Directory Sites with just listings

[jeffbozos]

Hi BuSo

This is my first time posting on the site.

I'm currently working on creating a huge number of directory sites with auto generated pages. I've built a few in the past and have seen some reach decent traffic and earnings.

The primary reason I'm attracted to building these is the ease with which a relevant site can be created once a good resource data is found. I also cannot afford to spend much on link building or getting content written to focus on making affiliate sites at the moment.

Before I get started, I want to seek your pointers for increasing my odds of success with these massive directory sites with thin pages for the most part.

Looking forward to contribute actively on the site. Thanks!

 

[Ryuzaki]

@jeffbozos, welcome. I used to create these. I call them "database sites", because like you said it's all about finding public domain data sources and using them creatively.

I did this in the addiction and rehab niches and monetized with Adsense and Pay-Per-Call with great success. But these niches are prohibitively competitive now. I got out of the database site game rather than continue it in other niches, but I imagine it's wide open for some stuff, especially service-based industries.

As far as keeping pages from being thin, I would recommend figuring out how granular you can go before your pages are "thin". Like if you dip to city-level pages and most only have 2-3 listings on them, don't bother (or find a way to beef them up).

I used to add paragraphs of content with adjectives, verbs, and numbers being tokenized and ad-libbed from custom fields. This helped. I'd include a Google Map with latitude and longitude pins for each location on the page. You can also include a state map and text table of state names to beef it up and also aid in interlinking. And of course, go the extra mile like hiring someone to find images of store fronts and logos to include.

You can always go the extra mile and scrape extra data to include from custom fields, and make sure to wrap the printing of those fields like "if field has data in it, show data, if not then don't show anything, not even the field label". You can scrape data from all over the place (be careful!) to beef up each listing more and more.

This is an aside, but it's amazing just how much bot traffic is online and on Google. The kind of crap that's being searched all day every day must cost Google a fortune. Fragments of addresses, fragments of names and randomized phone numbers, etc. What we see on database sites is probably only the tip of the iceberg too.

 

[jeffbozos]

@Ryuzaki Thanks a lot for all the useful pointers. I truly appreciate your detailed response.

I'll get started on building them in a few weeks as I'm building scrapers and parsers to make as many of them as possible in one stretch. I plan on slowly adding additional datasets to existing listings as and when I find them.

I'll keep this thread posted as I make progress.

Thanks again!!

 

[jeffbozos]

July 2022 Update:

I haven't seen any significant results from setting up thousands of these directory pages on about 10 different domains. The traffic barely reached above 100 visitors per month. I'm just going to let these sites be. I don't plan on doing anything else on these sites. I want to get started with the SEO Avalanche technique on a new site in the finance space. I've worked in this industry in the past. While it's extremely competitive, it's also highly lucrative. CPC runs above $2. I'll start a new thread to post regular updates to keep myself accountable.

 

[wikibum]

CPC runs above $2

That's cheap for a finance niche. Create a Google Ads account and pretend setup a campaign and run the keyword analysis tool. I am sure you will find a lot of keywords with much higher CPC's.

I know this might not be related, but check out how much "car accident attorney" CPC's are. You will be mind blown. Last I checked I believe they were up to $150 - $200/click. Google is literally making money from thin air.

 

[jeffbozos]

I know this might not be related, but check out how much "car accident attorney" CPC's are. You will be mind blown. Last I checked I believe they were up to $150 - $200/click. Google is literally making money from thin air.

Do these numbers translate to the Display Ads/Adsense when a relevant visitor visits a site with related info?

 

[wikibum]

Do these numbers translate to the Display Ads/Adsense when a relevant visitor visits a site with related info?

I doubt it. I never looked into what the difference is between the actual CPC (when you are running an actual Google Ads account) and a website that is ranking for that keyword with display ads. I would ASSUME it's much less but I don't know by how much.

Also, the actual CPC's vary by state, device, day of week, etc.. so what I mentioned above is just an average.

 

[convbelt]

Hey

1 month after I launched the project I'm currently working on, I created a directory site for a specific type of business/commerce in France.

Used a somewhat basic directory WordPress theme (clean, does the job).
I think I created a bit more than 500 entries, manually gathering data from Google, websites, Instagrams, etc. and putting it all in one place—my site. Tedious, took me a month. Haven't touched the site since (so, a year).

According to SEMRush (since I abandoned the site I figured I'd delete it from Analytics—silly), the site gets 2.9k organic visits per month.

In my opinion, I was able to rank thanks to 2 things:

• by having an 'Explore' page: a simple page with a search bar to type in your city. H1 is 'X near me'. THAT is the #1 traffic driver keyword.
• by crafting unique business intros (only for some businesses, not all 500)—effectively solving thin content (because the rest of the data is the same everywhere (phone, address, socials, website, hours, etc.).

The takeaway: I've received approximately 10 mails from people wanting to be added to the directory. That could've been money right there.

I've found a similar niche/business/service in the US; lack of data centralization, 0 competitor. That might be something to think about.

My 2 cents.

Looking forward your new thread. Cheers

 

[jeffbozos]

Hey convbelt,

My pages were too basic. They just had listings and nothing else. I was also not too focused on making it a success by implementing any of the templates/strategies used by other successful sites in different niches. I'll probably comeback to improving these sites down the line, but don't feel motivated to work on them for now.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, I'll be going fulltime on a site focused broadly on the finance space. I won't be focusing narrowly on any particular niche, but will do clusters around low volume/low competition keywords. I'll post a detailed first post next week. Excited to commit fully.