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Category: Business Strategies
Tags: DirectoriesMonetizationNicheSEOTraffic
Entities: Comicshoplocator.comFreecampsites.netGoogleStreetfoodfinder.comYahoo Finance
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One of the reasons I love finding profitable directories that you've never heard of is yes, to get inspiration, to get some ideas around potential subniches that we can go and build directories in, but it's also because I've been getting a lot more questions around Google AI mode, around chatbt,
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LLMs taking over search slowly but surely, and I always want to get more data to fully form my own perspectives and opinions around the state of directories and how search is being impacted. So, this is really a way to get as close as possible to these types
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of websites. I've shared this before, but I think Google's going to be around for a lot longer than people think.
If I had to boil down my theory on what's happening with search and Google in the next few years, I would say that the same way that Yahoo Finance is still relevant, a lot of people use Yahoo
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Finance is the same way that Google is going to be known for certain things down the line. And if I were to bet, I would say location-based queries, anything around local businesses or location-based keywords.
That's where I think Google is going to remain the champion. And I don't see LLM's replacing that, at least anytime soon.
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Now, real quick, if you do want to join a community of directory builders, then feel free to join Shipper Directory, the free community. It's popping in there.
There's people who are building and finding success with their very first directories, people who are building their second and third directories, and there's just a lot of learning and
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education going on. So, I'll leave a link in the description.
Feel free to check that out. So, the first directory on the list is comic shoplocator.com.
And as you can guess, it's to help you find comic shops around your area. So, we can see it's clearly a directory.
I want to take a look at the
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website first, but of course, I just want to show you how much traffic this is getting. It's getting an estimated 32,000 monthly visitors.
So, we'll take a look at this in more depth in a second. Now, the first thing I'm noticing is actually all of these websites in the header.
So, we see Previews World, which is a website
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around Yeah. comics and books and toys.
And here we see that comic shop locator right here. But there's a lot of other ones.
There's Kids Comics. And look at this.
They have so many other websites that I assume they're affiliated with or they own as like a entire portfolio of
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comic book related websites. So, on their homepage, they have a couple blogs here, which is cool.
And then they have new releases which I thought was an e-commerce store type play but when I click into any of them I can't actually buy the product. Now typically I don't like relying on blogs and articles on my
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directories to get traffic but it probably makes sense in this niche because there's a community of people looking for this information and they can probably get a good amount of traffic from these articles. At the bottom we see the first ad placement which looks like AdSense and that's it.
It's really not too crazy of a homepage. Let's use the actual locator to see what
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the directory is like. All right, so this is their directory.
It looks pretty simple right off the bat. We have another ad on top and a few ads on the sidebar.
And let's look at these listing pages. We have Omega Level Comics.
They also have these icons here, which if you click into them, go to another website. So, I don't know if that's used for
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social proof or if that's where you can learn more about Omega Level Comics and collectibles. Let's take a look at their profile.
So, this is their listing page. We have a little map embed here, which is using Microsoft Bing.
And then we have all the store hours which are unknown which is not very helpful in my opinion. And that's it.
Very empty if
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I'm going to be honest. Not very impressive at all.
Not very helpful. I don't know what this comic shop even offers in the sense of like broad categories.
You know, do they offer Marvel comics? I don't know.
I just don't really have a good idea of what the products that they even offer are.
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Let's check out the comic bug because this one looks more filled out. So, we do see a logo.
We have a little bit more information like their socials, another map embed, and then we actually have some product offers that they have in their shop. So, this is much more helpful, but I feel like it's still kind
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of empty. Now, I've personally been dabbling into the world of Magic the Gathering cards.
So, me and my friends have been looking for trading card stores around us, and it's actually pretty hard to find really highquality ones. So, as someone who's in this world and looking for things like this or adjacent to comic shops, it's not really
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enough for me to warrant choosing the comic bug just based off this information here. Another thing that's interesting is that there's only six listings here.
We can see them right here on the map. And then when we scroll down, we hit this little text that says, "For a complete list of comic shops in
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your area, visit comic shoplocator.com," which is where we're at. I don't understand.
