Transcript of 3 Profitable Food Directories You've Never Heard Of

it's time to explore some profitable website directories that you've never heard of and today's theme is going to be all around food as a foodie I'm always curious to know if there are opportunities in the directory world when it comes to food in America it's really easy to just ride off Yelp as the king of all food directories and it's hard to imagine anyone else kind of dominating the space in this video we're going to see that you can very well create a food directory and still have it be a success and I've always been a believer that whenever a market is saturated it's actually not a bad thing being saturated just indicates that there's a lot of demand and a lot of attention in that industry but what that does is that it creates these pockets of opportunities where smaller players like us can build directories and dominate a very hyper Niche hyper curated space and basically create a website directory that can still be successful I think you'll see in some of these examples that hyper curation is getting more and more valued from a consumer end and a couple of these websites that I'm about to cover you'll notice that some of these food related directories are in multiple categories and some of them are very dominant in one single space and spoiler alert the ones that are hyper curated tend to do much better so we have a good blend of website directories that are doing past a million dollars in Revenue a year and then we have some I guess smaller website directories in the food space that are probably doing you know several thousand a month we're going to dive into the organic keywords the top visited pages and just try to understand what has gone on in the last few years CU some of them have taken big hits and how can we be smart about the way we're building our directories so we don't follow in the same footsteps as some of these websites that have pretty massive draw Downs now if you haven't joined the ship your directory Community I'll leave a link in the description if you want to build alongside some really smart creative and ambitious directory Builders just like yourself so the first website on the list is going to be wine searcher and as we can tell from the name it's a wine related directory we can see here that they have their own products here that they're selling they have all sorts of different categories within the wine space so let's first take a look at the traffic here so they are getting 970,000 monthly visitors and in the last 10 years you can see a pretty steady sign of growth and it looks like their Peak was right around late 2022 around December and they hit 2 million monthly visitors a very International audience you know India taking 43% of the traffic that is coming to this website with only 34% being American traffic kind of want to see what keywords they're ranking for they're ranking for 342,000 keywords and they do have a branded tag for wine Searcher so a good 11,000 people a month search up wine Searchers specifically so that is a great sign that this is established this is pretty ridiculous the keyword wine which is you can't get more broad than that they're ranked number six which is first page six links down for a keyword difficulty 95 that has 139,000 monthly searches same with wine near me I mean that is very impressive too they're ranking for a lot of broad keywords wine grapes most expensive wine so they have this Marketplace and they have what I assume is probably their H1 here yep so they have bestselling wines and spirits they have this smaller text here which I assume they downgraded to a this is probably equivalent to kind of like a paragraph text here so that is not disturbing the hierarchy here and then they have shop by category I'm really curious to see what they did here okay that is really weird so they set shop by category as a second header one which goes against a lot of the SEO on page practices you know I think any SEO out there will tell you only to use one H1 so the fact that they are using both shop category as well as bestselling wines and spirits is very not optimal so I wonder why they did that so let's check out stores and producers here so this is essentially like an Excel sheet that lists all the different types of I guess marketplaces and wine retailers and breweries so this is essentially their listing page here we see an image of this Marketplace a short description phone location and the areas that it ships to so this is a directory on all types of just location that sell wine so if we type in Seattle for example so they have a top 40 listicle every time you type in a new City so I'll just type in New York there's name rating location distance these are the listing Pages here oh this one does not have anything I wonder if that is user generated and that's why there's no information here this one also doesn't have anything interesting interesting so I think these are generated by the business here we can see that you can list your store on on wine Searcher for free get started by creating a free business profile and tell us about your products and prices upgrade for more sales growth okay so here we see one of our first monetization methods it is a sponsored listing where people can essentially payperclick sponsored listings get priority in the search and pro buyers can see your list at any time go to shop button lands buyers on your product landing pages so very interesting take the price is 69 cents per click plus a flat fee of $65 a month I feel like that's actually a pretty good deal because all of the traffic coming here is very specific to people looking for wine looking at some of the prices for those wines you know some of those bottles were 600 bucks 1,000 bucks so I'm sure if we took a look real quick in HRS for the types of keywords that they're ranking for it would be more expensive cost per click for the keywords so we have wine near me which the cost per click if you were using Google ads would be .27 this probably makes killing for them I would assume this is a massive part of their business they also have a Marketplace listing which is actually probably what we saw here it's an add to card button that integrates with your POS no upfront costs only pay on confirmed orders but 7% per order marketing fee plus 3% credit card processing fee just imagine that you build this website you get a lot of traffic I mean almost a million monthly visitors in traffic and you're basically saying to these wine businesses pay me 7% of your order actually 10% of your order and you can list on our website that is an amazing offer and I'm sure a lot of people do it if you're in the wine business I did see on the bottom here that we have get wine Searcher Pro so I'm kind of curious what that is wine secher Pro is the best way to get the most value out of your wine Searcher experience with Pro you can see all the search results guaranteeing the lowest prices so they have their B2B play which is kind of the sponsored listings and the marketplace listings and they have this B Toc play