Low Competition Niches with High Profit Potential

Today, I'm going to walk you through 5 niches with high earnings potential and low competition. And no, this won't be a random list of 205 fluffy niches like health and fitness or DIY. I've actually done some market and keyword research to justify my cases with data, examples, and I'll give you my personal take on how I'd monetize and approach these sites. So if you want to geek out and maybe even argue in the comments, then stay tuned. Alright, so let's get on the same page and define the word niche. Simply put, a niche is a segment or a smaller part of an industry. And this segment has a community with their own specific needs. Now, while competitive niches often have higher earnings potential, it doesn't mean that low competition niches can't be very profitable too. In fact, if you don't have substantial resources, I think one of the best ways to enter competitive industries is to start in a sub-niche with lower competition. Build some authority to your site, and then niche up when you're ready to compete. And I talk more about this in our video about how to find a niche. So I won't expand on that now, but I'll link up the video in the description. Alright, so in order to actually choose these niches, there were four things that I wanted to see. Number one, the niche had to have a decent market size. So I searched for market stats. And this helps us to get a general idea of revenue potential and addressable market. Number two, I wanted to see a clear-cut way to monetize the site. And I did this by looking at what competing websites were doing and blended it with my own ideas. Number three, I wanted a rough idea of the search market for low competition keywords. Meaning, keywords that I felt pretty confident about ranking for in the short to medium term. And this will ensure that I'm not dumping resources into the site for years before I see a profit. And number four, I wanted to find low-authority websites that were getting a significant amount of search traffic for relevant topics. And to gauge authority, I used the Domain Rating Metric in Ahrefs or DR, which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile. And this would tell me that it's possible for small players to actually penetrate the SERPs for these keywords. Now, finding market size and monetization methods are pretty straightforward. But I do want to expand on my method of evaluating the search market because that's where I spent the majority of my time. Basically, I did up to 10 minutes of keyword research to see if there was a good amount of search demand for low-difficulty topics. So in short, I searched for a seed keyword in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, went to the matching terms report, set a maximum keyword difficulty filter of 20, and added some keyword modifiers based on the business model I had in mind. For example, if my monetization method was affiliate marketing, I'd search for keywords that include our seed and at least one of these words. Then I filtered through the list of keyword ideas and added any relevant ones to my own custom keyword list. Now, while keyword difficulty and domain rating aren't perfect metrics, I think using a combination of these across hundreds of SERPs paints a decent high-level view of keyword competition. And because they're not perfect, I need to note two things before we jump into the niches. Number one, the actual size of the search market will be significantly bigger than what I found in doing 10 minutes of keyword research. And number two, I don't actually have any experience in these niches. So the monetization methods that I came up with are based purely off of competitor data and around 12 years experience in SEO and site building. So if you have any agreements, disagreements, or questions, just leave them in the comments and we'll continue the conversation there. Alright, so let's get started with the first niche. And that's test preparation for graduate and professional schools. Now, for a lot of schools in the United States, you need to pass a standardized test in addition to doing well in your undergraduate studies. But students don't want to just pass. They want to excel to make their applications more competitive when applying to law schools, MBA programs, and medical schools, to name a few. Now, according to Forbes, students and parents spent over a billion dollars in 2020 on test prep. And while much of this went towards SATs, which is a standardized test for undergraduate admissions, a good chunk of this money still went towards graduate and professional test preparation. Now, if I were to approach this niche, I'd probably monetize through online courses or a membership program, where students can get access to educational material on tests like the LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, and GRE to name a few. And that also ties in perfectly with upsells like consulting, tutoring, and practice exams. Tons of different monetization methods you can explore. Now, from my 10 minutes of keyword research, I found 187 keywords with a difficulty score of less than 20. And that works out to a cumulative search volume of around 91,000 monthly searches in the U.S. or 117,000 globally. Again, this is only a fraction of the total search market. Now, let's take a look at a few low-authority example sites, starting with egmat.com. This site sells resources to help students prepare for the GMAT. And the site, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, has a mid-to-low domain rating of 38 and gets around 300,000 monthly search visits. And the traffic value comes out to around $450,000. Meaning, it would cost around $450,000 per month to get this traffic if you were to pay for it with Google Ads. Now, if we look at the top pages report, you'll see they cover topics that are covered in the GMAT, as well as questions related to the actual exam itself. In other words, they're attracting would-be customers through their content. Another site is brightlinkprep.com, which sells GMAT, GRE, and SAT prep. The site has a DR of 28, gets around 22,000 monthly search visits, and