SEO strategy breakdown of GoodHousekeeping, a Product review site

This is an SEO strategy breakdown of GoodHousekeeping, a product review site that drives more than 22 million organic visits every month from search.

Table of Contents

After Reading This Guide, You’ll Learn 🡭

How to write product reviews considering E-EAT
Content strategy to drive affiliate commissions
How to improve blog UX

About GoodHousekeeping 🡭

GoodHousekeeping (GH) is a product review site that covers topics like recipes, home decor accessories, fashion, and food.

Almost 85% of their site traffic comes from search. This shows thatGoodHousekepingheavily relied on its SEO and content strategy for growth.

Source: Similarweb

Results Achieved 🡭

GoodHousekeeping is one of the largest product review sites in the fashion and beauty industry. In the last 3 years, the site has significantly increased organic keywords (top 10 positions).

Here are some of the SEO stats about GH:

22.1 million organic visits every month
Drives traffic worth of $11.4 million
6.5 million backlinks from 115k different website
Total of 863k+ keywords are ranking on the first page of Google (up to 10th position)

SEO Strategy Breakdown 🡭

1. Product review content strategy

Since Google’s product review updates, many websites have struggled to maintain ranking because of Google’s strict guidelines.

If you’re unaware of product review updates, read this document highlighting best practices for writing high-quality product reviews.

Here are some of the strategies that helpedGoodHousekepingrank their product review articles.

1/ Product review process and editorial guidelines

GoodHousekeeping has created a dedicated page (3,000+ words) highlighting:

The entire process of how they test products
Why users should trustGoodHousekepingcontent
The expertise in Good Housekeeping testing and writing high-quality product reviews
Affiliate Disclosure
Experts and writers behind the product review articles

Here’s the landing page screenshot:

Creating this detailed page showing the editorial process will not directly help in ranking higher but build trust and credibility.

2/ Expertise of content creators

One common best practice to improve E-EAT is showcasing the writer’s expertise by adding an author bio at the end of the article.

Here, GoodHousekeeping takes it a step further by creating a dedicated page for each of its content writers and editors.

If you read any article from GH, you will see a clickable link to the author(s) of the article.

Here’s what it looks like:

And, when you click the author name, you will visit the individual author page with social profiles.

For example:

Why this matters:

In Google’s Quality Raters Guideline, it is mentioned that the high-level expertise of the writer is one of the characteristics of a high page rating.

Also, GoodHousekeeping publishes reviews and informational articles on health topics (which is a YMYL category), so it is important to build EAT by highlighting authors and editors.

Here’s how this strategy helped GoodHousekeeping SEO:

Because of the dedicated author page, GoodHousekepingis able to rank on the first page for these authors’ and editors’ names.

In fact, GoodHousekepinghas over 7k author pages, which drives additional site traffic and has generated 100+ backlinks.

2. Product review structure

The information structure of a product review page is important in delivering the best UX and generating a conversion. GoodHousekeping optimizes its product review articles with a similar templated structure.

Here’s the structure:

Key elements of the product review articles from GH:

1/ Pros-cons:

One of the best ways to improve blog UX is by improving the readability of your content. For product reviews, the Pros and Cons table makes it easy for the reader to scan each product from the list.

Here’s the screenshot of using the Pros and cons for each product.

However, one thing that GoodHousekeping can improve is adding the pros and cons of structured data. This will further help GoodHousekeeping win rich results in the SERP.

2/ Product specification table

Another element that helps in readability is HTML tables of product specifications because users don’t want to read a long article to find details about a specific product.

In addition, adding HTML tables for product specifications may help win rich snippets in the SERP.

3/ Button CTAs

Driving traffic isn’t enough for affiliate sites. It also needs to bring conversion to affiliate products.

One of the ways GoodHousekeeping boosts conversion is by adding button CTAs with high-quality product images.

Screenshot of the product CTA:

Also, giving multiple options to readers to shop for the product online is helpful. This increases the chance of conversion rate.

3. Content update

An XML sitemap is a great place to understand the content updating pattern of any website.

For example, studying the sitemap will give you an idea of content publishing/updating frequency and URL structure.

