How to Do Keyword Research for Amazon Affiliate Niche Sites

If you want to start an Amazon niche site, keyword research is one of the most important steps you have to tackle head on. The keywords you choose will determine a couple of things, including:

• How long it will take for your website to start seeing traffic
• Whether or not the visitors to your niche site will generate any revenue

As you can imagine, getting traffic to your website is the first step to making sales.

But you don’t just want any type of traffic. Rather, you want qualified traffic. This is to say that you want visitors that are looking for solution to their problems and are ready to take action, i.e., make a purchase.

And this is why the step of carrying out keyword research for Amazon affiliate niche site is crucial.

Target the wrong keywords and your website may never make any sales.

Target too competitive keywords and your website may never rank.

And this is why I’ve written this article. I’ll help you know how to do keyword research for Amazon affiliate niche site in an easy way, and without any paid tools by the way!

Sounds good?

Okay, let’s get started.

How to Do Keyword Research for Amazon Affiliate Niche Site

To start off, before you do any keyword research, you have to know your niche and its viability.

Yes, any niche can be profitable online. However, if you will solely be building a niche site that will be promoting products available on Amazon, you want to be smart.

Amazon is the world’s largest online marketplace. People are accustomed to shopping on Amazon.

However, given how large Amazon is, it’s difficult to know what product to buy straight off the bat given the thousands of competing options available.

For example, when you search for “best laptops for games” on Amazon, we see that there are over DASH products. How will a potential buyer know which from the DASH laptops would be the best to buy?

That is where you come in as an Amazon affiliate niche site builder.

You work is to help these people to make a buying decision by sorting and analyzing the products they are searching for, and giving them the best options based on your experience.

But before you start keyword research, you need to pick a niche. A niche is simply a group of people that are interested in something. For example, we can say that people who love boxing are in the “boxing niche”.  Or perhaps, women who want to lose weight are in the “women weight loss niche”.

You get the drill.

For an Amazon affiliate niche site to be successful, the niche you choose should have a wide range of products that you can recommend.

Here are three crucial things to keep in mind when brainstorming a niche that you can serve as an Amazon affiliate marketer:

• Do you see products for the niche available on Amazon?
• Is the niche big enough? (If you take a small niche, this will mean earning a small amount of income)
• How competitive is the niche? (If the niche is too competitive, it may take years of consistent hard work for you to start making some money with your niche site)

We’re going to tackle each of the three items, one by one.

1 Are Products for the Niche Available on Amazon?

Since we are building an Amazon affiliate niche site, we want to see whether the products that serve the needs of the niche are available on Amazon.

Finding out this information is quite easy; simply head over to Amazon.com and search for some products that you think prospects in the niche will need.

When you start searching on Amazon, you will see whether the products you are thinking of are available. Apart from this, you will see some related products, which you may not have thought of before.

This process is so simple, and is what I’ve been using for my Build to Flip case study niche site.

Here is how the process works:

Step 1: Go to Amazon.com and select a department that is related to your niche. (Such as “Tools and Home Improvement”)

Step 2: Go to a sub-category (Such as “Kitchen & Bath Fixtures”

Step 3: Go deeper and start looking at specific products (e.g. toilet stool, water filter, shower drain covers, etc.). Select the products that are rated 4 stars and above. These are the products that are selling well based on Amazon’s internal sales data. These are the products you want to be recommending to your niche.

Repeat this process for every single category and subcategory. If you already know the niche that you want to serve, then simply check the products in the specific category of the niche and its subcategories.

Write down the products in an Excel sheet. You can be sure of having tons of product ideas that you can offer your niche.

This method is great when you are starting a new site, or if you feel that your current site has stagnated. Perhaps you started a niche site when you did not have accurate information about it and now want to do things right. Or maybe, you feel like you have exhausted products in a particular subcategory and now want to expand the site to cover other related subcategories.

Give yourself time to do this process; it takes long. Alternatively, you can hire a VA from Fiverr such as this one to help you.

If you prefer to see the process in action, watch the video below:

2. Is the Niche Big Enough?

The next step is to determine whether the niche you want to serve is big enough. Here, it’s all about income in mind.

If you pick a niche that is too small, you may not end up hitting your income goals. This is why before you get excited with the product ideas you’ve found in step 1 above, you should check the size of the niche.

For this step, you can use both free and paid tools; it really doesn’t matter. The thing we want to find out is whether people are actively searching for the products you have identified in the previous step.

If you love paid tools, I recommend you go with SEMRush. This is one of my keyword research stacks that I use for my online business.

If you are just starting out and have no money to spend, there is a handy free Google Chrome extension that you can use. It’s called WhatsMySERP.

