Good Amazon niches are all around us, but to make sure you can make a profitable niche website with them, you need to perform a specific keyword research and niche validation. In this guide I’m going to teach you exactly how to do that so that you can start your Azon journey with success.
In my last guide I have shown you how to find hundreds of great Amazon niches in the shortest amount of time possible. Now I’m going to teach you how to find those few gold nuggets among those niches that we call profitable Amazon niches.
What’s a profitable Amazon niche
It’s a niche that brings you money, of course.
My slightly different definition of a profitable Amazon niche would be the niche that brings you the most amount of money in the shortest time possible.
I’m sure you like my version better 🙂
But let’s make it even more accurate and more related to this article. A potentially profitable Amazon niche is the one that has:
- High search volume
- Buyer intent keywords
- High priced products
- Low Google competition
- Products with high number of reviews
- Large amount of products
- Long product lifespan
- Consistent search volume trend
As you can see there’s more to it than just finding a niche with big search volume or products over $1000, you need to have most of this dots connected (preferably all of them) to have the highest chance of building a profitable Amazon niche website.
What are buyer intent keywords
A lot of you guys approached me either through Facebook or email to help you find a good niche or at least tell you if the niche you picked is good or not.
That’s where I realized a lot of you are doing it wrong and don’t understand some basic Amazon keyword research rules.
Put yourself in a position of buyers, think about the last thing you bought online.
For example, I bought a vaping box mod a few months ago (yeah, I’m a vaper), and, of course, I searched for it online to see what’s the right vaping machine for me.
What do you think I wrote in Google? Did I write vaping box mod? Or best vaping box mod? 🙂
You’re right; I wrote “best vaping box mod”. Because who doesn’t want something bad, we all want the best, right?
And when you write “best + keyword” that’s a clear buying intention right there.
You need to understand why people are searching for something online. Do they search to learn something, to find something or to buy something?
That brings us to three type of search queries:
- Informational – Searches performed to answer questions or learn something
- Navigational – Searches performed to locate a specific website or product
- Transactional – Searches performed to buy something
We obviously want to target transactional keywords people use when they look to buy something.
If you want to learn and understand more about three search query types check these two articles from WordStream, one about search queries and another about keyword intent.
Transactional keywords you should use when doing keyword research
I’ll go more in-depth about finding more great buyer intent (transactional) keywords and will just keep it simple here, since I know there’s a lot of you guys who are complete beginners.
Basically what you can do to find certain keywords is this. Use only 3 types of buyer intent keywords, those are:
I use only “best” when doing keyword research. For example, best kitchen faucets.
When you find a great keyword it’s advisable to check it out with other transactional keywords because maybe those will have a higher search volume, you never know.
But if you stay with just the “best” you will do fine. That’s a lot better than using just a naked keyword “kitchen faucets” which is, as you learned today, an informational keyword.
Now you are ready to start performing keyword research with KWFinder and find those little profitable gems. Let me show you exactly how to do that.
Always check plural and singular for each keyword, sometimes there’s a huge difference in search volume and SEO difficulty.
How to find and filter out bad Amazon niches
When you put together a list of Azon niches you like and think that might work, it’s time to see what are they really made of and are they a good fit or not.
To do that we’ll start by filtering the bad ones first. That way we’ll quickly shorten our list to only the best niches out there so that we can put more time into some deep research later.
Remember, always use transactional keywords when using any keyword research tool, preferably with the word “best” in front of your main keyword.
Removing keywords / niches with low search volume
The first thing I do is removing niches with really low monthly search volume. There’s no point in building a niche website around something no one is looking for.
I simply go to KWFinder, which is my go-to tool for keyword research, import or write all my keywords in there and check their search volume.
If the monthly search volume* is below 1000 searches I usually just forget about it.
When checking keywords on KWFinder always select the United States for the country.
Keep in mind that some niches are seasonal niches, which means they have a lot of searches in certain periods of a year (like around Christmas – gifts, during winter or summer, or at the start of school time and similar).
