This DR 0 site gets 174K monthly visitors!?

Programmatic SEO for the win

Author

Ian H
May 23, 2024

I found a site last week I just have to share with you.

It gets 174,000 monthly visitors, and has an Ahrefs DR (domain rating) of 0. High traffic, low DR sites nice to find, as it’s evidence whatever niche they’re in has little competition.

This site takes high traffic, low DR to an extreme.

The site is open-closed.org.

It ranks for tons of different store hour keywords. These aren’t high value. In fact, they’re bottom-of-the-barrel as far as keywords go.

But they’re sure easy to rank for, and if you rank for enough of them - like this site does - you can generate decent ad revenue.

By the way - if you want to find a bunch of high traffic, low DR sites, Site Stats Database is the perfect tool for this.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the site has a subdomain for each city. Like “city.domain. org”.

I think using subdirectories (domain .org/city) would be far easier (and better SEO practice), but who’s to say? The site seems to be doing just fine as is.

According to Ahrefs, the site has over 41,000 pages.

Those weren’t created manually. They were probably created all at once. A great example of “programmatic SEO” (pSEO for short).

If you have access to lots of data (easy to get, don’t worry) and at least basic knowledge of WordPress, you can create massive pSEO sites like this as well, and it won’t take you very long.

There are tons of datasets available for free (or for a small fee). You can also scrape data (depending on the details, there could be legal issues with this though - so do a bit of research first).

I’m not sure what data source open-closed .org uses, but it’s possible they simply scraped Google Maps for business hours.

With pSEO, you can combine data sources too, which is a great way to create entirely unique data that can’t be found anywhere else. Perfect for information gain and attracting backlinks.

I’m not a pSEO expert so I’m not going to turn this into a whole lesson on doing pSEO. But Ian Nuttall is an expert, and thankfully has a whole course on it (I bought it, and it’s fantastic).

He even shares a bunch of free datasets. Check those out here.

There are many FAR better niches for pSEO than store opening hours.

Investing/stock prices for example. That’s a very high value niche. Or travel. Or “product vs. product”-type sites. Those can be incredibly lucrative.

If you’re looking for inspiration, here are several great examples of sites making use of pSEO.

Programmatic SEO is one of many great alternatives to the traditional niche site model. It’s worth looking into if you haven’t yet.

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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