Guide: How to Find SEO Niches

I wrote this post in Spanish in 2021 and adapted it to English in 2026.

Want to know how to find profitable SEO niches? Today I'll show you some criteria I use, based on ROI.

Before we go on, let's talk about what ROI is, that is, what we mean by return on investment when we talk about SEO.

ROI is the profit you're left with after the investment, and it's calculated with a very simple formula:

ROI = (Revenue - Investment) / Investment

A good ROI is around 15%, meaning that for every hundred euros you invest, the business makes fifteen euros of profit.

That 15% profit range is considered the holy grail of ROI for most investments (real estate, for example).

But when it comes to SEO (which can be explosive), your ROI can shoot up to 600%.

A niche you've put little time into (or little money, or even little of both) can start making you tons of money.

And you'll think you're hot stuff (or, as Naruto would put it, the greatest ninja ever, believe it!), but that's not entirely true. Although it's true you can find cases like this (where the earnings are far higher than what you invested, leaving you with spectacular ROIs), when it comes to SEO you have to understand that at least eight or nine out of every ten niche websites you build will be a complete flop.

The niche site that does work has to cover all the other sites you built that didn't, so you break even, or at least keep losses to a minimum, across your whole investment before you start feeling real profit.

Whether that's in time, money, or both...

When you evaluate the ROI of an SEO niche in the initial phase (before investing), you should expect it to be above 400%.

What happens if you're getting into niches with an ROI below that 400%?

Since nine out of ten fail, when you land the niche that works and makes you money but has an ROI below 400% (on the investment in building that one niche alone), it won't be enough to win back all the money you put into the other niches that didn't work.

How to Find SEO Niches Using ROI #

In the previous section I told you the ROI of an SEO niche should be 400% or more. That's because this niche has to make up for all the other failures you're going to have (because you will have them; that's how this goes, that's how SEO works, and there's no definitive formula).

Over time you'll gain experience, and you'll be able to get into niches without such a high ROI, because you'll already know how to grow them and how to get your success rate above ten percent. In other words, more than one successful niche for every 10 you build.

When you're starting out, that ten percent success rate is pretty good, and that's why you should get into niches with an ROI above 400% (on the cost of producing them), so you can make up for the losses on the rest.

There are two ways to estimate how much a niche will cost you to build.

The first is when there are competitors; the second is when the niche is untouched (or there are no fully established niche sites). I'll go through them one by one so you see what I mean.

Are there competitors making money?

If there are competitors making money, the math is pretty simple, because all you have to do is estimate how much it cost the competition to build a niche site like that.

And how do you do that?

There are a few key aspects that will be the cornerstones for understanding how much it cost the competition to build the niche site.

You can guess, with some accuracy, how much money your competitor spent building their niche site, if you notice you can see:

• The links they've built
• The content (number of URLs and the word count of each piece)
• The website design
• The article layout (whether they have images, whether they have tables)

After that, you can estimate how much it will cost you to replicate the same thing.

Estimating how much it cost the competition to build a niche site

Links

Let's start with the first point, and figure out how much the person who built this hypothetical niche we want to go after has spent.

Check whether the link profile has backlinks from digital media outlets. Most of them are listed on link-selling platforms (or you can ask for the price directly by email), so you can estimate the cost of the link building.

Links in blog comments, forums and the like can be valued by how long it would take you to replicate them, or how much you'd be charged for a manual link building service.

Content and number of URLs

The second point, content and number of URLs, will also tell you roughly how much this person has spent.

Even if you don't know what their writer charged, you do know what a writer will charge you, and with that you can guess how much money you need to replicate not only the number of URLs the competing niche site has, but also the word count of each of its articles.

You get this information with Screaming Frog (the default SEO crawler all of us professionals use). Once you've crawled the URLs, you sort them by word count, from highest to lowest, and keep only the ones with more than 300 words.

Once you have this data, you can calculate the average word count of each post on the competing niche site. If one post has 1,500 words, another has 1,300 and another has 800, you add up the site's total word count and divide it by the number of URLs that have words, and that gives you the average words per post.

Then you multiply that by the number of URLs that have words, and multiply again by the rate (per thousand words, per word or per hundred) your writer quoted you.

That gives you a rough idea of how much money you need to match the competition's number of URLs with the same average word count for each of them.

Website design and article layout

This one is pretty interesting, because it seems like it wouldn't matter, but it does... Google likes good-looking websites, and the more polished a niche site's design is, the more money it costs to produce.

You can use easy-to-set-up WordPress templates with a good result, or your own HTML build, but in short, it all takes time, and that time is what you need to count as part of the money it takes to produce the niche site.

I'm also including article layout in this section, because if the competition's articles have images, your niche site needs original images to be relevant. That's where you can check whether they're stock images (you'll have your own way of finding that kind of image, or of creating them directly in Photoshop), and all of that is dollars, euros, yen or yuan that keep adding up, and that you need to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to get into this hypothetical industry with your own SEO niche site.

Estimating how much it will cost me to replicate what the competition has, and improve on it

Once you have all this data, start estimating how much it will cost you to replicate what the competition has. And not just replicate it, because if you only replicate it you'll end up just below or a tiny bit above them, and you want to beat the competition by a mile.

Now that you've done all that math, you need to add one more value: how much will it cost you to improve on what the competition has?

Do you add more words to each article?

Do you create more URLs?

Do you buy better links, or more links?

There's a lot to optimize just with what the competition already has, plus whatever extras you want to add. All of that is money you need to weigh before deciding whether or not to go after the industry with your own version of an SEO niche site.

Is it an untouched or semi-untouched industry with no established competitors?

