Boulder Link-Earning Research: 10 Projects

Ten original-research projects for boulderthingstodo.com, the things-to-do site, built to earn editorial links from Boulder, Denver and national press. Ranked, costed, and honest about which ones are worth skipping.

Three principles behind the ranking

Compounding beats one-shot. A dataset you rebuild every year is worth far more than a single clever post, because year two costs almost nothing and the links pile onto one URL. Four of these compound. Prefer them.

The link has to arrive when the news does. A parking study earns links every June. A smoke index earns links the week the sky turns orange. Timing the asset to a recurring news trigger matters more than how well it's written.

Different link neighborhoods beat more links. Ten links from Boulder blogs are worth less than one each from Outside, Axios Denver and a transit publication. Two ideas here deliberately target audiences that aren't tourism at all.

All ten at a glance

Tier 1: start here

1. The Dead Listing Audit

"A third of the restaurants recommended by Boulder's top-ranking guides have closed."

Building this site turned up four closures competitors still publish: Sanitas Brewing, Dark Horse, The Lazy Dog and the CU Museum of Natural History. Plus Boulder Beer, listed as a place to visit when it has no taproom at all. That was a by-product of building nine pages. Done deliberately and at scale, it's a study.

Take the top 20 results for a set of Boulder queries, extract every business named, verify each against its own site and the state business registry, then publish the percentage that are dead, the median age of the guides, and the oldest article still ranking.

Why it travels: this is a media story as much as a Boulder story, which doubles its reach. It lands right in the "AI slop is ruining search" conversation that Nieman Lab, 404 Media and The Verge cover constantly. They need a hard number and there isn't a local-travel one. Locally it's Boulder Reporting Lab, the Daily Camera, Westword, Eater Denver and BizWest.

Effort: medium, mostly scripted, but every closure needs human confirmation before publishing. Recurring: yes, and "it got worse" is the year-two story.

2. The Chautauqua Parking Study

"Nobody will tell you when the Chautauqua lot fills. Not even the city."

This is the most-asked Boulder visitor question and the city explicitly won't answer it. OSMP says only that parking "can be a challenge" and is "very limited," and warns that buying a permit online doesn't guarantee a space. It publishes no fill times, no percentages and no arrive-before-X guidance. Chautauqua is also a 40,500/mo keyword on its own, so whoever answers this owns the strongest single page in the niche.

Do this instead: ask OSMP. The city already runs trail counters at eleven trailheads, publishes them at daily granularity through a dashboard with no download option, and names a staff contact for data requests. That's a cooperative data project waiting to happen, and it's better than scraping in every way: it's permitted, it covers more sites, it counts actual visitation, and a partnership with the city is itself a link and a credibility marker no competitor can copy.

Effort: an email, then patience. Recurring: yes, and a multi-year series on whether crowding is getting worse is a far bigger story than one season.

3. The Smoke Season Index

"Boulder now loses more summer days to wildfire smoke than to rain."

Boulder's whole identity is outdoor access, and the real threat to it is air quality, not weather. Nobody publishes a clean local time series of unusable-air days. Boulder is also home to NOAA and NCAR, which makes a Boulder site publishing air-quality analysis credible in a way a generic travel blog isn't.

Pull historical fine-particulate data for the Boulder area over 15 years, define an honest "outdoor day lost" threshold and hold it constant, then publish days per year, the trend, and the shift in when smoke season starts.

Why it travels: it crosses from travel into climate, a much richer link neighborhood, and it republishes itself every fire season. It's also the honest backbone of the rainy-day guide, which already argues Boulder's indoor days are driven more by smoke and mud than rain. This proves it.

Tier 2: strong, more work

4. The Closed Trail Almanac

"The Third Flatiron is closed nearly half the year, and nobody keeps track."

OSMP posts current closures and then deletes them. Nobody archives the history. Raptor closures run February through July, mud closures come and go in spring, construction closures last months, and there's no way to answer "how many days a year is this trail actually open." Climbers and runners genuinely want to know.

Scrape the closures page daily starting now, keep the history forever, publish annual open-day counts per trail. The archive itself is the asset.

Effort: very low to start, and it must start now. The value is entirely elapsed time, so every week it isn't running is data you can never recover. This is the cheapest item on the list and the only one that gets permanently worse by waiting.

5. The Boulder Saturday Index

"It now costs $X to spend a Saturday in Boulder, up Y% in two years."

Cost of living is the Boulder story, and it's always discussed in housing terms. Nobody has priced a normal day out. The site already holds most of the components: Chautauqua parking at $2.50/hr on summer weekends, rec centers at $15, Eldorado at $10 plus timed entry, the reservoir at $12 per person, museum admissions, and the $5 or $25 permit that only non-Boulder-County plates pay.

