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When it comes to building a niche site, it seems like everyone wants to jump straight to finding keywords. All you have to do is look at all the comments in my YouTube videos to see all the requests for videos about keyword research.
What most people don’t realize is that there’s an important step that you really need to do before you start finding keywords, and that step is to find subtopics within your niche. Without a good list of subtopics, you’ll quickly run out of keywords to target.
There are of course plenty of other steps that need to be done prior to this step even, like selecting your niche, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll assume that you’re at the point where you’re ready to start building a list of topics to write about on your site.
Building a list of subtopics within your niche offers a ton of benefits. Personally, I do this before I even commit to creating a site within a niche. Even if you’ve already committed to the niche, I still highly recommend creating a list of subtopics.
Here’s why.
First, by building a list of subtopics, you will get a good scope of the future potential of your niche. If you come up with a high number of subtopics, you’ll know that you can post at a higher frequency without worrying about running out of content anytime soon.
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Second, by creating a list of subtopics, you’ll give yourself a nice list of areas to focus on within your niche, one by one. So if you’re in the fishing niche, instead of posting articles on any topic within fishing, you can stick to ice fishing at first, then move on to fly fishing, and so on.
This will help Google get a better understanding of your site early on, which will lead to your site ranking more quickly. This is really important if you’re targeting a broad niche, which is what my team and I always do.
Lastly, by building out a list of subtopics, you’ll be less likely to miss out on keywords within your niche. When you move on to the next step, which is to build a list of keywords, you can target each subtopic separately, which will result in a really thorough list of keywords within your niche.
Hopefully by now, you see the value in identifying the subtopics within your niche before building your keyword list. For the rest of this post, I will show you a few methods I use to find good subtopics.
How to Find Subtopics in Your Niche
When it comes to building your list of subtopics within your niche, the more methods you use the better. I’m going to cover a few of my go-to techniques, but that doesn’t mean you should stop there.
For any of the tips I show you in any article or video, always use them as a starting point and go from there. Get creative and think of other ways to expand on these methods.
1 – Check Authority Sites
The first method I always use when looking for subtopics within my niche is to go to a handful of authority sites within the niche.
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Now let me point out that you are looking for subtopics and NOT keywords. The last thing you want to do is copy an authority site’s keywords, as it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to outrank them.
Instead, you are simply trying to generate some ideas to use as subtopics within your niche. Not only are you looking to come up with ones that you’re familiar with, but forgot about, but ideally, you’ll see some that you didn’t even know about as well.
As an example, let’s say your niche is bicycling. If you enter “bicycling” into Google Search, you’ll see that the first site is bicycling.com. This definitely would fit the definition of an authority site in the bicycling niche.
Once you click over to the site, look for a menu item that looks like it contains blog posts. In this case, they have a menu item titled “Skills & Tips.” Perfect.
Once you’re on the “Skills & Tips” page, you simply want to browse through their list of articles to see if you can identify any general subtopics within the bicycling niche. Some sites might also have categories within the blog section of their site that would be great subtopics to add to your list as well.
As of the time of this writing, when I check out the “Skills & Tips” page on bicycling.com, I can see all sorts of great ideas that would work as subtopics within the bicycling niche.
For example, there are articles about e-bikes, bicycling for beginners, exercises for bicycling, bicycling on the road (vs. trails), bicycling tips for kids, indoor cycling, winter bicycling, bicycling attire, and bicycling maintenance.
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I came up with that entire list without scrolling to the bottom of the first page. If you paged through all of their blog posts, your list should be huge!
Once you get through the first authority site, run through the process on a few others, until you feel like you’ve found all there is to find.
2 – Use AnswerthePublic.com
If you’re unfamiliar with answerthepublic.com, it’s a site where you can enter a keyword or phrase, and it will return a fairly large list of related keywords. Most people use this for keyword research, but I tend to use it for other purposes.
One such purpose is to find subtopics within a niche. Again, if your niche is bicycling, you can type bike, helmet, kickstand, or any other bicycling related keyword you can think of into Answer the Public’s search tool.
As you browse through the results, look for subtopics to add to your list. For example, when entering “bike” and hitting enter, I see several potential subtopics, like bike shops, handlebars, pedals, chains, brakes, gears, bike size, tires, bike locks, bicycling lanes, and bicycle seats.
I found all of these subtopics without scrolling down 25% of the page.
3 – Use RelatedWords.org
Another great site to use to generate subtopic ideas is relatedwords.org. This tool works by providing you a huge list of words related to the word that you enter.
In addition, each related word that it provides has a definition that can be viewed by simply clicking on the word. This is a great way to quickly learn more about your niche.
When I enter “bike” into relatedwords.org, I see many of the same subtopics that I already identified above. However I do see some new ones, like mudguard, velocipede, wagon, minibike, tricycle, wheelie, BMX, rickshaw, and velodrome.
In this case, I found all of these after barely scrolling down the results page. However, if you keep scrolling down, there are tons of additional related words as well.
4 – Check Question-Based Sites
One last place to go to to spark some subtopic lists within your niche is sites like reddit.com or quora.com. These sites are full of people asking various questions within a given niche.
Because of this, you can quickly and easily browse through the lists of questions and identify overall themes that might work as good subtopics for your site.
Final Thoughts
When starting a new site, it can be tempting to jump right to the keyword research step so you can start creating content. However, by not identifying subtopics within your niche first, you won’t have a good feel for the scope of your site, and you’ll likely miss out on a ton of good keywords.
If you want to build a successful site, take the time and effort to complete each step to its fullest, as this will give you the best chance of succeeding. Creating a list of subtopics is one of those steps that needs to be done, and if done right, it will give you a leg up over your competitors.