If the industry is untouched or semi-untouched, you only need to estimate how much it will cost you to build a decent niche site tailored to the industry's needs.

When I say "semi-untouched", I mean there are no established competitors. That is, there are only two or three URLs ranking for certain keywords in the industry, but no whole domain is ranking, or they're multi-niche websites with one URL ranking for an industry keyword, but they're not niche sites focused on that industry.

When I say "decent", I mean that if it's an industry with tons of keywords, there's a lot to go after, and you estimate the website (when it's finished) should have more than fifty or even more than a hundred URLs, the smart move is to start with about thirty percent of that content.

Launch the website with about thirty pages, including the legal pages, but with at least twenty well laid out, well made articles, or at least ones with a minimum of content.

If you see there isn't that much to it, and it's a CTC (call to click) AdSense niche, which is very popular, five or six URLs are enough to launch and go after the niche.

You can also go after the niche with all the URLs you expect to add, and focus only on building quality links.

So working out how much the niche site will cost you here is very simple, especially if you apply an MVP (minimum viable product) approach to launch the niche with the bare minimum and cut production costs.

This is very different from when there's already an established competitor (or several) and you have to match and beat what they have. In that case, you not only have to spend all the money that person spent, you also have to spend a bit more to improve on what they did, whether in time or in cash.

Estimating the Expected Earnings #

To calculate ROI with the formula we saw at the start of this post, you need to know how much money you're going to make.

You won't know that exactly until you build the niche site, but there are ways to estimate it.

Expect to earn the money back in a year, maybe a year and a half, because in SEO you don't spend X and get that X back in a month. It doesn't work like that.

So you can calculate the earnings from the estimated monthly revenue multiplied by 12 or 14 (the months it takes to recover the investment).

But how do you know the monthly revenue?

Here are a couple of very effective ways to get there:

If you have someone to ask

You just ask how much the niche site makes them a month, simple as that...

If you have someone to ask, like a colleague who already has a niche site in the industry you want to go after, you can ask them how much that niche site makes a month and then use that number to calculate the ROI.

If you don't have anyone to ask

Time to use math!

If you don't have anyone to ask, there's a way to know how much money this hypothetical niche site would make, because these days there's a ton of information online about the conversion rates for both AdSense and Amazon, which are, let's say, the most popular ways to monetize niche sites today.

You can estimate, with some accuracy, how much money a given niche will make you using math formulas.

For Amazon

The math would be:

search volume, multiplied by the conversion rate in Google's top three, multiplied by the share of users who leave your website for Amazon.

Then multiply that number by the conversion rate a product category like that usually has (once users are on Amazon), then multiply by the commission rate, and multiply that by the product's average price.

That way you'd know roughly how much money the niche site will make you.

Formula to estimate Amazon niche site revenue:

• Search volume = KV
• Conversion rate in Google's top 3 (the CTR shown in Search Console once you're in Google's top three, usually 20 to 30%) = A
• Share of users who go to Amazon = B
• Conversion rate on Amazon = C
• Amazon commission rate = D
• Average product price = P

Expected monthly earnings = (KV) x (A) x (B) x (C) x (D) x (P)

For AdSense

The math is more or less the same as for Amazon: you multiply the search volume by the conversion rate (the CTR shown in Search Console once you're in Google's top three, usually 20 to 30%), multiplied by the average CPC of all the keywords you're going after, and then multiply by the expected page CTR in AdSense.

Depending on the niche, you should adjust the page CTR. For example, if it's an informational niche, it'll be between 1.5% and 4%, and you can play with the CTR there to see if the numbers work (being very optimistic or very pessimistic). If it's a CTC (call to click) niche, the page CTR is above 15% and can reach 30% depending on the niche (job search, insurance, etc.).

Formula to estimate the monthly revenue of a niche site monetized with AdSense:

• Search volume = KV
• Conversion rate in Google's top 3 (the CTR shown in Search Console once you're in Google's top three, usually 20 to 30%) = A
• Page CTR in AdSense = CTR
• Average CPC of all the keywords you're going after = CPC

Expected monthly earnings = (KV) x (A) x (CTR) x (CPC)

Calculating ROI to Find Profitable SEO Niches #

You've already estimated how much money you expect to make with this niche, and you already know how much you expect to spend producing it, so you just need to plug all those values into the ROI formula and see whether you're looking at a positive return or whether the ROI is crap.

ROI = (Revenue - Investment) / Investment

The ideal ROI for a beginner should be 400% or more, but if you already have experience you can get into lower ROIs (especially if the monthly earnings justify it). And as I said at the start: whether or not to go after a niche depends on how much experience you have as an SEO, that is, your success rate in terms of how many niche sites end up becoming income streams versus how many were a total waste of time.

When you're starting out, it's normal for nine out of ten to fail. Once you have experience and you've gotten really good at this, about five or six out of ten will fail, so your success rate goes from 10% to 40%, and that changes things a lot. When you're starting out, one and only one out of every ten niche sites will work, and that niche site has to make up for (as much as possible) all the money you put into the other nine that didn't.

Once you have some experience and four or five out of every ten niche sites you built end up working, the combined ROI of all those niche sites will make up for the money you lost on the ones that didn't. That's how this works, and that's how you can find profitable SEO niches.

Final Summary on How to Find Profitable SEO Niches #

The more time you put into the research phase, the easier it will be to raise your niche sites' success rate.

Sun Tzu once said (more or less): the general who makes many calculations before the battle is headed for glory, while the general who makes none is headed for certain defeat.

Keep those words in mind before you go buy 20 domains in niches you're never going to build, or commission articles for a baby-name-meanings website.

I have nothing more to add, and I hope this guide helped you understand how to find profitable SEO niches.