🚀 How to build a DR 90 site

Welcome to Niche Site Digest!

Here’s what happened last week:

• 🧑‍🦲 Brian Dean explains how he built Backlinko to DR 90

• 🗑️ A garbage disposal site selling for $15k

• 💸 Easy way to maximize your Mediavine revenue

Let’s dive in!

📈 Free Google Analytics 4 dashboard for bloggers

Let’s face it:

GA4 sucks.

Luckily Brie E Anderson created a (completely free) dashboard that shows you the most important metrics for your business.

Just plug in your site, and voila - you’ll get a nice, clean look at all the most important stats.

🧑‍🦲 Building a site to DR 90

Brian Dean built Backlinko.com to DR 90 and sold it to SemRush for a 7-figure amount.

So yeah, he knows a thing or two about SEO.

In this interview, Gael and Brian go over a lot of useful topics, like content planning, topical authority, internal linking, and much more.

You probably will never build a DR 90 site, but you’re guaranteed to get something useful out of this interview.

🏙️ Niche Idea: Local Travel

Itching to start a new niche site?

Instead of competing worldwide with everyone, why not focus on your local city (or ANY local city)?

As you can see from that tweet, there’s a LOT of money to be made from local sites.

And that’s just ad revenue - we’re not even talking about sponsorships from local businesses, lead generation opportunities, and a lot more.

🔍 Site Spotlight

This week we have a site in the garbage disposal niche.

But is it worth the asking price? Or is it complete trash?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist the joke).

Let’s dive in and analyze DisposalQA.com (selling on Flippa).

At a glance:

• Niche: Garbage disposals

• Traffic: 14,601 p/mo

• DR: 10

• Monthly profit: $535

• Asking price: $15,000

• Multiple: 28x

Some observations:

• The site has around 100 pages, and the top one gets 7% of the total traffic, which is reasonable (it would be bad if it were over 15%)

• It doesn’t have any really good links (although at DR 10, you can’t really expect that)

• Most of the top-ranking pages are informational posts, not reviews

• The site is monetized with Amazon Affiliates and Ezoic, which are great to start off with but are not the highest revenue-generating programs by any means

I I owned the site, here’s what I’d do:

• Redesign the site: Make it more readable, brandable, and implement EEAT signals.

• CRO: Optimize your reviews for conversions. The current ones are missing some fundamental things like a pros and cons list on all listings. I’d also reach out to manufacturers and try to see if I could get some better product photos

• Update existing articles: This goes hand in hand with CRO. Update both reviews and informational posts, focus on adding unique images, and generally make the content more readable. There are 146 keywords that are currently at positions 4-10; try to update them so they rank higher.

• Publish new articles: Now that you have updated all published articles, focus on publishing new articles. Try to cover everything related to garbage disposal, build out an entire topical map and go after every keyword.

• Build links: While publishing content, don’t forget to build links. You’ll likely have to pay for those, so set aside a small budget and try to build links to your review articles so you can beat higher DR sites for those keywords.

• Switch to Mediavine: If you’ve built enough links and published enough new content, you should be getting more than 50,000 sessions per month, which means you can switch to Mediavine and instantly double or triple your display ad revenue.

If you did all that, I predict you could probably 5-10x the current site revenue in 12 months. You can then decide to keep the site as a cash-flowing asset or to flip it and sell it at a much higher multiple.

🚀 Featured Snippets

• 🤖 Don’t want to feed your site data to ChatGPT? Here’s a simple way to block it from scraping your site.

• 💸 Are you on Mediavine? Make sure to set your site's content width to 728px. This allows all of Mediavine's ads (the widest being 728px) to run on your site, boosting your RPM.

• 📉 Google Analytics 4 has been out for a while now, and the results are in: 75% of marketers don’t like it.

• ✍️ Recommendation: If you’re hiring writers, the best place right now is the Problogger Job Board. You’d need to have a system for going through a bunch of applications, but you should find a few gems there.

• 🔗 Reddit discussion: are unpaid links a thing of the past? Most seem to agree. What’s your take?

• ❓Google removing FAQ rich results: Going forward, only government and big health websites will show FAQ rich results in SERPs. You can see the difference here.

🛠️ Tool of the week

Surfer SEO is the most well-known tool for on-page optimization. But if you’re on a budget (or are just sick of all the recurring charges), take a look at Neuron Writer.

It’s a (much) cheaper alternative. And the best of all? They have a lifetime deal going on AppSumo right now for just $69.

That’s it for today - see you next week!

Niche Site Digest crew