Easy directory, rank and rent, and online tool niches

After Google crushed niche sites, most of us pivoted to other online business models. Some popular ones were directories, rent and rent sites, and online tool sites.

Those verticals are all less prone to the wild swings of an algorithm update.

And, they can be extremely profitable and in some cases, nearly 100% passive.

The problem, as always, is finding the right niche. Those verticals all have plenty of competition, so if you can find an angle with very little competition, your chances of succeeding increase considerably.

So, how do you find a low competition angle?

You have to look for signs of weakness among the top ranking results.

I used to do this manually for each keyword. It was a huge pain and would literally take DAYS to analyze a few hundred keywords.

Now I use ClearSERP, and I can analyze 1,000 keywords for SERP weaknesses in just a few minutes. Wild.

Here are some examples:

Finding ridiculously easy online tool niches

I have a giant list of online tool site ideas (you can access it too at whattoship.com - doesn’t include ClearSERP analysis data btw).

I decided to analyze all the online tool keywords with ClearSERP and then sort by the lowest competition ideas.

There are over 900 keywords with a 0-domain authority site ranking among the top 10. That’s crazy. Waaayyy more low competition online tool site ideas than I know what to do with.

Here are some of the keywords:

• snow day calculator

• audiobook speed calculator

• prescription refill calculator

• random episode generator

• speech bubble meme generator (top site gets ~170K monthly visitors according to SimilarWeb and has very low authority)

Most of these ideas are super easy to build as well (now that AI can do all the coding). Many don’t even require ongoing maintenance aside from things like link building, which they may even be fine without.

Finding the easiest rank and rent niches

I also have a list of 85,000+ rank and rent niches (service + city).

It would take a lifetime to manually analyze them all to find the easiest ones.

But with ClearSERP, I can analyze 1,000 at a time in bulk and get the results in minutes. Which is exactly what I did.

Now I know what rank and rent niches are the easiest. Feels like cheating.

A few good ones from the list:

• window tinting lafayette la

• tree service rock hill sc

• pool service santa clarita ca

• fence company rochester ny

• duct cleaning greeley co

Many of the keywords I found are so unbelievably easy, I just want to stop what I’m doing and whip out a bunch of rank and rent sites.

Let them simmer and see what ones start to rank, then put a bit more effort into the ones doing well and reach out to potential renters.

Maybe not the best rank and rent approach (if you do it seriously it’s better to rent first and run google ads, then rank organically and stop the ads). But if you want something easy and don’t wanna spend on ads, just rank and then rent!

Easy directory ideas

In ClearSERP, I searched “* near me” and sorted by lowest difficulty to find potential directory site ideas. Many don’t make much sense for a directory, so you’d have to go through and select the ones that would work to then fully analyze to see the SERP weaknesses.

Other seed terms you could enter are things like “* rental near me” or “* classes near me”, which are a lot more likely to give results that would be good for a directory.

I tried the * classes near me keyword, and found a bunch in a matter of minutes that upon first glance seem like good directory ideas! For example:

• microblading classes near me - 3,600 monthly search volume, high value niche, no complete directory that I can find

• epoxy classes near me - also no traditional directory, but enough search volume to make building one worthwhile!

• mahjong classes near me - who’d of thought this was a thing? Well, it is, and this site has a mahjong teacher directory that costs $1,300 to join (and there are many thousands of teachers listed!!!) Now, the membership fee comes with other perks, but still… I’ll bet building a cheaper alternative directory would be a great idea.

I’ve never heard of any of those directory ideas, and I’ve researched directories on and off for years. There were lots of others I found just like those but for other lesser-known niches.

Without ClearSERP, there’s no way I would’ve found those ideas so easily (it seriously only took 2 minutes - and I found WAY more than just those 3 ideas).

By the way, I published a video walkthrough of ClearSERP so you can see exactly how it works (and how to use it effectively):

I’ve made a lot of little improvements to ClearSERP since my last email where I announced it, including support for many more languages and locations (so you can do non-US/English keyword research and analysis).

Quick reminder: the 20% off launch discount ends in 5 days (Sept 14th). So if you’re planning to sign up for ClearSERP, keep that in mind.

Thanks for reading, hope you have a great rest of your day!

Ian