Ranking For Statistics

I’ve been on the hunt for an interesting niche to profile for a while. Nothing has really sparked my interest. From wine blogs to niche rodent sites.

That was until one of my favorite YouTubers made a point about marriage statistics and referenced an obscure niche demographics website:

BlackDemographics.com.

Clicking through the site I was immediately impressed. Just a couple of charts and tables are acquiring really solid organic rankings and insane backlinks from the likes of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

This is a unique niche. Really short content is naturally attracting big-time backlinks that cement authoritative rankings.

The Big Idea

Start a niche statistics site compiling public information data into compelling charts, graphics and analysis. To get a sense of the opportunity, I ran Statista, the ‘internet’s leading statistics database’ through Ahrefs and extracted 1,000 of their top-performing organic keywords.

Scrolling through the keywords, you can see a variety of different ‘statistical’ niches:

• Social media (YouTube, TikTok, Reddit) stats
• Inflation rate
• Military spending
• Police killings
• Crypto stats
• Video gaming stats
• Dating (“how do couples meet”)
• Demographics (“highest population density”)

One note: sports stats is another huge niche opportunity that I’d be remiss ignoring. For example, Basketball-Reference ranks for nearly 1 million keywords. HoopsStats parses Basketball-Reference’s more traditional data in interesting ways, ranks for 20k keywords, and assuredly gets loads of direct traffic.

Another angle, HerHoopStats focuses on female basketball statistics, ranks for 6k keywords and sells a $20 data product. Sports is a great topic for stats, direct and social traffic, but will require some technical know-how to pull and compile game-by-game data.

A Real Example

A great example of a thriving site in the statistics niche is BlackDemographics.com.

BlackDemographics.com is the “top resource for information regarding African Americans”.

It publishes high-quality, statistical information about African Americans- ranging from State-by-State demographic breakdowns, business job creation, household income, political affiliation, marriage rates, and more.

It ranks for 15k keywords with super-powered backlinks from the Washington Post, New York Times, 538, PJMedia, DailyCaller, and more:

Check out some of their top ranking keywords:

Their top organic-trafficked page is this State-by-State breakdown of black demographics:

You can see that they are making money with ads (1, 2, 3, 4); promoting what looks to be a companion project (5); and soliciting donations (6).

Their top trafficked page is a simple table- it’s not some 15,000-word post. If you’re able to succinctly visualize data in a table or a chart, you can reap huge amounts of traffic.

One of the best things about a site like this is that it’ll get a ton of Direct traffic. Nearly 18%, according to SimilarWeb:

Some Considerations

Data Access

I’d think long and hard about the niche- you’ll want a niche that you can get free data, like this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the information is proprietary, you’re going to have to pay a lot of money to get access to quality stats.

In addition, you’ll want to consider how easy it is to publish the data. For example, SocialBlade does an amazing job scraping YouTube for up-to-date Subscriber statistics.

That type of data output will require a lot of technical know-how and server resources. BlackDemographics.com, on the other hand, uses publicly available information and, at most, creates or reuses existing charts and graphs to display information.

In a nutshell, you’ll want to find publicly available data that is not exceptionally difficult to visualize for your audience.

Traffic Potential

I’d also try to find something with solid organic traffic opportunities. BlackDemographics.com ranks for 15,000 keywords. That’s not a huge number, but it’s supplemented by Direct traffic.

For example, if you were considering targeting “college tuition stats”, it would make sense to zoom out to a broader, more trafficked niche.

You could specialize in a type of college, say Ivy League colleges, and covering tuition, admission and other related stats.

That way, you’re not covering every single college, which would be a huge undertaking, but you’re not just reviewing admissions data.

Getting Traffic

Traffic, as usual, comes down to publishing cross-channel content alongside quality ‘SEO’ content.

The good thing about statistics and data is that they can perform really well on social channels like YouTube on Twitter. At the time of this writing, this military spending visualization has over 3.5 million views:

and a military spending Tweet like this one already has over 205 Retweets in 5 days:

Who were the top 10 military spenders in 2020?

1) USA🇺🇸
2) China🇨🇳
3) India🇮🇳
4) Russia🇷🇺
5) UK🇬🇧
6) Saudi Arabia🇸🇦
7) Germany🇩🇪
8) France🇫🇷
9) Japan🇯🇵
10) South Korea🇰🇷

Together they spent $1482 billion, accounting for 75% of global military spending ➡️ https://t.co/rSIa4kNCH6 pic.twitter.com/Q0mgwXgBtL

— SIPRI (@SIPRIorg) April 26, 2021

This is really good news because it doesn’t tether you to organic traffic, which can be very fickle.

It should also be easier to get backlinks naturally because people usually cite the source of information.

If you’re publishing interesting data combined with charts and imagery that you allow others to share, it’s possible that you’ll acquire some big-time backlinks that will help increase your keyword rankings.

Content Creation

If I were approaching this niche, I’d focus on publishing tables, graphics and analysis.

Helpfully, Excel has an Analyze Data option which automatically creates dozens of charts and graphs based on your spreadsheet like this one:

I’d include at least 500 words of analysis with the tables and create some shareable/embeddable graphics.

That way, when the time comes to run ads on your content, Mediavine and AdThrive can run their in-content ad units on your Posts.

You can even create embed codes for the images so that other sites can embed the content with a backlink to your website.

In terms of site structure, I’d create a mind map ahead of time so that the content is thoughtfully structured.

Check out BlackDemographics menu structure- you can see their content is highly organized:

This helps Google index and rank your content, as well as enhancing on-site user engagement.

Monetization

You’ll want to find something with an affiliate opportunity. Demographics, as is the case with BlackDemographics.com, doesn’t have a natural affiliate opportunity.

On the other hand, Crypto does.

‘Military spending’ doesn’t have an affiliate angle. But ‘dating’ does. That said, there might be a better traffic/ranking opportunity in a niche without an affiliate angle.

In that case, display ads will be your primary option.

One important note- premium ad networks like Mediavine require long-form content to run their lucrative in-content ads.

If your top trafficked page is just a table- they might not accept you. It’s best to beef up these pages somewhat if you’re trying to get into an ad network like Mediavine or AdThrive.

You could experiment with selling a product. For example, if you donate to BlackDemographics.com, you get an exclusive data download product.

If you are able to provide exceptional data insights, maybe even your own proprietary data, you can charge huge amounts of money.

For example, Datarate is selling this litigation history product for $299 a month!

Some More Site Examples

TwitchTracker: Track Twitch channels, streams and subscribers along with global statistics visualised in a clear form of tables, charts and graphs.

CollegeStats: Discovering your dream school just got easier. Search our database of more than 3,000 colleges and universities to find the best advanced degree opportunities for you. CollegeStats.org lets you decide what matters most in your search for the perfect college.

MusicBrainz: MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.

FrontPageStats: Statistics about which users have made it to the ‘front page’ of Reddit the most. (Flippa listing)

US Inflation Calculator: This site was created as a resource for inflation and inflation-related news.

Pros

• Lots of public data available for free
• Great opportunity for easy, free backlinks
• Potential for direct traffic
• Potential for social media virality
• Chance to sell high-ticket data product/service

Cons

• There can be limited search traffic- depending on the niche you pick
• Data will need to be updated on a somewhat routine basis
• Some sites compile data by scraping- this requires some technical know-how
• Some data is proprietary, i.e. not publically available
• Generally, this will be an ads-only opportunity, though there are some good niches for affiliate marketing

Last Updated on May 10, 2021 by Ryan Nelson