which is $10 a month for people looking for the best prices very smart Okay so with the pro it looks like you get you know 10 years of price trends rather than 2 years probably appeals to people who are collecting really expensive bottles of wine and then you have all sorts of different filters so yeah this sounds like something for wine investors wine enthusiasts and people who just probably want the best price for their wine Christies fine and rare wines online so they do have ads as well so we've already seen three different monetization methods and we haven't even really gone too deep into the directory itself so when we click on an actual Marketplace listing and that goes to all the different listings that actually sells this product and I think that's how it works now their actual directory is centered around the products themselves as well as the different types of producers and stores and stuff like that as we saw here so in a way they have like a couple different directories that are at play so let's dive into more of the analytics here and we already saw that they're ranking for the broad keywords here a lot of them I'm noticing are specific types of wines that are getting a lot of volume in itself so this Wine's getting 2,000 monthly searches it's a keyword difficulty of Two And honestly a lot of the wines that they're ranking for they're rank one they're low difficulty and they have a lot of volume if we copy and paste orva wine just type it into Google wow okay so they're ranked above all of these Google shopping options which is really really impressive we can see wine Searcher is right underneath this AI overview if I type in a branded keyword keyword like Patagonia usually the sponsored listings are here but with this wine situation it looks different it is more organic search here so that's kind of interesting and good for them another thing I've noticed is that the amount of traffic that each keyword that they're ranking for is bringing in is really well distributed as we scroll down these are really steady numbers let's look at the top pages they have 326,000 index Pages here and of course their homepage is the most visited page let's look at their second most visited page and see what's up with that find signature rare wine whiskey India so this is why we have such a large audience from India like the top 10 pages you can see you know these are India based keywords that they're ranking number one for so most expensive bottle of wine here that is absolutely insane $217,000 for this Leroy migny Grand crew 100% butchered that another thing I want to see quickly is if there are other competitors a couple different competitors with pretty large traffic so let's just see this is a competitor here and it looks like this competitor is getting 48,000 monthly visitors this one is also getting 44,000 monthly visitors okay so there's there's obviously a lot of competition in this space probably wouldn't advise you compete with these people unless you want to go very very Niche into I think a specific type of wine or bottle of wine but even then I would say it's probably not worth competing with these people wine Searcher has over 5 million monthly active users the website and the apps are used by millions of people each month now 5 million monthly active users probably doesn't mean that they're all pro users so according to google wine Searchers annual revenue was $15 million as of September 2024 I mean I knew it was going to be a big company so uh so this is another reason not to compete with them so basically what I did is that I looked at the organic keywords that wine Searcher was ranking for look at the date that it was updated so this was 4 days ago this was January 31st so they were in position 51 which is the fifth page uh the first website and it went straight to rank one I mean this was updated 15 hours ago and they went from position two to rank one when a very authoritative website like this let's say writes a Blog they're probably going to jump straight to the first page super quickly just because they're just so established so for website number two we have tast list.com from what I understand this is a direct around all of the authentic food dishes around the world and we can see if we scroll down here that we do have some sort of cultural Cuisines so this is definitely targeting a global audience and let's just kind of look at this directory first and we'll check the traffic in a second we can view this interactive map California style pizza Tequila Sunrise pepperjack I don't know how useful that is to be honest where to eat local best traditional places in California recommended by food professionals I'm just not sure what the theme of this is I yeah I understand there's Local eats and local restaurants best local products here olive oil so this is a listing page for a olive oil producer of course we have the global destinations here so if we click on Armenia for example so a lot of these location pages are set up so that kind of your main header one I assume each one right here is the name of the location we have the Local eats area which for the highest rated areas to eat then we have the best local products and they have their actual dishes that are authentic to that location if we just click on one here it has this description suziki a short description of what it is and some ingredients and if we click on an ingredient we can now see all these dishes with mint okay so there's a recipe here for me I feel like the navigation is a little bit choppy and I don't know if it would be really that helpful for someone like me their listing pages are very simple and when we click into them so we can see that it's recommended by this user here which is kind of cool and this is interesting because this is an entirely different website I don't know if the website taste Atlas is selling back links or if this is just kind of like a guest post situation some images the address phone number uh and a couple buttons to get the directions and the website and we have some user generated content here which is actually solid good for them but let's dive into some of the traffic for this website here this website is getting 158,000 monthly visitors and that's kind of shocking to me pretty much majority tier one traffic so us the UK and Canada but if we look at the last 6 months here it has been pretty steady looking at the keywords here 231,000 keywords you're getting a lot of traffic from interesting keywords like space cake best cuisines in the world a lot of broad keywords and kind of specific types of foods that have a lot of search volume this is kind of eye opening because because these keywords have a good amount of search volume this is probably a website people use when they are traveling Taiwanese food 7400 monthly searches Paraguay food Portugal pastry a lot of these keywords yeah they're under the food umbrella but I feel like they're kind of all over the place and I almost feel like I'm in someone's like messy room of a directory where they kind of just threw as many things on the wall and