Analyze the Size of Your Niche
Before committing to your blog, you may want to assess the size of your potential audience. For most niches, this is more of a curiosity than a requirement, but if you’re trying to establish yourself in a very small niche and are uncertain about its size, this step can help you determine if it’s worth pursuing or not.
We’re after an estimate rather than exact numbers. More importantly, the process you’ll go through in order to estimate the size of your niche will also turn out to be useful when researching keywords and topics for your articles later on.
Determine the Search Volume for Your Niche
As you probably know, Google makes the bulk of its profits from selling ads. And ads are annoying, right? Well, in this case it actually works in our favor. Google has released a series of tools for advertisers that are meant to help its Ads (formerly AdWords) users find new keywords to advertise with, as well as helping them estimate search volumes for those keywords.
We have no intention of buying ads from Google through its Ads program now, but we can still use the information Google makes available to do some research into the size of our niche.
In the first edition of this book, I advocated using the Google Keyword Tool, which has since been rebranded to the Keyword Planner tool.[11] It’s still a viable option, but these days I find it to be more focused toward (and therefore more useful to) actual advertisers rather than bloggers. Nevertheless, at this stage, we’re not doing advanced SEO research. We’re looking for broad ranges, and the Keyword Planner does provide us with those.
For example, let’s say that your blog niche is TypeScript. The Keyword Planner currently suggests a U.S. monthly volume of searches for that exact keyword to be in the 10K--100K range, as shown in Figure 3, Google Keyword Planner. This gives us an idea of the size of the audience, and it’s good enough for now.
Alternatively, you could use one of the many free keyword tools available by searching for “free keyword tool” in…well, likely Google. Some of these services don’t require registration and provide specific numbers instead of broad ranges like Google does. The catch is that the estimates will be different, depending on the site you use, but the general order of magnitude should be consistent across the board.
Whichever tool you decide to use, plug in some keywords related to your specific blog topic and see what kind of search volume shows up. Use generic keywords with one or two words at most, and not something specific like “python programming for data science.” Instead, search for “python,” “data science,” and perhaps “numpy” to better gauge the interest level in the topic.
One of the tools I use shows a volume of 42,000 U.S. monthly searches for “TypeScript,” and much more globally (200K+). That’s certainly a sizable-enough audience to build a blog around.
Although worldwide data is provided by the Keyword Planner, if you’re primarily targeting countries like China, Russia, or South Korea, you might be better off using the keyword research tools offered by the most popular search engines in those respective countries—namely Baidu, Yandex, and Naver. The same is true for any market where Google isn’t the de facto search engine.
Going Pro with Premium SEO Tools
SEO experts tend to use premium tools that offer amazing features and insight. It’s a crowded market, but the three tools that stand out are Ahrefs,[12] SEMRush,[13] and Moz.[14] Personally, I’m partial to Ahrefs, but they’re all roughly equivalent and invaluable to bloggers who are serious about ranking in Google.
There are two downsides:
- They are as complex as they are powerful, so there’s a bit of a learning curve.
- Their price tends to be rather premium.
Pricing can vary over time, but think “$100/month and up” kind of premium. The good news is that they are total overkill for someone who’s just starting out. I included them because in a few months or years from now, you might decide to take your SEO efforts to the next level. If you do, one of the three tools shown in Figure 3, Google Keyword Planner will serve you well.
Figure 3. Google Keyword Planner
Use Google Trends
Just as important as the current search volume is the search trend. Is your keyword becoming increasingly popular over time, or are you setting yourself up to create a blog about a technology whose adoption is regressing?
Thankfully we don’t have to rely on intuition. We can verify our gut feeling about the trend of a given technology by using another Google tool called Google Trends.[15] By searching in Google Trends for our language, technology, or main keyword, we can easily assess its search volume over time. The specific example of TypeScript (Figure 4, Google Trends) shows decent growth over the past few years. Past performance is never a guarantee of future results, but a chart like this can be somewhat reassuring.
Google Trends offers details about the regions and cities in which a given keyword is popular. TypeScript seems to be searched for primarily in Redmond/Seattle (its birthplace), San Francisco, Minsk, Bengaluru, and other hotbeds of startup activity.
This kind of information is particularly useful to you if you live in one of the cities in which your niche is going strong. Along with starting a blog on the subject, you could decide to become active in your local tech community (and perhaps even launch a relevant Meetup group). A local environment favorable to your technology of choice would also be beneficial if you’re looking for a job, intending to offer your freelance services to local companies, or hiring talent for your own business.
Figure 4. Google Trends
Make an Executive Decision
Perform similar searches for your own niche. It’s hard to recommend a minimum threshold because it depends on many factors, including the type of niche, your reasons for blogging, and how specific you were while picking a keyword to search for. “It depends” answers are truthful but deeply unsatisfying. So if I truly had to provide you with a number, I would suggest opting for niches whose main keyword has at least 10,000 monthly searches. If you are creating a more generic blog, you don’t have to worry about this.
If only 1,000 people search for your main keyword in a given month, your topic might be too niche to attract a sizable audience. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s still worth pursuing, but you can probably broaden the scope of your blog, at least slightly, to attract more people.
The exception to this is a brand-new technology that has just been announced (particularly by a well-established company like Apple or Microsoft). While such technologies may show zero search results initially, they’re virtually guaranteed to become popular—at least to a certain extent—in the future. Also, keep in mind that, as a rule of thumb, the larger the niche, the bigger the competition.
Some Internet marketers make a very comfortable living through a series of microniche blogs (usually affiliate sites) that have a much smaller target audience than that. However, their business model and approach to blogging are quite different from the ones recommended in this book. Here we favor quality over quantity.