A Simple Wordle Game Is making ~$20k Annual Revenue with SEO

Wordle, a simple word game, took the world by storm in 2021. Its success shows how 'boring' ideas can become goldmines.

While many chase flashy startups, everyday puzzles and games quietly rake millions.

Innovative entrepreneurs are now eyeing these overlooked niches, proving that sometimes, the most straightforward concepts yield the most significant rewards.

Business Model

The business model is simple - People play the game on the site and make money by showing ads.

According to the analytics, most traffic comes from the US. Based on this insight, this site earns at least $15900 per year.

$1325/month is not a bad side hustle, right?

SEO Lessons to Learn from Wordle Unlimited:

Upon digging into the SEO traffic data, I found an obvious indicator - Exact match domains.

Searches for “World Unlimited” is 550,000 a month. This in US alone. The global search volume is 1.2M.

The Exact match domains have always been in the grey area, and EMDs won’t work if you span the SERPs with your EMDs.

However, in this case, Exact Match Domain has favored Wordle Unlimited.

Let’s dig deep into what is working for Wordle Unlimited.

#1 On-Page SEO:

For the sake of simplicity, we will understand the on-page SEO based on the traffic from the US alone.

Wordle Unlimited has a simple strategy, make the most out of Exact match domain.

The keyword, “Wordle Unlimited“ is bringing 40% of all the traffic.

Even though the search intent is Informational and Navigational, the visitors convert & stick around. It’s a game. There’s nothing else to convert to.

Furthermore, the keyword “wordle“ is bringing almost 50% of the traffic.

10% of all the keywords are ranking the page from Wordle Unlimited in the top 3 positions.

The total number of keywords the site is ranking for is around 4000 keywords, 10% of which makes it 400 keywords sending 2M organic traffic to the site.

Interestingly, even the official game, (now acquired by The New York Times) doesn’t rank for this keyword.

No wonder people click on Wordle Unlimited & play the game.

Other SEO strategies that are working in favour of Wordle Unlimited is localised pages. For example, Wordle UK has a global search volume of 736.7k.

World Unlimited ranks for this keyword as well. The official game page on NYT doesn’t have such a page.

Unfair advantage? Most probably.

#2 Off-Page SEO:

There’s little to nothing Wordle Unlimited had to do as part of Off-page SEO: no social media promotions, no link-building campaigns.

Backlinks are the biggest secret to the success of Wordle Unlimited.

One interesting thing I noticed while digging deep is the anchor text that is linking to the root domain.

Theoretically, I think, this is the reason why the domain is ranking for the search term “Wordle Unlimited”.

55.2% of backlinks are coming from mass media sites.

I anticipate that these links were naturally built when Wordle was trending back in 2022.

Areas Of Improvement:

Wordle is a word game.

People search for the list of words for the puzzle. There are endless combinations for keywords you can create content for.

For example, “5 letter words ending in id“ has a global search volume of 3.9k and keyword difficulty score of 23 - meaning, this keyword is easy to rank with quality content meeting the search intent.

Finding keywords around word ideas can help the domain rank and get users to play the game, hence increasing the ad revenue.

At present, the ads are taking away the good experience the players deserve. Introducing an ad-free paid plan should be considered.

This way, predictable revenue can be take care of and the number of ads shown to free users users can reduced, hence attracting more paid users.

Even if 1% of traffic converts to a paid plan, a number of ads served can be significantly reduced.

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