Here’s the graph of GoodHouskeeping’s content updating/publishing pattern in the last few years:

This shows thatGoodHousekepinghas increased its content updating or publishing frequency.

Updating existing content is important for affiliates as this helps maintain content freshness.

For example, most of the affiliate reviews are time-sensitive topics such as – Best Vacuum Cleaner of 2023, Best Fashion accessories for 2023 Summer, etc.

Another strategy that differentiatesGoodHousekepingfrom many mediocre affiliate sites is the transparency in the content.

Generally, when a page is updated, many sites mention the last updated date.

❌ Last updated on 20 Dec, 2022

In the case ofGoodHousekepingalso mentions the information added/edited in the content.

✔️ Last updated on 20 Dec, 2022 to include additional information on X, Y, and Z

An example:

Good Housekeeping(.com) uses a small text box to highlight what changes are done in the latest content update.

Benefits:

Make your editorial process more transparent
Inform users about the latest changes
Differentiate your content from the rest

So, the next time you update an article, take a few minutes to highlight the changes done in the article.

4. Optimizing blog categories

One of the mistakes many websites make is not optimizing their blog category pages.

This is a missed opportunity, especially if you have topical authority in the niche and dozens of articles under each category.

Here’s how GoodHouseKeeping optimizes its category pages to rank on the first page:

Unique title and meta description
Short category page description
Internal links to sub-categories

As a result, they are ranking on the first page for terms like:

Home products
Health and Fitness Products, etc.

5. Internal linking

One of the most powerful SEO tools is internal linking. But making a flat site structure becomes a challenge for larger sites with thousands of pages – which is the case of GoodHousekeeping.

First, let’s have a look at the site structure of GH:

Every node of the above structure denotes a page, and each line is an internal link. This shows that the site structure is well-optimized to maintain important pages within 3 or fewer clicks away from the homepage.

Here’s the number of URLs by crawl depth (Depth of the page from the start page):

A crawl depth of 2 for almost 500 URLs shows how good the internal linking strategy of GH is.

Here’s how:

The internal linking strategy starts with optimizing the website structure and navigation with proper categories.

Here’s the visualization of GoodHousekeeping’s internal linking strategy:

This way, category, sub-category, and related blog articles are internally connected via internal linking, breadcrumb, and navigation menu links.

Also, this silo structure prevents linking to irrelevant or off-topic pages.

Key Takeaways 🡭

1. Improve E-EAT

Product reviews or affiliate links need to focus on becoming a trustworthy online platform instead of just targeting low-difficulty keywords.

There is not a single way to improve your EEAT information but you can take inspiration from GoodHousekeeping.

Here are some of the things to consider:

Be transparent about the editorial process: it’s not about faking the editorial process. Instead, build a system that uses the products, and get experts or first-hand product users to share their opinion. Document the process and create a detailed content editorial guideline page.
Create individual pages for experts, writers, & editors: This helps build your content’s credibility and make your site associated with industry experts in Google’s knowledge graph.

2. Differentiate your content

If you’re just starting a new website with a few hundred pages, it is difficult to stand out if you’re creating similar content.

The better approach is to deliver a 10x better content experience.

Some of the ways:

Focus on improving content readability
Include tables, product pros and cons, CTA boxes, high-quality product images
Highlight what exactly has changed in the last content update, not just the last modified date of the article
Use proper headings
Write content from first-hand product experience

3. Leverage the power of internal linking

To make it simple, follow the steps:

Make a list of under-optimized pages with internal linking: Find orphan pages with fewer internal links. Also, check page URLs with the least PageRating (get the list from the Ahrefs website audit tool; it’s free)
Link from high authority page to low or new pages
Ensure that there are no orphan pages on the site
Check the crawl depth report of your website using Screaming Frog. Every important page should have a crawl depth of 3 or less
Properly categorize your content into primary and secondary categories

3. Maintain content freshness

Most affiliate sites write time-sensitive content. In that case, have a system focused on identifying pages that need improvement and freshness.

You can check URLs in Google Search Console with declined traffic in the last 3 or 6 months.

That’s all, folks.

Check out other case studies and SEO strategy breakdowns right here.