We click on this link and it just brings us to the homepage. Now, I'm not sure if that's actually accurate because when we go to Google Maps and we type in comic shop in the LA area, we do see a lot more than six comic shops.
At
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first, I thought maybe they just cleaned the data really well and all of these listings were hyper vetted and really high quality. But we saw from the first listing that that's not the case.
And on Google Maps, there's definitely a lot of comic stores based on the reviews and they even have comic in their name like Fisk Comics. So, definitely room to
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update this directory. It's not just a functionality of the actual map embed where it's cutting it off based on a certain radius of like 20 m, 30 mi.
Nope. There's literally comic stores that are not on this directory.
And that is kind of a good sign if you're going to build in this niche. And honestly,
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that's pretty much it for this directory. It's really not so crazy.
But with that, I think I'm ready to check out the analytics a little bit deeper. As we mentioned, this is getting 32,000 monthly visitors based on hrefs.
They're ranking for 7,900 keywords. They have a ton of backlinks, which is almost a concerning amount.
I don't know if
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that's actually made up of quality backlinks, but we'll take a look in a sec. Pretty high DR72.
Now, looking at this traffic chart sorted to all time, which shows us the last 10 years, we can see that they've been around and they've been doing pretty well. 10 years ago, they were still getting 20,000 monthly visitors.
They do see some pretty big
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drops, especially in 2020, which makes sense. They were probably all closed, but they reached a low of around 7,000 monthly visitors, but you can see they rebounded right back up.
It doesn't look like it was due to a penalty or any of the core updates because they're still climbing up and they've been picking
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back up ever since the start of 2025. Majority US traffic, so that's really great for the ads.
Let's take a look at their top pages cuz that's something I'm curious about. They have 760 indexed pages, which is a lot less than I thought.
And we can see the majority of traffic going to the homepage, which is
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typical. So, this is the third most visited page, which is an event calendar.
Okay, that's I don't think there's anything on this page. There's just a header one that says event calendar.
There's literally no text. So, I don't understand how this is still getting monthly visitors.
Take a look at this sharp drop in traffic. I mean, we
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have 23,7,800, 800, and then it just drops to 40 monthly visitors, 30, 29, 29. And these are probably the actual listing pages for specific places.
So, that's not a good sign for them, obviously. But what's interesting is that if we click
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on one of these listings, let's just click on this one for example, bases, cards, and comics. Again, we're seeing that very simple layout.
This one has actual text that tells you a little bit more about the comic store, but this page here ranks for eight different keywords. We can see that bases, cards,
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and comics is being searched 600 times every single month at a keyword difficulty zero. and they're still able to rank position four with this really simple listing page.
You know, I wonder what would happen if you created a listing page that was much more valuable that actually took a look at basis cards
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and comics. Let's just take a look at this place in Lancaster.
So, this is the place on Google Maps. If we go to the reviews, we can see that there's so much more going on based on these review tags alone.
There's Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, sports cards, right? And the environment.
The environment was
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really big when me and my friends were looking for card shops. My friend even walked into a place where he said he couldn't stay in there because it smelled so bad.
Not to make it a stereotype, but it was so bad that he couldn't stay in there. And so the environment actually does make a difference.
And I think it would be a
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worthwhile enrichment feature if you were to go and create a comic book directory. But anyways, look at all of these things that are being talked about and then look at the actual listing page for basis cards and comics.
There's just not a lot going on. They do mention
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Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh here in this little sentence where they say they host uh casual play for these card games, but they don't actually mention any details in this paragraph here, as well as the product offerings here. You may want to enrich this further and give people an idea of what type of Pokémon cards do
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you sell, what type of Pokémon merchandise do you sell, because that might be the deciding factor that gets people to your comic store over someone else's. With that said, they're still able to be on the first page of this keyword, basis, cards, and comics, which tells me that there might be an opportunity to do a better job and then
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overtake these guys over time. Of course, comic shoplocator.com has a pretty high domain rating, so you might be intimidated.