Those seasonal niches can have a huge spike in searches during those periods of time while they have low search volume the rest of the year.
If you want to have a huge amount of sales during just a few months in a year, that’s fine by me. But if you are making your first or second Amazon niche site I suggest you find a niche that has a decent (1000+/mo) search volume throughout the whole year.
Removing keywords / niches with high KC (SEO competition)
Depending which keyword tool you use you’ll often see some kind of competition score, keyword competitiveness score (KC), SEO competition score or any other similar name which will show you the SEO difficulty of ranking for certain keyword.
In KWFinder it’s called SEO competition, but I’ll keep it short and just call it KC which is the most popular term around the web.
The KC usually ranges from 0 to 100, the higher the number is the harder you will rank for it.
That score is a calculation of lots of SEO parameters like website’s age, content relevancy, on-Page SEO, Domain and Page authority, MOZ rank and a bunch of other SEO elements. If you would like to know more feel free to Google “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” and learn more about it all.
I usually remove all keywords that have KC above 40. Even those are not really easy to rank but they are manageable.
If you can, find a keyword with KC of a maximum 35. When you find a keyword with KC of 30 and lower, you struck a gold mine.
In case when you find a keyword with KC below 25 you can open up a bottle of champagne and start celebrating…well, almost 🙂
Removing keywords / niches with low-priced (cheap) products
The last really important test I put all my keywords through is the price of an actual product.
You can have a keyword with lowest KC and highest search volume, but if the product costs $5 and your average commission rate is 6% you won’t make too much money.
The higher the price the more you will make obviously. If you can find a product that costs $200+ you are on a roll.
Still, you can go a bit lower. I usually pick keywords / niches that have at least an average product price of around $100. If I really, really like the niche and see a huge potential in it, I might go even lower, but not below $80.
In any case, make sure that your niche has at least some $100+ products, and even some $200+, $300+ and higher priced products. Some people like to buy only the best and don’t care about the price.
For anyone out there who is wondering where to check product prices – on Amazon, obviously. You don’t have to use transactional queries on Amazon, just use a normal keyword (in other words, when researching on Amazon.com you will type “kitchen faucets” in their search box, and NOT “best kitchen faucets”).
Removing keywords / niches with low amount of products and bad reviews
You won’t usually ran into this particular problem, but it’s good to know in case you do.
I’ve seen some niches where there are maybe 6-7 good products to promote. And those niches were actually good and the products were great, but there isn’t really much space to grow beyond that.
You can make a small niche website with just around 5-10 products and make a lot of money with it, but it’s always good to have more options. You never know if you’ll decide to grow your website further or even sell it to someone later on.
So the final review of your keywords and niches is to check how many products do they have available on Amazon and out of those products how many of them have good reviews and in which amounts.
Like I said, you can find a niche and build a website around just 10 products, but if from those ten products only 3 have actual user reviews and if those reviews are not good and there’s not many of them, you’ll have a problem.
Try to find a niche with at least, like the minimum of minimums, 7-10 great products with great reviews (4/5 stars minimum) and make sure they have at least 10+ reviews each.
How to select winning Amazon keywords and niches
Now that we have filtered out all the bad keywords and niches we won’t be using, it’s time to find the good and the great ones that we have left.
If you don’t have any keywords/niches left after you have done the whole filtering process that means you need to go and find some more. Sorry, that’s how it works, it takes time but is crucial that you do this step right.
To find out what’s the best and most profitable Amazon niche we need to put them all against each other so we can easily distinguish weak points, and also strong points of each niche.
Create a table with all your niche keywords and statistics
I use Google Drive and all of its amazing free tools. In this example I used Google Spreadsheets.
*Click on the image to see it in full size.
Let me explain what this little table presents and shows…
In the first row I put most important parameters, those are:
- Niche – In this column you put all those keywords you got after you filtered the bad ones.
