Niche specific directories

Stephen

Ecommerce SEO / SEM
BuSo Pro
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Jan 21, 2015
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Hi,
I've been out of the directory building game for about 8/9 years, but I'm starting to get an itch again!

My background is mainly SEM but I've worked on SEO on some very large classifieds and jobs board sites over recent years, as of today I work on a consultancy basis and I'm sort of keen to start building out a few properties of my own in a few quite narrow niches.

Just wondering if anyone here has had relatively recent wins in this area at all? I'd love to be able to chat a few ideas through and share on various strategies.

Cheers

Stephen
 
There's a couple people on the forum building these right now. If you hunt through the Laboratory section you should find them.

I know a guy that built a ton of these for Local SEO purposes to sell to his clients. He's selling placements on all the big spots and little ones, and created a handful of his own to up the price I guess and maybe get paid placements from other service providers. I'm not sure it worked out that great.
 
I've built a directory of brands in the industry as a section of a niche site, but not a stand-alone directory.

I was just checking up on a site I flipped earlier in the year and it's outranking the brand's own websites and socials in some cases. I had noticed that a good chunk of brands in this niche had pretty decent search volume, so I just went spray and pray to take down as many as I could.

It's not really structured as a directory mind you, it's a category called "Brands" with a post for each brand, for about ~100 different ones. 400-600 words each... it talked about the bran's history and story and features a handful of their products with mini-reviews.

The plan was to reach out to every brand and show them their post, in hopes that some of them would link to it / share it, but the site sold before that happened.

I also had a sidebar for this category with the most popular brands based on how many pageviews their page got on my site, so it incentivized them to send a little traffic my way to appear higher on the list and therefor to have their name on the sidebar of all of their competitor's brand pages.

I'm going to do something similar on a new niche site I'm building, think along the lines of making a directory of every sushi restaurant in the world, but I'll probably use a similar category + post style rather than a traditional "directory" format (which I picture as a big list of options with a little bit of info about each vs. giving each one their own in-depth page.)
 
You can target new and growing towns, cities, suburbs, etc. Search volumes are always disproportionately high compared to towns with similar populations.

Supply & demand.

I've built a few like this now and I just have people sell listings to local businesses.

Can also make a decent bit of change from display ads if the traffic is good enough.
 
I was actually about to remove my directory from a site I purchased. It's a listing of shops and companies worldwide, while the rest of the site is news, informational and buyer's guides.

There are 1600 directory pages, a handful of them are paid. My theory is that I'm using my authority/link juice over a ton of pages. Most of them don't make me any money and a lot of them don't get me any traffic. Minimizing the pages and pushing that juice into the buyer's guides should be a good move.

This thread is making me second guess... Are you guys making good money from directories? I bumped the price (to not very much at all - $50 is the most expensive option) and have only had 2 takers in the last 6 months.
 
I used to make directories for pay-per-call leads. The dirty secret that rarely gets mentioned is upwards to 60-80% of the traffic you even get to these pages are bots. I'm not exactly sure why, but you'll get countless search traffic from queries involving incomplete chunks of addresses and weird stuff.

That doesn't mean you can't monetize the remaining traffic effectively. You absolutely can. I used to fetch $150 - $300 per phone lead and get tons of Adsense clicks. It used to be such easy traffic too, even in difficult niches. Not so much now, to the point where I don't bother.
 
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