I get it. But I think there's a lot of SEO principles that are missing from this listing page as well.
I don't see any internal linking on this listing page, which I think is a lost
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opportunity. I don't see FAQs.
I don't see too many photos, right? there could be more images with an alt text targeting certain keywords.
So, these are just a few things that I'm noticing right off the bat. Let's take a look at their organic keywords.
So, they are ranking position two for comic book
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store near me. And they have a lot of other high rankings for comic store related keywords.
Comic shops, comic store, comic bookstore. All of these look pretty competitive based on the keyword difficulty.
So, I just put a filter to see all the keywords that don't contain near me in them just to
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get an idea of what else they're ranking for. And we do see some lower competition keywords.
We do see that basis cards and comics here. We also see Colorado coins, cards, and comics.
And we just continue to see these other comic stores, which could be where the
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opportunity is. There's clearly some comic stores around the country that are getting hundreds of monthly searches.
And I'm wondering if we can go and create a directory and enrich the hell out of those specific stores that are getting, you know, 450 monthly searches. I think that could work out.
I don't
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think you'll get very much traffic. And this is a good example here.
Big Pets Collectibles is searched 500 times a month and they're only getting 17 monthly visitors out of that 500. So, yes, you could be ranking on the first page, maybe towards the bottom, but you won't get that much traffic, and it
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would have to be a lot of listings for this to actually earn anything substantial from display ads. I want to take a look at their back links, too.
Right off the bat, we can see that there's 2,000 referring domains, but there's 1.6 million back links. So, I'm wondering if it's a forum or how is it possible that 2,000 websites would
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effectively have to give 800 back links per referring domain just to get to this number here. All right, so they do have some great backlinks.
We have freecomicbookday.com. And this is looking like one of the websites they own just because this looks exactly the same as their header.
Yeah, if we keep
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on clicking down, we start to see the same thing over and over again. Boom Studios.
Okay, so this is their first backlink that actually looks like a really solid backlink, right? 4,300 monthly visitors to this page with a DR68.
And it doesn't look like a website
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that they own. So, this is an interesting one.
We have archcomics.com. high DR at 64 getting 2100 monthly visitors to this page and this is the article and when I first landed on this I was like okay this is a very simple page where is the actual backlink I see
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some images here and you can click onto them but they just go to other parts of the page so they're internal links and then these are call to actions for their newsletter so where could the actual backlink exist so I scrolled down and I saw this which says comic shop locator service and if we click on it that's
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where we would then end up on comic shop locator. So, this is not good.
It says page not found. I assume that at one point there was an actual listing for RG comics.
So, even though this looks bad, this is a good example of the badges way of getting back links that I've spoken about before. And you can see that comic
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shop locator at this point is pretty reputable. But is there an opportunity here to make a competing comic book directory, create some kind of badge that looks good, and then actually works to point to a listing page?
I would literally create this directory and then
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reach out to Archie comics and say, "Hey, like on this article, you link to comic shop locator service. You don't even have a listing.
It doesn't exist. And I just happen to own the most accurate up-to-date comic store locator directory.
So, I would love to feature
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you and give you this badge." And then you can kind of go about it that way because as we saw, RG Comics is a pretty high DR. The entire website gets 38,000 monthly visitors.
So, it's clearly still in business. It's still relevant and this is a backlink for the taking, especially if you pay them a little bit.
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Now, what do I think this website is making? I really only saw ads being played, which I'm pretty sure is AdSense.
I would say a solid $1,500 to $2,000 a month. That's mainly because it's all US-based traffic.
Comics is probably not the highest RPM niche, but it's probably not bad. Yeah, I would say
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that's a pretty fair estimate. The last thing I'll say about this is that while there are a lot of backlinks, there's a high DR of 72.
