Hot dogs and s’mores, ghost stories, and days spent fishing, boating and hiking . . . what’s not to love about a good camping trip? As long as you stay clear of sunburn and ticks, you can make some of your best memories while camping.
Websites in the camping niche get to call up all of those good memories. They also get to sell more physical products than one could hope to count.
You don't have to limit yourself to tents and sleeping bags. You can throw in any type of survival, hiking or fishing gear you can imagine, and don’t forget the marshmallows and Hershey bars!
There are also a handful of information products on ClickBank. For example, “Get Paid to Camp,” which (in spite of the not-so-great English) has a rather enticing sales page that should appeal to the most fervent campers in your audience. I might have bought it if I didn’t already love my job!
Google Trends shows that this niche goes through seasonal patterns like clockwork, consistently peaking in July and doing its worst in November.
Sadly, it has followed the pattern of other outdoor activities, with interest slacking off a bit in recent years. Let's take a look at the current search figures before we call it doomed, though.
Geographic note: Camping appears to be quite popular in Western Europe right now. The Netherlands, France and Denmark have the highest levels of interest per capita.
This rather general keyword probably won't convert many visitors into customers, but it could produce a LOT of traffic. And since it has low AdWords competition and a high KEI, the organic competition might be light enough to make it a worthwhile target.
This keyword could attract a lot of campers, plus preppers, survivalists, and other cautious types. You could easily build an entire website around survival gear.
What's the first thing that comes your mind when you think of camping? A tent, right? If you're anything like me, your second thought is about the things that go inside that tent—sleeping bags.
Since most sleeping bags sit comfortably in the $20–$80 range, you can make decent money on each sale without facing high buyer resistance.
Those three keywords are some pretty big fish. With so many searches, I expect them to have fairly difficult ratings—but on the off chance that they don't, they could become enormous cash cows or incredible sources of traffic. Let's find out if they'd be worth the trouble, and if not, what keywords would be better.
The smiles of a family forced to listen to my camping puns.
Well guys, it looks like we got lucky after all! Although local and country-specific sites often get preference for this keyword (New Zealand searches pretty much only turn up NZ websites about camping here specifically), plenty of American sites have ranked across the entire country. Those sites only have a moderate number of backlinks and wouldn't be too hard to beat.
Even if you decide to focus on local SEO and rank in a single U.S. state, you can still expect several hundred searches per month. That makes this a highly versatile keyword that could suit a wide variety of websites.
Most of the top 10 websites are fairly authoritative and have put a moderate to significant amount of effort into their SEO. You would need a combination of quality backlinks, good on-page SEO, and strong social signals to rank well, but you wouldn’t need to go viral or anything. I would seriously consider it.
The competition for this keyword doesn't have too much in the way of backlinks or social signals. They've made up for those weaknesses by optimizing the hell out of their pages—and by being monstrously large authority sites to begin. A small website would need an excellent backlinking and social media strategy in order to go toe-to-toe with these giants, but it could certainly win.
While you can cook the hot dogs and s'mores with nothing more than a stick, most people (or at least most adults) will want to eat something a little more wholesome on occasion.
For many, having the right cookware can make all the difference between surviving a camping trip and enjoying an adventure. Just ask Samwise Gamgee! (I know I will the next time I catch him dropping eaves in my backyard.)
Anyway, back to keyword analysis. Most of the pages that rank for camping cookware are weakly optimized and have very few backlinks. The only challenge is the high authority of the websites they come from.
Of course, some people want to eat well while camping and can't cook to save their lives, even when they have a full kitchen at their disposal. They will probably search for keywords like this in the hopes of finding pre-made or easy-to-make camping meals.
Only the top page has bothered to do any optimization for this keyword phrase, and even it has done so halfheartedly. Only two of the pages have better than 25 backlinks. Two of the pages that have very low backlink counts also come from low-authority pages (including result #1).
It would be a cinch to beat all of those pages and become king of the wild! Or, well, king of camping food.
With its varied sub-niches and easy keywords as abundant as wildflowers, the camping niche has plenty of room for you. Go pitch a tent!
Want to perform keyword analyses like the ones we've shown here? Get your free copy of Traffic Travis today! You can also save yourself a lot of work by downloading my camping keyword research and following these instructions. Just don't forget to hit the Like button before you go!
