(The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building A Finance/Banking Site From $0 to $100,000: Niche Selection
Updated on July 28, 2023
Niche Selection
Hey guys, this is my first recording for the first month about how I’ve chosen this niche and the key factors around it.
First of all, I enjoy building websites that have a larger impact on the industry. I like to build stuff. I’ve been doing it for clients for many years, but now it’s time that I just focus on building projects for myself.
Can you guide us through the key factors you considered when choosing your niche?
I wanted to focus on banking and finance. There was no specific reason for this industry, but it’s an industry that there is always potential in any country. I chose Portugal because it’s where I come from and I had experience in this industry.
I looked at the top two competitors that existed seven to ten years ago, and they became quite big. They have between 300,000-500,000 visits a month, and 5% of that could potentially be profitable.
So the way that these websites grew over the past years means that there is huge potential in this industry and probably more money on the table than ever.
I checked AHREFS, and these two competitors have DRs between 52 and 56. However, we also saw websites competing with these websites that have much lower domain ratings. If these guys can take over these big boys, why can’t I? Especially if we go into a more targeted approach in terms of a topical map.
We acquired a domain name that has a domain rating of 17. It’s an aged domain name and we believe that there’s a big opportunity to compete with them.
I also noticed that most of these companies that I knew in the finance industry, including financial institutions, actually started to build their own niche websites to sell their products, which is quite interesting.
That tells me that there is potential room for an acquisition If I build something bigger than theirs, better than what they have, and I show them how I’ve done it and how they could replicate my methodology. I bet this is worth a lot.
This wouldn’t be the same thing 10 years ago when there was no opportunity for this, but today I think companies understand, so I think there is a huge opportunity for me to enter this market.
Do you have any beliefs about choosing niches that are uncommon in the SEO community?
I don’t necessarily have any uncommon beliefs about choosing niches.
If there is enough search volume and lower competition (especially if it’s in non-English countries) there is huge potential as long as there is a way to monetize it.
For this ride-along, I chose something a bit more standard and highly competitive. But when I look at international standards, like the same industry in the US, it looks like a newborn niche in Portugal. It’s not as competitive or as advanced.
The way we’re approaching this and with the brand name that we bought, it will drive a much bigger buzz. I think there’s true potential to compete with the big boys.
If you initially chose one niche and then decided on another niche, can you share in more detail what made you first consider that first niche and what made you change your mind?
Initially, I was thinking about moving forward with a wedding project that I started a couple of months ago. It’s been sort of on the backlog, but I’ve been producing content every week. I already have hundreds of pieces of content published and we never really implemented any sort of big strategy. That’s why I thought it would be a good thing to look into.
It’s multi-language, but then when I thought deeper, I felt like it was not scalable enough for what I could potentially achieve with Empire Flippers. It’s very narrow into weddings in Bali specifically and is in a country where flipping a project would be much harder, so I decided to move into finance in Portugal because the prospect of acquisition is more realistic if it becomes successful.
What niches or factors about niches do you try to avoid and why?
I would never compete with Healthline, as an example, and I would never compete with sites about loans and credit in the US. The amount of money that you have to put in to rank against those types of sites, it’s just crazy.
It doesn’t mean you can’t make it work, but it’s just how crazy you want to be about it.
This niche is still competitive in Portugal, but it’s not like it is in the US. There is still a huge opportunity to take some market share. Non-native English countries have more opportunities now, and that’s probably why Empire Flippers have opened their doors to non-English content sites.
Also, if I want to compete with English-based content sites in Portugal or Indonesia, or any other country that is not native English-speaking, there is a truly big opportunity because often these companies don’t have access to good copywriters and living overseas gives me a good edge on cost versus benefit.
Is it scalable? Can you pivot the idea if it’s not in the right direction and you need to build something differently?
For the niche that I choose, we could talk about different types of products like loans, insurance, savings, and investment. So you have to think about how scalable it is.
And if your idea doesn’t work, can you still use it? Is it brandable?
Can you explain any more in-depth or technical ways of validating your niche?
So how I approach this project is by checking the top competitors. I discovered the two biggest competitors have dominated the majority of the industry.
They definitely have a huge impact, but we can see a huge difference between the 1st and 2nd place competitors. For example, number one has 84,000 keywords while number two has 66,000 keywords, but the traffic difference between them is quite big.
You’ll also notice that although number two has less traffic, it also has more pages and they’re going to search results, which means that having more pages does not necessarily mean that you’re going to have more traffic.
Then we see this smaller guy here, which has a domain rating of 30. They have half of the key organic keywords and a fraction of the pages, but they still have over 100,000 organic traffic every month. This definitely shows that quality and proper topical maps make a huge difference.
In the three pages here, you can see that one is specifically about one type of loan. The other one is specifically about the other type of loans. They have way fewer pages, like 80 pages, 63 pages, and 31 pages indexed in Google, but they still have up to 9,000 monthly visits. This is good because I could potentially break even with a little bit more than this.
If I wanted to compete with this website specifically, I already have a higher domain rating. I may not have organic keywords, but our domain name is aged, and it’s been in the market longer than this one, so that could potentially be an edge.
Building 80 pages cost me $2400 in content, so it’s not a big deal to compete with this website specifically. I think we could potentially see an increase in traffic as soon as we launch the website, much faster than what I was initially predicting. But, also looking at this one here, with the DR of 30, there are 690 pages. This volume of content would cost me roughly $20K.
As I said, the number of pages and the content that they have on the website does not necessarily mean that you’re going to have more traffic. But if we do things correctly, it could potentially overtake the competitors and that’s what I’m going to try to do.
As far as tools, I used AHREFS and SEO Browser. AHREFS is mainly for the research piece and understanding the metrics of each project. I use SEO Browser just because I’m overseas and I needed to search in Portugal without having Google Chrome affect searches.