I would still consider competing with a directory like this because of the lack of quality in the listing pages, the broken links that we saw in the back links. That already gave
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me a pretty clear game plan as far as what I can do to improve the actual website experience and the data and then how I can go and get quality backlinks by just reaching out to these comic store owners. The second directory is one that I found in a recent video on
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accident and it's free campsites.net and I found this looking up offgrid parking the keyword in Google and this showed up pretty much near the top of the list. But when I looked up this website on hrefs, we'll see that there are 150,000 monthly visitors
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coming to this old looking directory which you already know I love. I love the old school, ugly, outdated looking directories, especially because it might mean that there's opportunity to build a competitor website.
So, this is a global directory. I just typed in Berlin just
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for fun. And here we can see that it does populate some uh free campsites, but let's take a look at Los Angeles.
And this is what the experience looks like. We have some markers here for free, which are the green ones.
The red ones means it's paid. blue for permit,
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yellow for research, which I don't even know what that means. On the right side, we do see all of the listing pages, and it looks really crazy.
Like, I can barely tell the separation if not for these little icons here. So, let's just click into one.
Let's click into Valley Forge Trail. Now, this is the listing
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page. It doesn't look beautiful, but there actually are some good pieces of information here.
We have the name here. U a pass or permit is required.
So, that's really, really useful to know. And there's 16 to 29 campsites.
Very useful information, the amenities, a little forecast widget, and then a
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review right here. I love camping.
I've booked campgrounds through a dozen different websites, and sometimes you're just not really satisfied with the information it provides. It addresses all the most important things, like a fire ring is something that I think is really important.
These are all things that you need and want to know before
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going on a trip. So, we do see a couple ads here, one at the top and one on the side, which kind of looks like Google AdSense.
And we can double check. I looked up the website.
By the way, this website was made using WordPress. And yes, we do have Google AdSense right over here.
Now, I don't even know if Valley Forge Trail is a header one. Kind
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of looks like a paragraph. Nope.
Okay. So, it's a header one here.
Solid SEO practice. Let me just make sure that this is a paragraph text.
Okay. Yep.
So, they have the header down. They have the breadcrumbs.
The actual URL is looking a little bit weird. This can be improved if at all possible.
So, yeah. Overall,
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it's just a really simple directory. And they did the most important part really, really well, which is it's a global directory.
For the actual campsite information, they nailed it because that's really what matters. Campers don't really care if it's this beautiful kind of thing, right?
You're you're
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you're a camper. You're going to sleep on the dirt.
They have their own social media profiles here. They have a YouTube channel which has 660 subscribers.
Last post was 6 years ago, so that's not very relevant, but it is still good to have. These social icons are proven to be good for your website's SEO and just
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generally make it look like you're a person running it. Same with the about page, FAQs, blog, support, right?
Contact us. These are all good pages to have.
Clearly, other people find it useful. It's getting 150,000 monthly visitors, ranking for 48,000 keywords, 62,000 backlinks with a DR67.
Let's take
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a look at the last 10 years. And of course, we see some seasonality, which makes perfect sense.
If the majority of traffic here is from the US, which 94% is, then you're going to have most of the country deal with seasons, perhaps the summer months are going to be more popular, which is pretty accurate based
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on these peaks in the traffic chart. Here in the summer of 2024, we can see some of the months reaching over 200,000 monthly visitors, and we're starting to see it happen again.
Let's look at their top pages here. 495 pages.
Another small directory, but this kind of throws me
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off a little bit because they probably have way more than 495 camp sites alone that they have sourced and mapped. But this might be just referring to the actual like static pages.
I can already tell based on that last example where we saw this URL structure that it's not
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counting this in the 495 index pages. And when we look at these URLs, we can see that yeah, this second most visited page is how to find more sites.
And it's just this static page. We do see
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freeampsites.netwploin. So this is the login page, I guess, maybe so you can leave a review or which kind of tells me that there might be a community behind this website.
You know, it's been around for some time. People recognize it as the place to find free campsites.
I wouldn't be surprised if thousands of
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people every single month were just kind of like actively posting. Nothing crazy, right?
It drops down pretty heavily because all the traffic's going to the homepage. If we go to the organic keywords, we do see 61,000 keywords that they're ranking for.