- Search volume (average) – In this column you will write the average search volume of each keyword. KWFinder shows you average search volume by default.
- Search volume (range) – This column shows the search volume trends, from lowest to highest, depending on each month of the year. You can find that data in KWFinder.
- KC (Keyword Competitiveness) – In this column you will put a so-called KC, or as they call it in KWFinder – SEO Competition rank for each keyword.
- High DA – This column shows how many websites / pages on the first page of Google results have DA (Domain Authority) over 40. You can easily see that in KWFinder or SERPchecker.
- High PA – This column shows how many websites / pages on the first page of Google results have PA (Page Authority) over 40. You can easily see that in KWFinder or SERPchecker.
- High CF – This column shows how many websites / pages on the first page of Google results have CF (Citation Flow) over 40. You can easily see that in SERPchecker.
- High TF – This column shows how many websites / pages on the first page of Google results have TF (Trust Flow) over 40. You can easily see that in SERPchecker.
- Avg. Product Price – This column shows the average price of a product you plan on promoting. Go to Amazon and see what’s the price of a cheapest and most expensive product, then write down the average. But keep in mind that you look for multiple products in the same price range, otherwise don’t take it into consideration. For example, if most products cost between $30 and $150, and then you find one product which costs $300 you won’t take that one in this calculation because it’s just one product and most people won’t buy that one.
- Authority potential – Does the niche have a potential to become an authority niche site or not. If you find a niche that has 15 products in it and there are not more products you could use on the same website you won’t be able to create an authority website around it. This is hugely dependable and unique for each niche and your own judgment, plans and way of thinking.
- Min. Earning Potential – For this calculation I use AmaProfits.com website. Now this can be a bit tricky because we are basically just guessing things, but if you use the same parameters for each keyword, you can see some differences which will help you determine is the keyword / niche good or bad. More about this calculation below.
Some of you will say hey Drazen you forgot to include the number of backlinks each competitor has. I didn’t forget; I chose not to include it.
First of all, yeah, backlinks matter, but the number of backlinks, not so much. It’s more about the quality, relevancy, anchor texts and a bunch of other different reasons I won’t discuss in this article.
To prove you that the number of links doesn’t matter just take a look at this screenshot below.
This website has almost half a million of backlinks, and it still isn’t in the first position. I rest my case 🙂
Earning potential calculation instructions
I tried to replicate the parameters I used to get results as in my table shown on the image above, but I couldn’t get it. It doesn’t matter; I will show you how to do it from scratch.
First step – go to AmaProfits.com.
Fill in all the fields as I tell you below:
- Main Keyword Searches – In this field you will write your keyword’s search volume. It can be average search volume, min. search volume or max. search volume. Whatever you choose just make sure to repeat it for all other keywords. I personally like to use min. and max. search volume (visible from search trends in KWFinder), that way I know the minimum amount of money I’ll make, and the highest for just that one keyword, and it’s easy to calculate average profit from that data.
- Longtail Searches (est) – This is hard to find out without doing some heavy keyword research. For this purpose just put zero (0) in it.
- Average SERP Position – This is again completely up to you, as long as you use the same number / position for each keyword. I like to use number one (1) because we are all aiming for that position anyway, right? And it’s good for motivation 🙂 In other words, just put 1 in it.
- Visit Affiliate Link – You can put 40% in it, I think that’s by default and a reasonable percentage. Hopefully you’ll have the same or higher rate on your websites, but not lower.
- Amazon Purchase Rate – This is the amount of people (percentage) that actually buy something through your affiliate link after they visit Amazon. You can leave it at 5%.
- Average Amazon Purchase – Here you can again use min. and max. product price, or average, as you wish. Whatever you choose make sure to do the same for each keyword (depending on the product price for each keyword of course). I like to use both, min. and max. product prices here.
- Amazon Rate (Commission Rate) – Shown in the right column at the bottom. Choose whatever you like, just be consistent for all keywords. I personally pick 6% for that.