surprisingly a lot of things stuck because in my opinion A lot of these Pages aren't super helpful and a lot of their onpage SEO isn't super optimized maybe I'm being too harsh but this is just one man's opinion looking at their top pages here they have 41,000 index Pages space cake worst rated dishes in the world these are all kind of their most viewed Pages which is just a listicle essentially these people basically created their own kind of pillar page for these listings here and I assume when we click on it it is the listing itself so this is proof of another pillar page format style working out for them because you know this is actually a lot of these are kind of long pages when I asked Chach gbt how it's monetizing Chach gbt brought me to their privacy policy page which mentions that they may be serving Google AdSense they may have advertising but I didn't see any advertising on this website originally when I included it in this video I thought it would be interesting because I was sure that they had some kind of monetization strategy in place especially based on their traffic here um because if they were just simply putting on advertisement you know 160,000 monthly visitors could definitely be in the ballpark of I would say in the ballpark of around5 to $6,000 a month just from Google ads if they did that but I think it's still a good example of what could be a profitable website directory kind of a bummer that we don't see a monetization in fact someone should go reach out to these people and try to buy this website I mean what are they doing with this if they're not making money with it you know so website number three is justapinch.com this is a directory where people can share their home-cooked meals and recipes right off the bat we can see that there's a ton of ads here we have I guess different types of foods here different types of recipes they are in a lot of different categories I'm just going to go ahead and click on dinner so these are their listings here so I'm just going to click on one for an example and this is really cool you see the person that came up with this recipe and they even have this little badge here that shows up next to their name and this is a blue ribbon recipe it's kind of like a social status thing I'm sure for this community this is so smart because having someone share their recipe and take images all throughout the way is kind of all you can ask for as someone who owns a directory so we have ratings and we do have these user generated comments now I feel like a comment section that is organically generating like reviews and and comments like these is a really slept on SEO metric just having people generate more content and that that's relevant is just such a win-win and it's always good to see their main monetization has to be ads I mean this is plastered with ads here let's just look at advertising real quick they are a premium publisher for select food only sites in addition to just a pinch the largest collection of User submitted recipes on the web Just A Pinch focuses on programmatic sales in addition to Google ads they do offer like direct advertising and sponsorships looking at the traffic this website gets 138,000 monthly visitors pretty massive website and what's amazing is that it's pretty much all user generated 366,000 keywords 77,000 backlinks here is where we kind of start to see some volatility here you know in the last year or so they did drop a good amount of traffic they were right around 400,000 monthly visitors back in December 2024 so it's possible that they did get hit with the Google spam update or the Google core update I'm not really sure because here right around mid December that was the I believe that was the Google core update yeah so here we can see on December 12th was the Google core update and that is really right when we see this drop all the way down and they hit a low of 124,000 monthly visitors and they have recovered a little bit but they're kind of flatlining around 130 140,000 monthly visitors majority us traffic so their AdSense must be paying them pretty good all tier one traffic at least like 98% or so but let's take a look at their keywords so 2600 people looking for just a pinch wow they have really strong rankings for some of these different types of foods and a lot of these foods have a lot of search volume so kind of similar to the other ones that we've seen so far so looking at the types of keywords this website's ranking for and the previous website I think it's obvious that there's a lot of different types of foods and recipes and just yeah different types of dishes that get a lot of search volume on Google they are relatively low competition based on the keyword difficulty so so in a lot of ways you don't need a beautiful website a lot of this is kind of pretty simple right I mean they really just put their header one here the keyword in the header 2 added some images that's pretty much it they do have some internal links as well which and they have user generated content which I actually think is helping them a lot I mean I guess my point is that if you do create a food directory it seems like there's no shortage of different types of dishes to go and kind of Target from an SEO perspective and you can start getting traffic that way if you're starting your first directory ever and all you want to do is get the confidence to know that SEO Works try to look at some of these keywords that you're seeing in this video right here and just make a simple like one or two page website where it's just a really long page uh about monkey butter or something that's you know pretty high search volume but low keyword difficulty and then just see if it starts to get organic traffic and this is a really good way in my opinion to start gaining that self-belief that you can go out and build out these sort of hight trffic directory websites at 138,000 monthly visitors you're probably yeah right around kind of similar to last one around $5,000 a month except for this one this is like 9 like 8% tier one traffic so there's actually a good chance it's more than that I wouldn't be surprised if this could even be as high as like $7 $8,000 a month yes they do have some traffic decreases which is a little bit concerning but they haven't gone to zero like some of the websites after this December update they lost like 99% of their traffic looking at top pages here so these are all sort of yeah kind of the same situation right so all of these top pages are like actual listing Pages if we take a look at how they built this website this is our first directory that is made using Wordpress it's always good to see a WordPress website Okay Google AdSense confirmed so that's it guys I hope you enjoyed this video and let me know if you have any questions or found this interesting I thought I would change it up with the food theme but there are a ton of other directories that I found so of course let me know if you'd like to see more of this don't forget to join the ship your directory free community and with that I will catch you guys in a future video see you