Ranking For Colors: Cool Color Wheel Cash

When I first started building websites, I was obsessed with emulating what the pros were doing.

With good reason.

I had learned early on that I had zero design instinct. Some of my early websites were ghastly. I wish I had saved screenshots.

Utterly abysmal.

Which is why I imitated what better-looking authority sites were doing.

Right down to their color selections.

I remember using a Color Picker Chrome extension to get the exact hex codes of the colors other site owners were using on their cash green Calls To Action, the light-gray borders of their content boxes, even the rich shade of black on their H3 headers.

It should come as no surprise that there are some Color Picker websites out there with monstrous organic traffic rankings.

What’s The Site?

It’s HTMLColorCodes.com– a site that helps you “Get HTML color codes, Hex color codes, RGB and HSL values with our color picker, color chart and HTML color names.”

HTML Color Codes Ranks for 131,000 organic keywords and is pulling in an estimated 1.3 million organic visits a month:

Site Features

1. A color wheel lets you pick out colors on the fly
2. A color name page helps you find colors by their proper titles like ‘Salmon’ or ‘Indian Red’
3. A flat design color chart helps designers find “bold, bright colors are used to create clean, simple interfaces”

Keyword Research

I extracted 1,000 of the top-performing organic keywords- you can do the same keyword research with SEMRush (click for free 2-week trial) or pay for Ahrefs:

You can see that they rank for a variety of different types of terms.

Broadly speaking, they rank for things like “color picker”, “color codes”, “color hex codes”, but on a more granular level they are ranking for individual color code keywords like “black color code” and “white color code”:

Competitors

As you can see, the color-hex.com website is the only one of the bunch with more total keywords than HTML Color Codes:

However, HTML Color Codes is still the organic traffic leader with 1.3 million, almost doubling up it’s nearest competitor, as of August 2019.

How Does It Make Money?

They run ads on their content – you can see in the screenshot below a couple of ads above the fold. As you scroll down this particular page (https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-names/), you’ll see more ads in the sidebar:

According to SimilarWeb, they are getting about 2.7 million visits a month:

What I Would Do

Contact A Developer

I would first contact a developer to figure out how I could recreate the functionality of a web site like this within WordPress.

A site like this relies on the smooth functionality of the color selection tool generating color codes.

Keyword-Targeted Landing Pages

I would then consider publishing individual landing pages for particular color code queries like ‘gray color codes’.

This site doesn’t produce individual landing pages, but if I were starting a competitor site I would try to build out hyper-targeted landing pages to see if I could outrank them on the basis of content relevance.

I would do some rank tracking using SEMrush or Ahrefs To monitor my progress.

Link Building

I would consider using my Backlink Breakthrough strategy (or outreach services from DFY Links and Authority.Builders) to begin creating backlinks to the site.

Waiting Game

Organic traffic takes a long time to develop. Maybe I create 50 posts, try to get 25 high-quality backlinks, and then sit back and see how the site mature is over time.

What I Like

Gorgeous Design

The site is attractively designed. Which makes sense since its audience is probably comprised of designers and UX people.

Ease Of Use

The site is very easy to use. You can click on it color and instantly generate all of the different codes you need.

One thing that is sometimes overlooked when it comes to ranking a website is satisfying the users. The better engagement metrics you have the better your rankings will be.

Plus, the more useful your site is, the easier it will be to get high-quality backlinks.

Easy Keywords

There is a lot of long-tail traffic you can rank for here. While terms like ‘color picker’ are somewhat competitive, there are thousands and thousands of color keyword searches that are low competition.

What I Don’t Like

Development Costs

There aren’t any plug-and-play WordPress themes you can use to recreate the functionality of a website like this. It will require some development work to recreate what this site has done.

Not A Lot Of Content

The site doesn’t have many pages, either. It doesn’t create individual landing pages for each color.

Instead, they created a useful resource, got a lot of backlinks, and their relatively small amount of pages end up ranking for a lot of keywords even though they aren’t necessarily individually optimized for them.

If I were starting a site like this, my inclination would be to create landing pages for the individual colors.

Summing Up

This is yet another example of a site that ranks for truly unorthodox keywords.

However, unlike some of my recent niche reports, the site isn’t scraping and publishing thin content. On the contrary, it only has a few pages but a strong-back link profile and superior UI- a recipe for solid rankings.

Last Updated on June 16, 2020 by Ryan Nelson