How far do they go? Suppose you have an exact match domain of a low-competition search. There isnt any website dedicated entirely to that keyword. You put 1-2-3-5 unique articles for that keyword. Will you ever rank without ( serious ) backlinks? What would it take to get to the top?
Yes, even without backlinks exactmatch domains can really get you to the top in whatever niche IF, you've done enough keyword research and are lucky enough to still register them. Take the keywords "horse racing" for example. A lot of online betters would type that in the search engine and if you're article has those keywords and have done enough backlinks, they'd find your site right away. What more if you have an EMD of the words horse racing, then maybe even if you don't have articles or backlinks yet they'd get to you too.
That can't happen, Competition is so high every business man running a website, depending only on article submission will not solve the purpose!!
Certainly you will rank without much backlinks, if the article title is not having much competitions.
Having targeted keyword as website domain name is certainly of great benefit from SEO point of view. But, I don't believe that just by having your targeted keyword as your domain name, you can rank well in the major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. To rank well in search engines, it takes lots of efforts and time. You should have sufficient enough credible back links to rank for any targeted keyword. At the least, you should do link building on regular basis, if at all you want to rank and retain already obtained ranking positions for any set of targeted keywords.
Backlinks are one of the most highly looked for parameters in Google's eyes, so it is not possible this way to rank without building backlinks. Exact match domains are not considered very good and impressive now. They do not carry the benefit they once used to carry. Matt Cutts stated this some time ago.... "We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it."
It actually still can work, but you have to make sure that you don't overoptimize your website. If using an EMD site, don't ever go more than 1% of the keyword density. But yea, have at least 5-10 inner pages, just to make google happy lol.
Doing so, you can get traffic for the keyword you had used in domain that is matching exactly but if you need rank you need to get good back-links to survive in search engine.