City criteria
Ideally, one should target a city with a population between 100 and 300 K. The priority should be Making sure the final asset generates enough leads.
Tools for finding the associated niche
Using a keyword research tool like Ubbersuggest, SEMRush, and Ahrefs will allow you to list all the information pertaining to a search for a given keyword.
Conditions to pick the keyword
Volume
Volume between 200 to 1,000 search queries per month.
Difficulty and competition
Each research tool has its own metric to gauge the competition level of a given keyword.
In Ubbersuggest, it is called the SD (SEO Difficulty), and I filter my search to be between 5 and 32.
It is also essential to analyze the domains that appear on the first page of Google SERPs. Ideally, the competition should have lower domain authorities, not rank for many keywords, and have a weak backlink profile.
Things to keep in mind for the niche selection
The niche has to be lucrative, I.e. a potential lead can be converted to a high-paying ticket customer.
The niche has to be more of a service because it will be harder to build if it's a product website.
The service should be measured in terms of the urgency with which it is resolved. The more urgently the service is resolved, the better. This yields a higher lead-to-paying customer ratio.
Also, the client's emotional commitment to finding a resolution is important for said service.
Market offer and demand analysis
Two parameters are important when gauging market demand: the amount of demand and the amount of offers.
Demand is determined by the search volume. Due to the winner-take-all effect, helping a competitor be better positioned to have too many clients is a good thing.
Your client should be able to service all clients of your website funnels.
We want the market demand to be over-serviced regarding the number of competitors on Google.
Suppose the number of service providers in a niche is slim. In that case, most queries are already funnelled to them and will be less likely to require your website.
Next Step and Entire Process
The next step can be found in this blog article: Rank And Rent Part 2 Finding A Potential Client.
To view the entire process of building a rank and rent business, refer to this blog article: Building My First Rank And Rent Asset In Public
Identifying Target Keywords
When picking a niche, I wanted a service with at least a decent number of businesses already running in the location. That way, I would have more prospects to choose from to rent the site to.
To gauge whether the number of businesses was sufficient, I looked at the total number of companies in the Google My Business listings, directory listings, and general number of companies on the SERP.
I also wanted to make sure that the average cost per client was sufficient (i.e., high enough ticked client) for my leads to be valuable, so I chose Drywall repair and maintenance.
For the keywords, I identified the keyword « drywall Kingston,» which was getting 100 queries per month of search volume. I knew this number was under-reported. I looked at the competition, and their domain authorities were not that high. The top SERP domains for that keyword were domains with reasonable numbers of pages per site, so this was good for me to equal or surpass my site.
Other than « drywall Kingston,» there were other keywords with local service search intent, but all of their volumes were flagged with 0 search volume.