And they're ranked two for camping near me, which is an
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absolutely crazy competitive keyword. We have this broad keyword, free camping, and they're ranking number one for that.
And I feel like this is a very good example of a trap niche. You know, if you're doing research in Hrefs and you stumbled upon free camping and you're
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like, "Cool, I'm just going to go and rank for this." Well, clearly we can see from this data that this keyword, yes, it says it's low difficulty and there's 9,000 people searching it up every single month, but because they're rank one, they're taking 7900 out of 9,000 people. Proportionally, that's pretty insane.
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So, they're getting 87% of everyone who's searching free camping to their website, which doesn't leave you a lot of traffic if you were to go and create a directory targeting free camping. We also see a lot of rank ones and twos for all of these keywords that have the exact same search intent.
We do see a
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branded tag for free campsites.net. So, they do have a little community brewing.
So, that's another sign that it would be hard to compete with these people. I think we only found Google AdSense as the monetization strategy here for freeampsites.net.
So, they have a lot of traffic, 150,000. I wouldn't be
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surprised if this website was making just an educated guess here. I think $6,000 is a really low ball estimate for this.
It's only tricky because on their off months they can get as low as 50,000 40,000 monthly visitors, which I would guess earns them in the ballpark of that
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$2,000 to $3,000 range. But I wouldn't be surprised if in June, July, August, for example, they're bringing in closer to $8 to $10,000 a month.
So the third directory on the list today is around street food. It's street foodfinder.com.
A little bit more modern than the ones
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we just looked at. And the first thing I thought about was there's truly so much opportunity in the food niche.
And yes, it's saturated, but then there's these pockets of opportunities. So, this website's getting 55,000 monthly visitors.
Just from looking at this Los Angeles map, I can tell that they are doing a good job at least mapping out
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these locations because if we just go over to Google Maps, we can see that I typed in street food Los Angeles, and there's really only 15 or so that populate right over here. Some of them may not even be street food places like this is a restaurant.
So that's kind of confusing. So this is a very good
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example of taking something that has very fragmented search on Google maps. So let's just click into one for example urban pizza catering.
So we can click into it and then see an actual listing page. Okay.
So a little description here with a book catering button and then we
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have a schedule a menu right here. From this I'm thinking that this is a selfsubmitted listing.
If I click book catering, what happens? Okay, so they have a lead form and we've seen a couple examples of this play out in other food related directories.
Sometimes they charge a fixed fee just to have a
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listing like this. Sometimes they take a fee based on the order value of a catering job and that's how they monetize.
Now, I'm not really sure which one it is because this is a really simple website. There's not a lot of information at all.
We do see another call to action for need food trucks. So, it's a call to action for what looks
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like some kind of recurring catering or food truck event. This is something that I had when I worked a corporate job.
Every single Thursday, there would be three or four food trucks right outside our office. And I think this form is for that purpose.
So, they're probably monetizing with the catering and they're monetizing with this reoccurring food
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truck location. And I would say those are probably the main ways this monetizes.
I would have to look into their app to see if they're running ads on their mobile app. So, it does look like it's a US-based directory because I typed in Berlin and it says that we haven't launched in your area yet.
We can take a look at the HF's data here
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and we see that 98.6% of the traffic is US-based. 55,000 monthly visitors, 35,000 keywords and a good amount of backlinks.
And here we see that they really started their directory right around November of 2016.
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Yes, they've been around for a good amount of time, but it's not like one of the 25 year old directories that we've seen. And then we can see how their growth pattern was in the first year.
If we look at November 2017, it took them a full year just to get 2,000 monthly visitors. So, this is actually a pretty
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slow growth directory. You know, it didn't just blow up overnight.
It looks like it wasn't until co that this really started blowing up, which kind of makes sense. and it started to get 50,000ish monthly visitors right around the end of the pandemic.
And then from there, they just continued to keep growing. They
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have some down months during the winter. And I wonder if that's just seasonality at play here.
And all things considered, they're still looking very, very healthy in terms of traffic in the last couple years. Let's take a look at their top pages here.
