The foundational first step before any keyword optimization work: building a competitor set that accurately represents the niche. Get this wrong and every downstream keyword-relevancy calculation in the Master Keyword List & Listing Scorecard is distorted.
Run two dives in parallel: one broad (all styles/materials in the category) to track total category-wide demand, and one narrow (only your own style/variation) to track your actual market share within it. Comparing the two shows how much of the overall market your specific product type can realistically capture.
Target roughly 8-25 competitors, weighted toward quality (real sales) over quantity. Small or new niches with only 4-5 real sellers should not be padded out with irrelevant listings just to hit a number.
Include a seller only if: (1) they're making a decent amount of sales, (2) they rank for unique, useful keywords, and (3) including them meaningfully improves the set's coverage of the market.
Including too many low- or no-sales competitors. Each irrelevant competitor dilutes the keyword-relevancy percentage calculation, causing keywords to be bucketed incorrectly in the Master Keyword List & Listing Scorecard.
A three-part litmus test decides whether to add a candidate ASIN to a niche: does it have decent sales, does it rank for unique keywords, and does adding it meaningfully improve market coverage. As the guest frames it, "the number one mistake I see people make is that they include too many sellers in their niche, and those sellers don't have good data" — bloating the competitor set dilutes demand and keyword signals rather than sharpening them.
When building a niche manually rather than relying on Data Dive Niche Dive Tool (Automated Competitor Selection), sort candidate ASINs by sales volume first so the fastest movers get prioritized, then judge borderline cases by direct listing comparison (e.g. excluding a nylon bag from a canvas-bag niche, or dropping a hanging cosmetic bag that doesn't match the target form factor).
A competitor set isn't fixed at dive time. Sellers should periodically revisit an already-built niche and manually add ASINs for competitors that emerged since the last dive, or remove ones that turn out to be irrelevant — e.g. underpriced sellers who don't represent real market competition — checking each competitor's data before removing them.
This matters because including a seller who makes zero sales doesn't just add harmless noise: it corrupts the relevancy percentage that decides which keywords land in the master keyword list versus the trash can or residue (see Data Dive Four-Bucket Keyword Sorting System). A bloated competitor set with non-selling sellers actively degrades the keyword data, so more competitors is not automatically better — the set should track who is actually earning sales in the niche and stay updated as that changes. The Data Dive Compare Feature (Niche Tracking Over Time) is the tool for spotting when a niche's competitor landscape has shifted enough to warrant this maintenance.
Из тем: Product Research & Validation