Chris Haines
Chris is an SEO director who has 10 years of experience in SEO, agency side. When not involved in SEO, he enjoys messing around with vintage synthesizers, walks on sandy beaches, and a good cup of tea.
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If you want to create a blog but don’t know where to start, it’s worth putting in some time to find a good blog niche. But how can you findone? In my experience, identifying a good blog niche is usually determined by three things: If you can find a niche with these elements, it’s likely a good blogniche. Sidenote. This is a good starting point for most beginners when identifying a good blog niche. However, considering all the Ahrefs metrics before committing to a particular niche is always a goodidea. The easiest way to identify a good niche is to use a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. With this tool, you can plug in different keywords to see if they represent a workable blog niche opportunity. Let’s say you’re a travel enthusiast with expert knowledge of Singapore and SouthKorea. You want to write a guide about these topics but don’t know which one has more opportunities for organic search traffic. We can use keyword research to help determine the answer. Let’s start by entering “singapore travel guide” into Keywords Explorer. We can see that the TP for this keyword in the U.S. is 250—that’s quitelow. Since this keyword has a KD of 46, let’s plug in “south korea travel guide” into Keywords Explorer to compare these terms against eachother. From this, we cansee: This means there is ~17 times more TP for a South Korean travel guide than for a Singaporean travel guide. A South Korean travel guide blog would also be easier to rank based on the KD scores. Do note that Keywords Explorer estimates that we would need backlinks from ~41 websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword—meaning it would take time for this site to rank on the firstpage. If you have several potential topics for your blog, this method helps prioritize your blog niche ideas effectively. Finding a good niche is one thing, but how do you know if it makesmoney? Unfortunately, knowing exactly how much money a site makes is difficult unless you’re the siteowner. But we can get an idea of the estimated value of specific pages or even entire websites for different keywords using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and Site Explorer. The metric we use to do this is organic traffic value. Sidenote. Organic traffic value is the equivalent monthly cost of traffic from all keywords that the target website/URL ranks for if paid via Pay Per Click instead of ranking organically. Here’s a quick way to get the estimated organic traffic value of a page that ranks for a keyword: You can enter the competitor’s website into Site Explorer to find the estimated organic traffic value. In this example, I’ve entered the website’s domain, and we can see that the estimated monthly organic traffic value is $210K. From this quick analysis, we can see that it’s likely a successful website. Tip For a more in-depth guide on this topic, check out Mateusz Makosiewicz’s blog post, “How to Start a Blog That Makes Money (And Gets Free Traffic).” You can also see how a blog niche is making money by looking at the top SERP results and understanding how the site owner is monetizing the website. For instance, on the website we looked at, we can see that it’s monetized with Amazon Associates and Mediavine in the footer. For Amazon, we can see the text disclosure. For Mediavine, we can see the Mediavine logo next to the advert. Mediavine requires 50K sessions to apply, so this website is likely making a regular income. If you want to take it further and only find Amazon Affiliate sites within your niche, you could use Ahrefs’ Web Explorer. To do this, copy and paste the code below into Web Explorer to get a list of Amazon Affiliate websites: We can also add a filter to narrow our search to a specific niche. I’ve used a “Page URL” filter for Seoul-related keywords, but you can search for any niche you likehere. This isn’t a guarantee that the site is making money—but it can be a good indication. Once you’ve identified a decent blog niche, the next stage is to develop youridea. Here are some things you need to consider at thisstage: When deciding on the main pages of your website, the Matching terms report in Keywords Explorer is your friend. I use “seoul” as my seed keyword in this example, and I want to set it to “By parent topic” and “Show aslist.” We see that the Parent Topics are listed by topicsize. Here are a few main pages I’ve picked from the above list that we can use for ourblog: You can build a travel blog about these two topics, and we know from Keywords Explorer that these topics have plenty of search volume. To get an idea of how we can build out the website’s structure, you can use Ahrefs to spy on your competitors to see what’s already working in Google. Let’s continue with our “seoul travel blogs” idea by clicking on the downward-facing caret result from SERP overview and clicking on “Overview” in the pop-up menu. Doing this takes us to Site Explorer’s Overview report. Once we are there, click on “Site structure” and change “Exact URL” to “Domain.” Once we’ve done that, we can spy on the entire structure of the number #1 ranking site for this keyword phrase. This is a powerful tactic, as it lets you understand what’s working on Google for other websites. We can go further by adding a “URL” filter to show only URLs that contain “seoul” within this domain. This can help us to understand what level of traffic this keyword is driving for this website. It also may inspire you to write about article topics that you hadn’t considered previously. For example, we can see a lot of traffic related to food-based content in Seoul. If we had knowledge of this area, it could represent an excellent opportunity to cover these topics on your website. Finding questions in your blog niche is easy—here’s how you doit. To start, enter your keyword into Keywords Explorer. Then you’ll see the types of questions people are searching for in the bottom right-hand corner. If you’ve read the first two sections, you should have a good idea of how to find a blogniche. But if you’re short of time and looking for some instant ideas, I’ve identified 40 blog niche ideas. With some work, you could build a website around these for the U.S. market. Sidenote. *Starred categories indicate a YMYL niche, which will likely be harder to rank for than other categories listed. Once you’ve chosen your blog niche, there’s still more work ahead—you’ll need to do these things to ensure your website’s success: Choosing a successful blog niche isn’t always straightforward. But if you have Ahrefs, much of the guesswork is removed, and you can use our data to help make the decisions. Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter. 🙂Using Keywords Explorer to find a goodniche
Finding blog niche ideas that (probably) makemoney
incontent:is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program AND outlinkdomain:amazon.com OR outlinkdomain:amzn.to
Finding the main pages of yourblog
How to build out and define your website’s structure
Identifying popular questions in your blogniche
Health and fitness*
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Healthy restaurants 43K 8 Meal plans to gain weight 7.1K 28 Upper backpain 35K 34 Stretches for sciatic pain 92K 20 Parenting
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Parenting advice for new parents 2.8K 17 Traditional parenting styles 9K 37 Raising children books 3K 20 Positive parenting 9.1K 57 Personal finance*
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Money saving strategies 14K 77 Budgeting advice 22K 69 Financial planning 4.7K 73 Budgeting plans 22K 86 Travel
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Budget family travel 8.4K 37 Travel hacks 2.8K 31 Traveling alone 900 52 Traveling with ababy 2.1K 38 Lifestyle
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty How to live a better life 3.2K 48 Decluttering 6.7K 57 Relationship advice 5.4K 67 Green living 2.4K 43 Food and kitchen
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Vegan and vegetarian recipes 24K 66 Pescatarian diet 7.4K 55 Kitchen organization 8.5K 67 Kitchen gadgets 8K 50 DIY
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty DIY furniture 1.2K 29 Make your own clothing 6.9K 53 Make your own crafts 5K 54 Upcycling 2K 61 Beauty and fashion
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Makeup tutorials 11K 21 Hair styling techniques 2K 6 Skincare routine 64K 74 Hair styling 1K 30 Self-help and motivation
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Visualization techniques 2.3K 43 Manifestation 8.8K 59 Personal growth examples 1.7K 34 Self motivation affirmations 18K 8 Newborn and pregnancy*
Topic Traffic Potential Keyword Difficulty Newborn care 400 49 Pregnancy books 1.4K 19 Baby gear 2.9K 37 Baby sleep training 5.9K 58 Final thoughts