I was fortunate enough to have gotten in on beta testing a brand new niche market research tool that I think you will want to pay attention to.

Niche marketing is nothing new, and neither are keyword tools that allow researching niches to market in. Most of us have a few keyword research tools, and even a couple of subscriptions to niche research sites. There are a lot of different approaches to the problem of finding the right words to target to dominate a niche market.

So do we really need another keyword tool?

Most likely another new keyword tool hitting the market isn’t going to excite you too much. But every now and then something does come along that deserves closer attention.

Jonathan Leger believes he has just such a tool.

This tool is rooted in a system for finding niche markets to dominate that Jonathan first described in a post about having achieved forty-six page one rankings on Google in just seven days.

After talking about this method with several people and being asked repeatedly to share the exact method he used to dominate these small but profitable niches, Jonathan decided to go one better. He actually created a niche keyword research tool called Niche Horde that automatically finds these niches for you.

And find them it does. The Niche Horde database has added over a million (That’s million with an m) new niches in the last couple of days. It’s amazing to just watch that number grow.

What’s New about this tool?

There are two things that primarily interest me in this new niche research tool.

The first really interesting thing is that it is driven by an organic growth model. Members (it is a low cost membership based tool) run a small software application in the background that gathers data about keywords from Google.

Each client only accesses Google once each sixty seconds, and even on my dial up connection it is barely noticeable. But the cumulative results of each of these individual clients mining and reverse engineering niches on Google is staggering.

The number of niche groups available in the database grows constantly. every time you refresh the “latest Niches” page you have a whole new view of potentially explosive niche markets to explore.

The second thing that excites me is the “Strength Of Competition” measurement that Jonathan uses.

Most keyword research tools and systems use an “exact match” or allintitle: search to determine the competition for a given phrase. Jonathan builds the case that this is not true. In order to determine the actual competition for a given niche phrase you need to use the allinanchor: operator.

This returns a listing of pages that are linked to with a link containing the niche phrase as the anchor text. If someone uses the phrase on their site, or even if they use it in their title, this does not really indicate that they are competing for that phrase. If they use it in a link anchor pointing back to their site, that is a whole other story.

That’s an intentional action designed to tell Google that they are providing that information. That’s competition.

So, looking at the numbers involved can suddenly give you a completely different impression of the landscape in any given niche market. Some things may have thousands and thousands of pages with the target phrase somewhere on the page, but none of those pages might actually be competing for the phrase, while other phrases might have just a few hundred pages, but they are all competing fiercely for the term.

Using this method you will know this up front, and can make a decision based on this whether or not you want to dive in. Or you can even just change your campaign slightly to maximize your opportunities to get pages to the top of Google using less competitive, but still highly relevant words.