We have 15,554 indexed pages. So, this is a very
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large directory. Their most visited page is, interestingly enough, the Columbus location page.
So many street food places. Apparently, it's popping with the street food in Columbus.
This Columbus page is ranking for over 5,000 keywords with the top one being food trucks near me. So, even though it's
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street food, it's really aligning with the intent behind food trucks. Now, take a look at the most traffic pages.
This is a trend that I've been spotting for many months now, which is where all the traffic is going to the location pages. And we can kind of see that based on the URL structure.
This is for Boise, Rally,
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Middleton, there's Charlotte, there's Minneapolis, and then there's actual specific food trucks that are pretty famous, I assume. And then if we click on this one, on the hook food truck must be pretty popular.
It's getting 283 monthly visitors. And we can check real quick.
Yep. So, On the Hook Fish and Chips menu is searched 1,700 times every
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single month. And the On the Hook food truck is searched 2,700 times a month.
Let's take a look at their organic keywords. I assume there are some heavy hitters here.
Food truck near me. I mean, rank two.
Yeah, this is a pretty dominant food truck directory, I will say. Taco truck near me, 53,000 monthly
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searches, rank one. So, that's amazing.
But keep in mind, this has a lot of search volume, but they're really only getting 3,700 monthly visitors for ranking number one. If we compare that to free camping, which was the keyword we were just looking at before, it was getting 87% of the total monthly traffic
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for ranking number one. This is only getting 6%ish.
So this is an interesting observation, right? Ranking one, you would think you deserve a majority of the traffic, but this kind of speaks to the user behavior, the types of people looking at food truck near me.
Let's take a look at their back links real
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quick. I assume a lot of these backlinks are going to be from the actual food truck websites.
So that's not going to be any surprise. And I think that is the strategy if you go and build a competing website, which I probably wouldn't looking at this directory.
This is one of their best links apparently. It's a DR58 with 1100 monthly visitors going to
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this page. I actually don't know why Hrefs considers this a best link because the search intent is not fully aligned.
So the backlink is in an FAQ section. So yeah, this isn't surprising.
We're seeing a lot of the restaurants themselves mention the directory on
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their website, which is I think really smart. Giving people the option to set a schedule is like such a win-win situation for the website visitor, the business in question that's trying to market their food truck, and just to give them a place where they can see the schedule, right?
If you're a restaurant
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owner, you're probably not trying to worry too much about how to create an event widget on your homepage so people can see, you know, where you're going to be. But it does give a lot of restaurants a reason to use your directory from like a practical standpoint.
So, since we didn't see any ads, it's pretty hard to determine how
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much this website directory is making. But I did ask Chat GBT and I tried to figure out how much does this website make.
And it does look like they are trying to automate the booking service for recurring food truck events and then the actual catering. And here it says
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the average fee for association member food trucks is reported to be $8 per event. I don't know how much we can trust that, so let's just use $8 as an example.
it's probably much lower than they actually make. Now, ChachiBT is assuming a 1% conversion rate, which I think is probably fair.
So, if we were
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to use that example according to the 55,000 monthly visitors, that would be roughly $4,400 a month in booking fees. That's got to be way off.
I mean, I would assume it's many multiples above that, especially because with corporate deals, you know, you have these reoccurring
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food trucks that could be that could be multi-month, maybe even year-long contracts. And now all of a sudden you're playing with larger numbers.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was like a 500k plus directory easily. So those are three profitable directories that you've never heard of.
Please let me know if you found inspiration, if you found
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ideas, if it gave you some kind of epiphany for your own directory builds because it tells me that I should make more of these videos. Share what I'm seeing online and keep you posted on some cool directories that have some room to optimize.
So with that, don't forget to join the free ship your
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directory community if you haven't already. Again, great place just to air out any ideas, get some feedback.
There are people in there every single day making posts. With that, I hope you keep building.
If you have any questions, please post them below and I'll try my best to answer them. Always grateful for your support and I'll catch you in
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another video. See you.