One of, if not the, main element that determines the success of a website starts with what the website is about: the sector or niche that the website is targeting. If you choose the wrong sector/market to base your website around, then it should not come as a surprise to see your website struggle to gain traffic and conversions.

Finding a niche to create a website for is surprisingly difficult. There are a few lucky people that have ‘light bulb’ moments where they quickly come up with a niche to create a website on. However, for the majority, we are left sitting around, pondering just what to make a website on.

Fear not, though. There are a few steps, talking from experience, that has significantly helped me determine what a good niche is for a website to make it a success. Here are the following tips.

#1 Create a Experimental Website First

The first step I have always found to be the most effective is to create a baseline website, about absolutely anything you want. The website should not be bound to any topic, where you should have the freedom to experiment and create content about all sorts of sectors. Although this does not mean your content will get as good SEO from too generalized a website, it will enable you to create content on many sectors of your choosing.

#2 Analyse Traffic

SEO takes some time to build, especially for a generalized website. For this reason, keep creating content for around 3-6 months. After such a time, start to look at the traffic to see what is generating you the pageviews and what is not. This will start to give you an idea as to what sector is gaining you the best results from your content.

#3 Categorize Content with Traffic

The next step comes at around 7 months in (although the longer you wait, the better). Take the top 100 pages and categorize them based on what the content is about. Add the number of pageviews achieved to each category. From this, you should gain a baseline as to what category gained you the most pageviews, and even compare what category was best in terms of pageviews per post. From doing this, it will help you identify the niche which is gaining you the most traffic.

#4 Research Niche

Once you have identified the niche, the next step is not to start a website in it, but research it first. See what search terms are common for that sector. What should you make the domain name for your new website? What are competitors doing and what sort of theme are they adopting? What is the potential of the niche? How much competition is there?

Once you have answered such questions, you will gain an even better idea whether the niche is worth pursuing or not.