also ranks for relevant keywords that are likely to drive them business. And the last site that I have for you is LSATClarity, which focuses on the law school admissions test. The site has a DR of just 15, gets around 8,000 monthly search visits, and has a traffic value of 37,000. That's quite a bit considering their estimated search traffic. Bottom line, there's a ton of potential here to start small and to scale out as your website becomes more authoritative over time. Alright, the next niche is snowboarding equipment. Now, according to this report, snowboarding equipment had a market size of around $500 million in 2020. Now, because snowboarding equipment is generally pretty expensive, I'd probably start at an affiliate site in this niche because it's cheap to start and you won't have to deal with stocking inventory for a seasonal niche. As for the search market, I found 198 low-difficulty and relevant keywords with a total US search volume of 108,000 monthly searches. And globally, that works out to around 134,000 monthly searches. Now, this niche in particular had quite a few low-competition topics. In fact, I only spent around 5 minutes doing keyword research for this niche, using the same techniques that I teach in our Affiliate Keyword Research tutorial. Now, let's take a look at a couple example sites, starting with snowboardingprofiles.com. As you can see from the navigation, they've gone with the affiliate route too. And looking at Ahrefs' Site Explorer, you'll see that the site has a DR of 28 and gets around 90,000 monthly search visits. And if we look at their organic traffic graph, you'll see they actually hit over 200,000 monthly search visits during the heavy snowboarding months last year. Now, if we head over to the Top Pages report, you'll see that they rank for a bunch of affiliate list topics like Top 20 Women's Snowboarding Jackets and Best Men's Snowboarding Pants. These pages are likely to generate revenue for them, so the traffic looks pretty good overall. Alright, the second site I found is snowgeartracker.com, which is another affiliate site. Now, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, the site has a DR of just 0.1. And that's because it only has 11 referring domains, none of which seem to be very high quality. Now, going back to the overview report, you'll see that they get around 3,500 monthly search visits without having backlinks, which is telling of the level of competition in this niche. And if we go to the Top Pages report, you'll see that they rank for a list post about Wide Snowboarding Boots and Best All-Mountain Snowboards for Men. Now, because snowboarding is seasonal, it means that your winter months, and maybe a couple leading up to the season, are going to be the ones that generate revenue for you. As for the off-season, I wouldn't expect much. So in my opinion, this is a niche that's probably worth going after if you're new to SEO or a passionate hobbyist. The level of effort seems pretty low for the potential reward. Alright, so sticking with sports, the next niche is golf equipment. As a professional hacker of golf courses, I can confidently say that golf is not cheap. In addition to paying to play, you need to have clubs, balls, a glove, shoes, tees, and the list goes on. And the thing is, people lose golf balls all the time. Gloves, shoes, and grips need to be replaced. And when you're having a bad day, you might even have a club or two to replace. In fact, Grandview research shows that the global golf equipment market size was $6.5 billion in 2018. Now, because golf equipment is actually quite expensive and new models and makes are introduced frequently, I would create an affiliate website for similar reasons to the snowboarding site. As for the search market with low-difficulty topics, I spent around 7 minutes doing keyword research to find around 150 keywords with a U.S. search volume of around 225,000. And that works out to a global monthly volume of over 304,000 monthly searches. Now, there are actually quite a few low-authority websites that are getting a significant amount of traffic. Let's look at two of them. The first is Southampton Golf Club, which is a typical affiliate site. And this site has a DR of 24 and gets over 222,000 monthly search visits according to interest. Now, if we go to the top pages report, you'll see a mix of low-value topics like these ones mixed in with high business value topics like these ones. Now, to get a better understanding of search traffic from commercial topics, at least for an affiliate site, we can narrow down the results with the URLs filter. To do that, I'll set a rule to show URLs that contain the word best. Then I'll add another rule and choose Contains Review. And then one more with Contains Versus. And the reason why I'm doing this is because people often use their target keyword in the URL slot. I'll hit the Any Rule tab and hit Apply. And as you can see, they still get a ton of search traffic from product review keywords. Alright, the second site is Top Rank Golf, which is another affiliate site. And according to Ahrefs, it has a domain rating of 6 and gets over 29,000 monthly search visits. Now, if we head over to the top pages report, you'll see very relevant topics. And if you look at the orange line in the graph, they've had pretty explosive traffic over the past 6 months. Alright, the next niche is one that's been on my list for a while, and that's baby products. Now, being a parent myself, I can tell you that we spend a lot of money on products. Some that we don't even need. And in 2020, baby products had a global market size of $11.7 billion. And while this niche is mostly a volume game, there are still some high-ticket items like strollers, cribs, rocking chairs, nursery chairs, which are basically couches, and car seats to name a few. Now, the two main monetization methods I'd go with are affiliate and info products. And the reason for affiliate products is pretty straightforward. With around 385,000 babies born each day, there are so many products to choose from, which also means that there are more topics than you can probably handle. Now, the reason why I'd