Late last year, Ezoic rolled out a new tool called NicheIQ that has a topic suggestion feature.
I’ve spent the last few weeks testing this out across my sites that are on Ezoic to see how it works and determine if it’s actually useful or just a waste of time.
My Ezoic sites are in a variety of niches, which means that I got to test it in more than one niche.
I’ll walk you through how it works and let you know what kind of results I got from my testing.
**And as always, I’m an affiliate marketer and this post contains affiliate links, meaning I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my link.
What Is It?
First things first, where the heck is this thing in your Ezoic account?
You’ll find the link for it in the navigation menu within your Ezoic dashboard.
You’ll see it listed at the top like that for every site that you have.
However, once you go to NicheIQ from one of your sites, you can stay within the tool and change websites without needing to head back to the main dashboard.
So, NicheIQ is actually kind of a suite of SEO tools for your site.
You should have your Google Search Console connected to your Ezoic account so that everything within the tool works.
But, I’m only sharing my testing of the Topics part of the tool, which gives you topic suggestions for your site based on Ezoic’s AI having analyzed what your site is about and what topics you don’t have already that you can write about.
After clicking on NicheIQ from the main navigation area of your Ezoic dashboard, this is what you’ll end up seeing.
And from this page, you gotta click on Enable Topics to start seeing those keyword suggestions.
There are other things you can enable here as well, but like I said, I’m focused on the Topics part of this tool.
Anyways, once you’ve enabled Topics, you are ready to see what the tool has to offer.
But do note that it takes up to 24 hours for the data to populate!
Also, if you have newish site with little traffic, then you may not see any topic suggestion results yet.
The screenshot above is what I get for one of my sites that launched in late December and isn’t really getting much traffic.
I have no idea what the traffic threshold is for seeing results though.
Anyways, you need to click on Topics from the left sidebar to see the results.
Using NicheIQ Topic Suggestions
Once you’ve enabled Topics, you’ll get fresh data each week.
The data gets refreshed every Monday, typically between 8am and 10am PST.
And from what I understand, if you’re not in Premium then you get 50 topics and if you’re in Premium then you get 100 topics.
So, the first thing you’ll notice is that there are four tabs in the Topics section of NicheIQ.
Of course, those topics/keywords are in the Topic Suggestions tab.
But what is really cool to me are the Competitors Overview and Competitors List tabs because I totally was not expecting them.
Here’s what it looks like once you click on Topic Suggestions –
So, this screenshot is for site #5 in my Ezoic monthly income reports.
I’ve blurred out some of the topic keywords to make it a bit more challenging for you super sleuths to find my site.
Here’s a quick rundown of the features you see in the screenshot:
- Bookmark option so you don’t lose any good keywords.
- Potential = how valuable they think the topic is for your site (scored 1-10 with 10 being the best)
- Search Volume: this data comes from a dataset they license (it’s updated every few months) and it doesn’t match Ahrefs or Semrush most of the time.
- Keyword difficulty: a propriety calculation (more details below)
- Covered: No=you don’t already have it, but you can change that to yes with the three dots menu on the right side.
Okay, so I was curious about the keyword difficulty score and I asked them about it.
Here is the verbatim response that I got from my contact at Ezoic:
The difficulty score is a proprietary calculation and reflects how the domain will perform in search results for that topic and is calculated based on the search volume, domain authority, and relevancy of the topic to the website. Here’s a breakdown of the scores:
- A topic that has low difficulty (1-3) will likely drive low traffic to the site in relation to current organic monthly traffic and may not be worth the effort
- An optimal difficulty level is between 4-6, which means there is a balance between how much traffic a topic can bring and how difficult it may be to rank well for it
- A topic that has high difficulty (7-10) will likely be competitive and hard to rank well
Note that you can sort by Keyword Difficulty score, or any other column, if you want to do so.
My Experience Using NicheIQ Topic Suggestions
As I mentioned above, I spent the last few weeks taking this tool for a test drive with my sites.
Here’s a closer look at the topics/keywords recommended for my outdoors site:
Again, I’ve blurred some of these that I will likely use on my site.