Find the extension here on Google Chrome store and install it. Of course, you have to register (for free!) to get the extension to work.

Now, we are ready to find out whether the niche(s) we want to serve are big enough.

To do this, we simply want to see whether the main keywords related to the products meet the following:

• There are keywords whose search volume is 500 – 10,000 Exact Match Local Searches (your market may vary but I target the US) for the main keywords. The US market is the largest on the internet, that’s why I build niche sites that target US audiences. However, if you are building a niche site targeted at another market, you can set the main keywords to be lower, something like 250 – 5000 Exact Local Searches.

Check the video below to find out how to do this for free using WhatsMySERP Google Chrome Extension.

• Next, check whether there are many other keywords related to products in the niche that are in the range of 10 – 250 that follow the Keyword Golden Ratio. Now, there is a caveat here; the Keyword Golden Ratio is not perfect. It has it’s flows. However, it is a good starting point.

If you are not sure what the Keyword Golden Ratio is, it is simply a formula developed by Doug Cunnington from NicheSiteProject. Here is how the ratio works:

You can find out how the Keyword Golden Ratio works on the video below. In the video, I also explain the other method that I use to determine whether or not to go after specific keywords for a niche site.

• Are there other niche sites in the top 20 results of the Google search results
• Are there active blogs, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Pinterest boards, forums, and email newsletters of the niche?

Now, before we continue, let’s make one thing clear: you don’t have to follow the guidelines above to the tee. Remember, we are only trying to determine whether the niche is profitable. So, if the niche does not check all the four boxes we have discussed above, it doesn’t mean it is not worth going after.

For example, if you don’t find active Pinterest boards in your niche, it doesn’t mean that the niche is a no-go. It could be that the audience of your niche does not use Pinterest.

So, you have to use your head. Generally, you want the niche to meet a couple of the points we have listed above. It doesn’t have to meet all the recommendations.

On the same note, some high-priced products may not have a lot of search volume. For example, you may not find a lot of high search volume keywords related to “commercial refrigerators”. However, given that these are high-ticket items, you won’t need a lot of sales to make good income from promoting them.

Apart from this, you can also get some more secondary keywords related to “commercial refrigerators”, which can bring a sizeable amount of traffic to your niche site.

Now, that we know whether the niche is big enough, let’s find out how competitive it is.

3. How Competitive is the Niche?

The final step is to check how competitive the niche is. Now, as I indicated above, the rules of determining whether or not a niche is competitive are not set on stone. This is because Google sets different rules for different keywords.

For example, if you are going to go after a category in the health niche, let’s say, hypertension, you will have a difficult time ranking. This is because Google ranks particular websites for queries in the health niche.

If you search most health queries, you will start seeing some sites appearing over and over again. I’m talking about sites like VeryWell.com, MayoClinic.org, and so on. These are sites that are written by real doctors and as a result, Google trusts the information they provide.

According to Google Guidelines, sites that are in the YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) niches are likely to struggle if they are not written by people with the proper credentials. YMYL topics are those that are likely to have a significant impact in a person’s health and financial wellness.

In short, what Google is saying is that if you want to go into some medical niches, you better have the credentials to back it up.

And for this reason, I generally avoid making niches sites in the health and finances industries.

Okay, back to checking how competitive the niche is. To do this, check the top 10 results of websites that are ranking for some of the keywords you identified in step 2 above. Check whether the websites ranking have the following:

• Keywords in the Title of the page
• Keywords  in the URL of the page
• 3 or more results with less than 40 backlinks
• 3 or more results with a MOZ Page Authority (PA) less than 30
• 1 or more niche sites
• 1 or more forum posts
• 1 or more Q & A Sites

Also, like is the case as above, these are general guidelines. Your niche does not need to meet all the criteria exactly. Use your head, or should I say your brain? There are no rules set on stone.

Carrying out proper research is critical when you are starting an Amazon niche site as it will determine whether you can actually rank and make money. When beginning, you want to start with the low hanging fruits, i.e., keywords that are easier to rank. In particular, you should  go for KGR keywords.

But if your website is a little established, you can start going for more competitive keywords.

Also, if you have money to spend on your niche site, then you can outrightly go for the competitive keywords. But since most of us start niche sites with small or nearly zero financial resources, this is why I’m encouraging you to go for the low hanging fruits.

And that is all that you need to know about keyword research for Amazon affiliate niche sites.

Yes, there are other keyword guides available online. But you don’t want to procrastinate trying to find the “perfect” way of doing keyword research for Amazon niche sites. This guide is enough.

Read the guide again, watch the videos and start doing keyword research today.

Don’t procrastinate.