Finding a Good Blog Niche (The Easy Way)

In my experience, identifying a good blog niche is usually determined by three things:

• It has high Traffic Potential. (TP estimates how much search traffic the top-ranking site gets for your keyword.)
• It has a low Keyword Difficulty. (KD estimates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page of Google for that keyword.)
• It’s a topic that interests you or you are an expert in.

If you can find a niche with these elements, it’s likely a good blog niche.

Using Keywords Explorer to find a good niche

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 South Korea. 

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 quite low. 

Since this keyword has a KD of 46, let’s plug in “south korea travel guide” into Keywords Explorer to compare these terms against each other.

From this, we can see:

• The KD is lower for “south korea travel guide” than “singapore travel guide.”
• The TP is much higher for “south korea travel guide” at 4.3K.

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 first page.

If you have several potential topics for your blog, this method helps prioritize your blog niche ideas effectively.

Finding blog niche ideas that (probably) make money

Finding a good niche is one thing, but how do you know if it makes money? 

Unfortunately, knowing exactly how much money a site makes is difficult unless you’re the site owner. 

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.

Here’s a quick way to get the estimated organic traffic value of a page that ranks for a keyword:

• Enter your keyword into Keywords Explorer (e.g., “seoul travel blogs”)
• Scroll down to the SERP overview at the bottom of the page
• Estimated value of the page is shown on the right-hand side

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. 

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:

incontent:is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program AND outlinkdomain:amazon.com OR outlinkdomain:amzn.to

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 like here.

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 your idea.

Here are some things you need to consider at this stage:

• What will the blog’s main pages be?
• What will the website’s architecture look like?
• What types of questions are people asking about this topic?

Finding the main pages of your blog

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 as list.”

We see that the Parent Topics are listed by topic size.

Here are a few main pages I’ve picked from the above list that we can use for our blog:

• “things to do in seoul”
• “seoul food”

You can build a travel blog about these two topics, and we know from Keywords Explorer that these topics have plenty of search volume.

How to build out and define your website’s structure

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.

Identifying popular questions in your blog niche

Finding questions in your blog niche is easy—here’s how you do it.

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 blog niche. 

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.

Health and fitness*

Parenting

Personal finance*

Travel

Lifestyle

Food and kitchen

DIY

Beauty and fashion

Self-help and motivation

Newborn and pregnancy*

Final thoughts

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:

• Start competitor research for your blog niche to understand the market
• Start more detailed keyword research
• Choose a domain name, hosting, and website platform like WordPress
• Create a good site architecture
• Write content that ranks well in Google (and people want to read)
• Learn how to promote your blog and start link building 
• Ensure your technical SEO is up to scratch 
• Ensure your blog is SEO-friendly

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. 🙂