The keyword map I build before buying any domain

The keyword map I build before buying any domain

Month 1 of my coffee-niche site, I skipped this and wrote 40 posts on pure vibes. Month 4: 600 visits. Painful. So here's the exact map I now build first.

— Pull 3 seed terms into a free Keywords Everywhere export, dump everything under volume 2,000 into a sheet
— Tag each row as Money (buyer intent), Info (how/what), or Bridge (comparison) — I want 1 Money per 4 Info
— Sort by a homemade score: volume divided by the number of forum/Reddit results ranking on page one (more forums = weaker competition)
— Cut anything where the top result is over 3,000 words; I can't out-resource that on a baby site
— Cluster the survivors into 8-10 pillars, one folder each

On my second site I did this religiously. Picked 'manual espresso' instead of 'espresso' because forums littered page one. Month 6: 9k sessions, the pillar ranked at #4 with a 1,400-word post.

The setback: two clusters had zero buyer intent, so traffic came but revenue didn't. I learned the Money tag is non-negotiable before a single word gets written.

The takeaway: Don't pick a niche, pick a 200-row scored keyword map — the niche falls out of the data.