Define a fixed basket, price it quarterly, never change the basket, publish the index. Business and civic press love an index because it's reusable. It also feeds newtoboulder.com directly.

6. The Restaurant Churn Map

"The median Boulder restaurant survives X years. On the Hill it's half that."

Everyone has a theory about downtown vitality. Nobody has the number. Business registrations and city liquor licenses are public, and together they let you compute lifespan and map turnover block by block: Pearl versus University Hill versus east Boulder. Business press first, then every future restaurant-closure story needs your median, which is the compounding part. Pairs naturally with project 1 and shares its data pipeline.

Tier 3: cheaper, narrower, still worth it

7. The Off-Leash Paradox

"Boulder's famous off-leash program costs visitors $75 and takes a month."

We verified the mechanics during the build: the Voice and Sight tag needs an education course repeated every five years, proof of rabies vaccination, DocuPet registration, and $13 for city residents, $33 for county residents, or $75 for everyone else, with tags arriving by mail and OSMP warning the process can take up to a month. That's already a story. The missing half is enforcement data, which is a public records request. Dogs are a permanent Boulder argument and local news covers this every time it reaches council.

8. The Reservation Wall

"Colorado's outdoors is quietly becoming a booking system."

The strongest national play here. Eldorado Canyon now requires timed entry on weekends and summer holidays from May through October. Chautauqua runs paid weekend parking and a shuttle season. Rocky Mountain National Park has its own system. Nobody has counted how many Colorado outdoor experiences now require advance booking, or charted the growth. Boulder is the case study, not the whole story, which is what makes it travel. Outside, National Parks Traveler, the wires, and every "is the outdoors too crowded" feature.

9. The Busker Rules Census

"Everything you've read about busking on Pearl Street is wrong."

We already found this one. The "22 designated performer spots" repeated in guide after guide aren't busker pitches at all: the city's own permit page says they're free advocacy permits for nonprofits. The real rules are that acoustic needs no permit, amplification is banned, and stilts, fire, juggling or anything over six feet needs a special entertainment permit with liability insurance. Add a permit count and a census of who actually performs and it becomes a feature rather than a correction. This is a weekend's work.

10. The Car-Free and Accessible Trailhead Audit

"Which Boulder trails can you reach without a car, or use with a wheelchair?"

Boulder markets itself as an outdoor city for everyone and has never published this. The site already holds pieces of it: NCAR's Mesa Lab has no public transit and the nearest stop is a 2.1 mile walk with 610 feet of climbing, Mount Sanitas is reachable by bus with a nine-block walk, Eldorado Springs has no public parking at all, and CPW lists Fowler Trail as ADA accessible and Streamside as accessible for its first 300 feet. Audit every major trailhead and publish one honest table.

Why it matters more than it looks: the links come from a completely different neighborhood, disability and accessibility publications, transit and planning press, local advocacy groups and CU researchers. Those links are rarer and carry more weight precisely because they aren't travel links.

What I'd actually do

Start project 4, the Closed Trail Almanac, this week, before anything else and regardless of what else you pick. It's a scraper and a database, it needs no writing, and every week you wait is history you can never get back. It's the only item here that gets permanently worse by being delayed.

Then build the Dead Listing Audit as the flagship. It uses a capability this project has already proven, it has a built-in national angle, and it's the one most likely to produce a real press hit rather than a scattering of blog mentions.

Then send the OSMP data email, because the reply time is out of your hands and the sooner the clock starts the better, and publish the Smoke Season Index ahead of fire season. The 48-versus-58 parking discrepancy is a cheap standalone post you can run any time.

The part everyone skips

Research doesn't earn links by existing. It earns links when a specific journalist who already covers the beat sees it. Budget real time for:

A named byline and a real bio on every study. Lonely Planet's only durable advantage over the tourism board in this niche is a named Colorado writer with a visible bio, and that's copyable by an actual local.

Publishing the underlying data as a download. It doubles citations, because it lets other people build on it and credit you.

Named reporters, contacted individually. Not a blast. Use the eight-tier outreach list already built on the Boulder Link-Earning Program page rather than starting a second one. For these ten projects the relevant tiers are Boulder and Boulder County, Denver metro and statewide, and national news and policy, plus outdoor and climate press for projects 3, 4, 8 and 10.

One permanent URL per study, updated in place. Reposting annually scatters your links across many pages instead of stacking them on one.

Prepared 26 July 2026 for SEO Believer. Companion to Boulder Keyword Research: Why These 4 Sites.