In a recent video, I spoke about how finding an amazing directory niche for passive display ad income can be really hard.
Even for me, who knows exactly what signs to look for from a data perspective.
Sometimes I'll browse ahrefs like a magazine hoping to find these ideas.
More recently, I'll get ideas from Claude and ChatGPT.
That's how I found the niche "scratch and dent appliances" and, I mean, just look at how beautiful this ahrefs data is.
The feeling I had when I first saw this data was similar to the feeling I got 4 years ago when I'd go to a garage sale and spot a $5 item that I could re-sell for $150.
It's just not that common.
Let's break down what makes this so juicy:
✅ SV 54k: This means 54,000 searches every month contain the word "scratch and dent appliances" which is great. Not too big, and not small. The potential for creating a high-traffic directory with thousands of potential visitors is there. It's also not considering any other keywords that match in search intent (i.e. open box appliances, like new appliances, etc)
✅ City-specific keywords like "scratch and dent appliances San Antonio" get 800-1000 monthly searches. Anytime you see multiple cities with this much monthly search volume and they're at the top of the results (meaning they're the most searched keywords in the niche), it's a really great sign that a high-traffic nation-wide directory can exist.
✅ Main keyword + city-specific keywords have a low keyword difficulty (KD). A lot of the time, you'll see low keyword difficulty in the long-tail local keywords (i.e. plasma donation dallas) but the main keyword is much higher in KD (i.e. plasma donation near me). But when all the keywords within this niche are low KD, that's a sign of beauty. Put simply, it means you won't need as many backlinks to start ranking.
✅ Appliance store upkeep is pretty evergreen. Thinking ahead to the maintenance and upkeep of a directory like this, it's going to be really chill. The only scenario where my directory becomes way less helpful is if an appliance store closes entirely, which doesn't happen too often in this niche.
✅ There's thousands of these S&D appliance stores to reach out to. There's approximately 10.2k scratch and dent appliance stores in America. Small mom & pop business and nation-wide retailers included. This means there's a large enough market of business owners that I could reach out to and acquire backlinks or sell featured listings to. The fact that there's so many small businesses too means it shouldn't be hard to get in touch with them too.
✅ Reddit sentiment tells us that people are looking for these stores. If you search up "scratch and dent appliances" in any city + reddit, you'll see that the majority of posts are made by people looking for these stores. This confirms the search intent of the keyword (which is huge) and indicates that it might not be as easy as searching "scratch and dent appliances" into Google maps.
❌ There's no directory on the front-page of Google. This niche actually breaks one of my fundamental rules, which is where an existing directory should exist on the front-page of Google (ideally not yelp or a big directory). But because of all the green flags, it's an exception where I think to myself "I guess I'll be the first."
And that's why I chose this niche as my first AI-Coded directory (site is live here https://scratchanddentlocator.com, but needs more work).
It's officially been 14 days since I went live and the clicks are coming in.
How to find these rare gems (my favorite way using ahrefs)
I'm always finding different ways to dig up these high-potential, evergreen, passive display ad niches.
Most recently, my favorite method has come down to using different filters on ahrefs.
Here are the filters I've been using:
Here's the breakdown:
- Leave the keyword field blank at the top (this tells ahrefs that you just want to see all the keywords in order of high monthly SV to low monthly SV)
- Intents: Set to local (Optional: toggle on Commercial and Transactional to narrows down)
- KD set from 0 to 5
- Volume: 300-1500 monthly searches
- Include a keyword: "san antonio" (or any other major city)
Why these filters?
If there's one thing these rare, evergreen passive niches have in common, it's the fact that the city-specific keywords pull in several hundred searches each month.
For me, that's the most promising characteristic to look for.
If you don't have ahrefs, you can use today's newsletter to create a prompt based on all the criteria I just mentioned above and feed it to Claude or ChatGPT.
Happy hunting!
Keep Building,
Frey
