2 step niche research for dummies.

First thing first -

Page Rank doesn't matter.

And teling from my experience don't listen to the "gurus" who tells u to search by title compition ,url comptition,exact match,brad phrase blah blah blah and blah.

1st Step -

Just check the top ten list.use sequake to see how many links this individual page have if those pages have over then 70-80 links then this would be tough to rank and if it's under that u will rank very easily.

2nd Step -

Are all of the sites authority sites in ur niche?That means are those site only about ur niche or those sites have many other topics.Like for example u see amazon in the top list but amazon is not only about your niche it has many other things.If most of the sites are authority sites then it would be really tough to rank for ur niche if not this niche is to be ur own.

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70-80 links is not hard to beat, I often see sites that has around 70-80 backlinks but are coming only from a few sites.

What I recommend is to check the quality of the backinks, if they're of high quality then it would be tough to beat

Perhaps you mean 700-800 links...?

Sorry i didn't cleared it up totally in the post.I am actually talking about microniche sites,for this if a page has 70-80 links that means the links are not natural and the author is building links for the page so u got compition and this is not a good news when u r building small niche authority sites.U won't have the time to compete with others because u will be creating hundreds of this small niche sites.So u have to check that the top ten ranked sites are not ranking because they r trying to rank it's because they r huge and old google trusted sites.You can easily outrank them by just building small authority sites.In some cases i beat them with only on page optimization without any backlinks.
I am not saying u cant beat other sites that are actually building links for this niche but it won't be worth your time.
Another thing i want to clear up is i got into many niches and build pages for those but after some time i lost interest in them for many reasons.So i abandoned them.There are thousands of "online money seekers" those try and build pages and do nothing.So when your researching for niche you will see millions of competing pages and 90% of them are abandoned.so i mentioned u shouldn't decide whether u r going into this niche or not, just by the data of competing pages