So as well as running the Niche Laboratory (which has just had a major rebuild!) I like experimenting with niche sites.

I am slowly building a test e-commerce store. Actually at the moment it is just an affiliate store. I don't sell my own products. That might change.

My site is starting to get traffic. It's 6 months old now. Yesterday it had 10 visitor sessions - a new daily record!

I think my niche (clothing) is a good one. My sub-niche (secret!) is quite broad. It's fairly competitive but the competing sites are generally quite poor quality.

What is a broad niche? I'm kind of selling clothes in many niches, but the clothes have a specific thing in common (e.g. they're all red, or all for tall people).

There are literally millions of clothing sub-niches like this, so get creative and come up with your own ideas.

So how am I doing keyword research?

I started by adding 10 products to the store. Just random products I thought people would like.

Once the site started getting organic search traffic, I checked Google Search Console to see what products I was ranking for. Then I simply added more of these. The good thing about this is that you get users to drive your site's content and direction. The downside is that you might end up in a different niche to what you started in! I did this in a dating niche before. It was a fun journey, but I got a bit of hassle from people thinking I was personally interested in the niche!!!

I've also been using Niche Laboratory of course. I like the Words report and regularly scan this for anything I should add to my site.

I also added a search facility to the site. This is a goldmine of information because I log the queries and it's super good at capturing the categories of products I haven't added. If people don't see stuff on your site, then they're quite likely to search for it. For example, I realise I haven't added a section for t-shirts.