sure that people are actually interested in the niche & searching for it organically on Google. For that, I use a tool called Google Keyword Planner, which is completely free, and gives you a good indication about how many people are searching for that particular keyword.

Inside the tool, I searched for 'dogs probiotics', and here was the result:

As you can see, there is a strong interest for the topic, with 10K-100K searches per month for those keywords. That's my sweet spot for authority websites, because I also don't want the keyword to be too generic (like 'dog health'). Note that this search also gave me some cool insights on the niche, like extending the potential site to digestive enzymes.

As I was satisfied with keyword research, I decided to move to the next step: checking the competition. This is important as you want to not only make sure that there is an actual interest in the niche, but also that there are not too big players in the niche you want to get in.

Here, I found that there are of course huge websites talking about dog health, but there was only one focused on probiotics. It was not of a great quality, and also it didn't have so much traffic (I checked that using Similar Web). So definitely a competition I could beat.

The next step to validate the niche was to make sure I can actually make some decent money in it. For that, I went over to Amazon, and had a closer look at the products sold in the niche. Here is a sample of what I found:

As you can see, the star products in the category are just below my sweet spot in terms of price ($50), which is actually great. People are also raving about those products, with more than a thousand good reviews for some of those supplements. So I was sure that I could definitely build a profitable site in that niche.