There’s a wide variety of niches that can benefit from SEO.

Basically, any business in which people are searching for in Google can/should leverage the free traffic search engines provide.

However, certain industries definitely lend themselves more to search marketing than others do.

This article is going to assume you’re selling SEO services to local businesses rather than investing in a rank and rent model.

With that being said, let’s get right into it and cover what the best businesses to target for SEO services are….

What to Look For

The best SEO clients generally have a few characteristics in common.

Below, I’ve listed some qualities to keep in mind when choosing a niche and finding local SEO clients online.

Their service/product has a high price point

This makes it easier to justify higher management fees and reduces the need for high volume. It doesn’t matter if their site only gets 30 visitors a month if one sales makes the company 20K+ in revenue.

In general, your sales will be much easier and you’ll make far more revenue only setting your sights on industries that have high price points.

Quick sales turnaround

The more shopping their customers do when making purchases the lower your conversion rates will be and the less effective SEO is for the client.

Emergency and commodity style businesses (home services) generally have fast sales processes.

The less complex the sales process is of the industry you’re targeting the better.

Competition is already investing in SEO

It’s generally good to see that other companies are investing in SEO to verify there is a need in the market.

Although potentially lucrative, it’s much harder to enter an industry not currently leverage SEO as you’ll have to sell the business owners on the value of internet marketing and hand hold them throughout the process.

Further, look to target businesses already investing in their own online marketing efforts as these owners are usually easier to convince.

How People Use Google Search

I want to quickly go over some nuances in industries.

There are some niches where the customers come to your client, there are some where the client goes to their customers.

Further, there are some industries where people use phones more than their computers to search and vice versa.

Lastly, there are some industries where most people will clicks ads rather than go down to the organic results.

All of this really depends on the nature of your niche and the demographics/psychographics of the person searching.

Keep this in mind when selecting a niche as this will likely inform you on whether you should target map rankings, organic rankings, or go the PPC route instead.

List of SEO Niches to Target

Here are 42 highly profitable local SEO niches, broken down by category, that you can target for your marketing services.

Home Services

Pros:

High price point
Quick turnaround
Simple sales process
Easy to contact decision makers

Cons:

High competition
- You’re competing with HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and even Google themselves
Finding consistent labor is usually a bigger need for them than new customers
They don’t always have a dedicated assistant answering their calls & email inquiries