After you fill all that in you will get a Potential Profit number. Write that number down in your table and repeat the same steps for each keyword.
Make sure to use both minimum and maximum prices so that you know how big (or small) is the earning potential of your niche.
This calculation will not tell you exactly how much will you earn, that’s really hard to calculate, but you will be able to see which niche (keyword) performs better compared to other ones. Obviously the higher Potential Profit, the better for you.
Better look at niche competitors
I almost skipped this step but I think it’s really important and I want you to use it every time you do keyword research because it can make or break your niche picking decision.
To be able to perform this quick SEO analysis you will need a tool like SERPchecker or other similar alternatives. When you get any KWFinder plan you also get SERPchecker included – they are meant to work together and you should use them together always.
When you put a keyword in SERP checker you’ll get the first ten results on Google, together with all the important SEO data you need, like DA, PA, CF, TF, SEO difficulty and more.
You can find more info about each of these SEO parameters on Google if you don’t understand what they mean. A better understanding of it all will also give you a better perspective when you look at your competitors and help you make better decisions.
What I really like about SERPchecker are the colors used for each parameter, giving you the instant feel about your competitors, i.e. screen full of green color = easy to rank, a screen full of red and orange color = hard to compete with.
Here are few examples of SERPchecker and how the results look for a good keyword, and how they look for a bad keyword.
Good keyword (easy to rank – low competition)
Here you can see a nice little niche with lots of green colors, all looking very nice and approachable. That’s because it is, really easy to rank, and that’s what you should be going for.
Bad keyword (hard to rank – high competition)
As you can see on the image above, the competition is brutal, and it would take you (probably) years to rank anywhere on the first page. If you see lots of red, just run away from it.
Understanding the table parameters and defining a winner niche
It may look complicated, but all of the hard work is now done. What remains is looking at the table, understanding the parameters and deciding on the best option for you.
This is how I do it for myself, just follow my steps and you’ll end up with a great niche.
The first thing I look at is the earning potential. Obviously, we want to create a niche website which can make us the most money. So pick a few of your highest earning niches / keywords from your table.
You have already probably cut your niche list in half by doing just this step.
Next, I look at all that SEO data (DA, PA, etc.) and see which of the keyword has the lowest number of high values (40+). I especially look at PA because that’s one of the really important factors.
By now you may already have a winner. If not, continue to next step.
Now I look at the search volume. Even if I find a keyword with easy SEO competition, I might use the niche with a bit higher competition but with a lot more search volume. High search volume means that there will be a lot more buyers and you might start making money even sooner because a lot more visitors will see your website even before you hit the number one position on Google.
And finally, I check on the authority potential. Most of the time your niche will have a lot of potential to become an authority niche site, eventually, but sometimes it won’t. Meaning, sooner or later your niche site will hit a plateau, and you won’t be able to grow it further. That’s just something you need to consider before making a final decision, think long term and see what will work best for you. Not everyone wants to have a huge authority niche site.
The end – I hope that now you have found at least one good niche for which you can be certain that it’s going to be good and profitable and easy to rank.
Wrapping it up
This article has 3500+ words and will take some time to read and understand, but I assure you this whole niche validation process is much quicker when you learn what you need to do from this article.
The most important part is filtering the bad niches right from the start, after that it’s harder to make a big mistake, and with this guide you shouldn’t make any mistakes because you have all the steps needed to find a great niche.
I’m aware some of Amazon affiliate gurus reading this, or some SEO gurus, will say that there’s much more to be done when doing an SEO / competition analysis, and I agree. But I also think that you learn the most by actually doing things. So even if you pick a bit harder niche the first time, you’ll learn so much in the process that you’ll nail it the next time.
It’s hard work, it takes time but it will all pay off, just don’t give up.
In my future articles I will talk more about ranking websites, getting traffic, increasing conversions and making more money with Amazon. Subscribe to my email list and I’ll notify you as soon as I publish new stuff, plus give you some awesome freebies.
