In this blog post I will explain the process and tools I used to analyze a niche online and then I will share the results of my research. I hope you find this both interesting and helpful.

The tools I used included:

• Google.com
• SEOmoz.org
• SEO for Firefox Toolbar

(Some of the data points are a result of my subjective judgment - like the "Good, Bad, Fair" in the Title Tag / Meta Description row - but most are based on cold hard numbers)

The area I researched is related to the Wisconsin home builder niche. The 26 keywords I looked up were based on variations of the phrase: Wisconsin Home Builders". 

After looking at many different on-page and off-site factors, one interesting thing I found was that the domain name with the highest number of external links pointing to it happened to be one of the worst performing websites in the search engines for the 26 themed keywords I analyzed. Although their website looks nice, and has the a relatively high number of pages cached by Google, they were certainly not making an effort to optimize their pages for high-traffic, high-potential keywords. They had no listings in the first page of Google for the 26 terms researched.

On the other hand, the domain name that had the most number of listings found in the top 5 of Google, and the most number of listings in the top 20 of Google was the websites that had the highest number of pages cached by Google. (This website had 14 of the 26 terms ranking in the top 5 positions in Google). This website did not seem to have highly keyword-rich Title Tags and Meta Descriptions, but the tags at least existed, which is beneficial.

This well-ranking website's homepage and the previously mentioned, poorly-ranking website's homepage both have a PageRank of 4.

What are YOUR observations and thoughts? I'd like to hear your feedback. Also, If you'd like to use the template for one of your own reports, I've uploaded the original PSD here: Online Research Report Template PSD

Thanks,
Scott