also create info products is because when you bring home a baby for the first time, no one knows what they're really doing. And they're happy to pay for education from reputable sources. And you know what happens when they do find out what they're doing? They realize they have no idea what they're doing when it comes to raising and parenting children. So they look for parenting resources. My point is that these two monetization methods alone can scale like crazy in this niche. Now, as for the search market, I focus just on informational and product-less keywords. So nothing about parenting is included here. And after around 10 minutes, I found close to 150 keywords with a total US search volume of 223,000 monthly searches and a global volume of 266,000 searches. Again, this is just a tiny fraction of the total addressable search market. Now, an interesting thing I found when analyzing SERPs is that there are a ton of websites from mom blogs. And these usually aren't super niche-focused. And that tells me that there could be an opportunity here. And some sites are taking advantage of this. For example, travelcarseatmom.com is a site just about car seats for children while traveling. Pretty niche. And according to HF Site Explorer, her DR-14 car seat travel site gets around 80,000 monthly search visits. Another site I found is experiencemommy.com. And this site is another typical affiliate site where they review all sorts of products for children. And according to HF Site Explorer, the site has a DR of 43 and gets around 180,000 monthly search visits. And if we head over to the top pages report, you'll see that the pages that send them the most search traffic are product-related posts. In my opinion, there's a ton of opportunity here for someone to build a real brand. Because most of the content I've seen in this area is pretty bad. Alright, the final niche is slightly controversial, but I'll do my best to justify my case. And that's sports picks for Daily Fantasy Sports. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Daily Fantasy Sports, you basically bet on your favorite players or teams to win a match. And if your guesses are better than everyone else's, then you can win anything from a couple bucks to even a million dollars with a tiny wager. Now, because this niche falls into the larger industry of sports betting or gambling, it's one that often gets ignored by SEOs. And that's probably because gambling niches are usually super competitive, which results in a lot of link buying and other black hat tactics. But it doesn't change the fact that there's a huge market for this with very little competition in terms of where the industry is at today and where I think it can be in 5-10 years. According to Grandview Research, the global sports betting market size was valued at around $67 billion in 2020. And the industry, in my opinion, is just getting started. And there are two reasons for this. Number one, companies like DraftKings and FanDuel have made online sports betting super accessible and borderline cool. Now, pair that with streaming services and you can place bets and watch the game from anywhere in the world. And number two, more and more states in the U.S. are legalizing sports betting at a rapid pace. In fact, in May 2019, only a handful of states had fully legalized sports betting as you can see from the red blocks. Fast forward around a year and a half, and this is what the graph looks like today. Now, in terms of monetization, there are actually quite a few routes you can go. But I'd probably start with the affiliate route because qualified leads can result in big payouts. For example, Caesars Casino, which also has a sports book, pays a CPA of at least $125. And Software as a Service may also be another route to go because from my research, people will subscribe to services to get access to sports data. Now, as for my 10-minute keyword research exercise, I found 234 keywords with a total monthly search volume of around 190,000 searches just in the U.S. And the global volume came out to around 210,000. Now, as expected, there are already some sites that have discovered this niche and they're doing pretty well. The first site is thegameday.com. And this site focuses on daily fantasy sports as you can see from the pick of the day on their homepage. Now, looking at Ahrefs' Site Explorer, you'll see that the site has a DR of 31 and gets around 70,000 monthly search visits. And if we head over to the top pages report, you'll see that nearly all of the pages are related to sports picks. Another low-authority site is pjagolfbets.com, which does pretty much the same thing. And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, it has a very low DR and gets around 10,000 monthly search visits. Now, if we head on over to the top pages report, the majority of their traffic comes from low competition topics like tournament name plus betting tips. So they're definitely attracting a relevant audience. Now, this niche is by far the most difficult to penetrate from the five that we've discussed. And there are good reasons for this. Number one, the SERPs for keywords in this niche have a lot of big players in there. So while you might be able to rank, it'll take more effort to get a top spot. Number two, sports run seasonally. Meaning, if you're only going to tackle NFL picks, you'll have slow months for around half a year. So be prepared to cover multiple sports if you hope to generate somewhat consistent revenue throughout the year. And number three, a lot of the topics in this niche are highly freshness-dependent. Meaning, you'll need an editorial team to regularly update content because picks for one week won't be the same for the next. So with that said, if you're relatively new to SEO, I wouldn't go for this niche. But if you're an experienced SEO who has the resources to build an editorial team and experience ranking sites, then in my opinion, this niche has a lot of upside. Now, these are just five niches that I think have a ton of potential. Let me know which one interests you the most. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I'll see you in the next one.