Purely informational content sites are dead.

That’s obvious after Google’s September HCU and March Core update.

But there’s one type of site Google still seems to love (for the most part): sites with utility beyond information.

A great example is online tools.

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In today’s email, I’ll share a few tool sites that are crushing it right now.

It’s actually an app, but it’s web-based as well. Besides the app, there’s a blog which targets tons of easy color-related keywords.

This strategy has paid off well. The site gets over 20,000 monthly visitors despite a DR of just 0.1!

The most plausible explanation for Vivaldi Color Lab’s success in the SERPs is that it’s not just a purely informational site. It’s an interactive web-based tool.

Time will tell whether it continues to have success long-term. Many sites with sudden traffic increases end up getting hit by future Google updates.

The next site has been around for a long time. My guess is that it will be more resilient to updates, but again, it’s anyone’s guess.

Mathster had a sudden traffic increase after the March Core update:

And it’s primarily due to one page.

A super simple web-based tetris game:

But they’re not just ranking well for tetris.

Most of their other pages saw a nice boost after March 6th (the day the March Core update started rolling out):

What’s fascinating to me is that they’ve had the tetris game on their site for a long time. It only started ranking well after March 6th.

The next couple sites I’ll share are purely tool-based sites that are super simple, and doing quite well.

Despite the fact that it’s plastered in ads, MPG Calculator was unaffected by the recent updates:

Notice too that the DR is just 5 - meaning the site’s success is not due to having any authority.

Sites like this are very easy to create, even if you don’t know how to code. AI tools like ChatGPT can easily code the calculators for you.

The next site is also dead-simple:

This site serves a single function, and gets over 800,000 monthly visitors (and growing):

Again, the functionality of this site could be coded with ChatGPT.

You may think the high DR means the competition is rough. And while that may be true, there’s so much traffic to go around that even brand-new sites are pulling in decent numbers.

Such as epochconverter.io, which is just over a year old.

SimilarWeb estimates much higher traffic:

As you can see, opportunities abound in the web-based tools niche.

Many of these sites were unaffected by the recent Google updates, which means building tool sites could be a nice avenue to explore now that the niche site model is basically dead.

Imagine having a portfolio of a dozen small tool sites.

From what I’ve seen, the monetization potential isn’t great - but for the amount of work it requires, it’s absolutely worthwhile (assuming your sites rank).

Some quick napkin math:

Let’s assume epochconverter (.io) gets 40,000 monthly visitors. And let’s assume the ad RPM (revenue per 1,000 visits) is $10. That would mean the site earns $400/mo.

Not a lot, but for the effort required to build a site like this, it’s definitely worth it! Whip up a dozen simple tool sites like that, and you’re looking at ~$5,000/mo.

And of course, you can sell sites for ~30x monthly revenue. For a site earning $400/mo, that comes out to $12,000.

Anyway, hope this email gave you some inspiration. Tool sites are just one of many great alternatives to the traditional “niche site” model.

If you have experience building niche sites (and coding knowledge or access to ChatGPT), building tool sites will be very easy for you.

Thanks for reading!

Ian

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