So, I was able to fit 14 of the suggestions in this screenshot, and here’s how relevant they are for my site:
- Two are definitely irrelevant
- One is wtf to me, but I’d have to look to see what Google is ranking and what people are writing about to determine relevancy
- Three I’m not sure about, but they may be relevant. I’d have to look into it to determine.
- Eight are definitely relevant to my site.
Overall, the topic suggestions are a mix of really broad keywords as well as niched down ones.
Some of the affiliate focused topics were things like:
- Best X
- Best X for Y
I think the suggestions overall were a decent mix of intent types, but there were several irrelevant topics.
This is likely due to the results being created by AI, but I’m under the impression that if you hide irrelevant topics that it re-trains the AI for your site.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can also mark topics as covered so that you don’t get the same suggestions in the future.
It’s super interesting to me that this Topics suggestion feature includes competitor information with it.
On the first tab about competitors, this is what you’ll see (again, from my outdoors site).
Interesting to see this sort of overview, which I don’t think that I’ve seen in any other tool that I’ve used or tested.
Though that search rank delta score doesn’t tell you here what it means for the lower set of domains, it is on the next tab and there is a description for it.
Here’s what the final tab looks like –
And let me give you the rundown on what each column is all about.
- Keyword Overlap: Number of keywords for which both the competitor and the domain appeared in results.
- Rank Delta: A score between -10 (worst) and +10 (best) which reflects the degree to which the competing domain ranks better (positive, leading competitors) or worse (negative, runners up competitors) than this domain.
- Overlap Ratio: Ratio of keywords where the competing domain is found in results and competes with the reference domain.
One thing that I’ve noticed on this tab, which you likely also noticed from the screenshot, is that there are some irrelevant domains here.
For instance, my outdoors site is in no way competing with Ferrell Gas, which is a company that offers propane gas services to homes and businesses.
Other irrelevant sites in the list include Etsy, Walmart, Sixt, and eBay.
And unlike the Topic Suggestion tab, there seems to be no way to hide the irrelevant websites or otherwise remove them. (I’ve suggested they add this feature.)
That being said, I did discover a few competitor sites that I was not previously aware of, which was a nice find.
All in, it looks like you get 60 of these competitor sites in the list.
My Results With NicheIQ Topic Suggestions
Across my Ezoic sites, I’ve been adding content based on the topic suggestions found within NicheIQ Topics.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that a lot of the keywords are actually a bit more difficult to rank for than the tool leads you to believe.
Of course, my Ezoic sites are low authority sites right now, so there aren’t a ton of easy keywords – especially affiliate keywords – that I can easily rank for on the sites.
I think the other missing component here is topic clusters.
If the topic results gave you multiple keywords within a cluster that you could write, then the rankings would come easier.
Before I tell you my current results, I must preface it with the sad reality that I’ve been experiencing indexing issues with some of these sites.
In fact, I’ve had to request indexing in Search Console to get most of the articles indexed – and some of them I’m STILL waiting for indexing.
While I don’t have any page one rankings yet, I do have some page two rankings.
And most of the articles are showing up in Ahrefs like this after getting indexed –
And yeah, some traffic is starting to trickle in already for these.
I think the real power of NicheIQ is using it to identify some good topics/keywords and then doing independent additional research to build a full topic cluster.
I think using it in conjunction with something like LowFruits or Keyword Chef is a really great way to find awesome new topics for your site.
Doing that would likely turbo boost rankings and traffics for these topics.
Right now, I don’t think this tool is something that will replace whatever you’re using for keyword or topic research, but you should still add it to your workflow.
After all, this tool is free for Ezoic users, so why not see what data it gives you that you can implement to grow your site?
You might even discover some new competitors that are creeping up on you!
And if you’re not yet using Ezoic on your site, then why not sign up and test out this tool for yourself?
Hey, I’m Shawna. I make a living working from my laptop in places like London, Sydney, Dubai, Rome, Oslo, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. I share how I do some of that on this website.