Ranking For Random Dates In Time

In the past, I’ve written about a variety of niches that are somewhat strange and obscure. These include expired food searches, ranking for random people’s names, ranking for license plates, and ranking for phone numbers.

In this niche report, I’m going to analyze sites that rank for dates and time.

There are searches for literally every combination of day / year and month / year on the calendar.

For example, take a look at the keyword rankings of onthisday.com:

You can see that they rank for 564,000 keywords with 1.2 million estimated monthly organic visits.

Using Ahrefs, I filter their keywords by “10th”, and you can see a variety of different keyword searches that include this term, July 10th, November 10th 2015, May 10th 2017, December 10th in history and on and on.

How They Make Money

If you click into one of these search results, for example the November 10th landing page, you’ll see that this page catalogs all sorts of different historical events that occurred on November 10th:

In addition, there are two prominent above the fold ad units.

The page is pretty comprehensive with a lot of deep links to specific historical events like a failed palace revolution in France against Richelieu.

Keyword Research

I did some more keyword research below- check out the interactive table to see their top 1,000 organic keyword rankings.

As you can see below they don’t just rank for obscure dates and time, they rank for a range of different big-time search queries like this “day in history”, ”today in history”, ”famous birthdays”, ”Clint Eastwood”, ”who died today”, “famous birthdays today” and so on.

What I would do

This site is pretty ambitious. It catalogs all different types of events that have occurred throughout time.

Niche Down

If I were entering into a niche like this, I might drill down a bit into a specific genre like music, sports or technology. It would be a lot more manageable with a tighter focus- though you will sacrifice significant Search potential when you go narrower.

Site Structure

Another important thing that I’ve learned building sites is that you want to get the site structure correct from the start.

I would study how onthisday.com has structured things. If you look at their menu structure, you can get a bit of an overview of the site’s intelligent categorizations:

There are categories for history, film & TV, music, sport as well as categories for individual months, years and days.

You probably wouldn’t be able to emulate such a comprehensive site structure to start, but make sure you give it some forethought so that you can always adapt the content you’re creating to an improved site structure in the future.

Content Style

Maybe you start a site that discusses basketball history, going through each day of the year to catalog some of the top events that occurred.

Keep in mind, you’re not going to just rank for the individual day search, you are going to end up ranking for the events that are occurring on that day.

For example, if you look at today’s date and analyze what is ranking for, they’re obviously a lot of September 7th related searches, but you can also see that they end up ranking for some really weird, long-tail keywords:

Once I had figured out site structure and a narrower niche, I would analyze how I want to create content. Maybe I start by going through every day of the calendar year and figuring out all of the important historical events that occurred on that day across time, i.e. many different years.

Or, maybe you decide to write long essays about the significance of certain days to technology or sports. Or maybe you do both- you have a long list of events that occurred on a specific day and combine that with longer-form, essay-style content.

What I like

Once again, this niche capitalizes on one of my favorite search ranking formulas- high search volume and low competition. As you might imagine, there is not a ton of competition for these keyword searches.

Additionally, there’s a ton of long-tail keywords here because literally every combination of day, month and year get some level of search traffic that you can optimize for.

Fun

This can be a really fun site to own. Particularly if you decide to write about a topic that interests you. Keep in mind, though, that if you niche down to something that is too obscure, and you’re trying to rank for dates and years in that particular niche, you might be sacrificing some significant search traffic.

As I’ve already touched on, however, say you are in a particular niche, you’re not strictly limited to ranking for individual days and years, you can rank for specific events that are important to your niche.

What I don’t like

Monetization

This is going to be a display ads play. If you’ve been following along with my case study, you’ll see how difficult it can be to get a display ad property enough traffic that it makes decent money from AdSense or Mediavine.

On the other hand, you can earn more money faster by creating an affiliate site.

That’s definitely something you want to think about. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to get traffic for obscure keywords when you write about days of the week than it would be writing affiliate product reviews.

So there is a trade-off here, for sure. A lot of these sites with massive traffic figures don’t have affiliate opportunities.

Arduous Content

It’s a pretty arduous task to catalog the historical events that have occurred on a specific day.

This is not the easiest type of content to create. For a lot of sites, you can use something like HireWriters to spin out some mediocre quality content, but for a site like this, I think it would be better to have some dedicated writers from UpWork, not just paid text mercenaries from a brokerage.

Summing Up

This is another strange and somewhat curious niche to enter into. There are some pretty amazing opportunities here, but you will need some decent traffic to truly capitalize on the income potential.

Last Updated on March 13, 2021 by Ryan Nelson