How Parents.com Captures 4.5 Million Monthly Visitors: An SEO Case Study

Welcome to another week of 'Growth Through Content.' This time, we're turning the spotlight onto Parents.com, a trusted source for parenting information and part of the Meredith group.

You'll learn:

• How leveraging a vast content library and authoritative backlinks can drive immense traffic.
• The importance of user-focused content and social proof in building brand trust.
• Why even simple, list-based content can be highly effective in engaging audiences.

Let's dive in.

*****Newsletter notes******

As always, here are the latest jobs from SEOjobs.com

SEO Lead ~ TrueCar ~ $96,000 – $147,000 ~ Remote (US)

SEO Content Manager ~ Semrush ~ $6k-$8k/month ~ Remote (WW)

Amazon SEO Specialist ~ BAD Marketing ~ $42k-60k ~ Remote (US)

International SEO & Content Specialist ~ Investoo Group ~ Remote (UK)

SEO Specialist ~ TECHNO CLOUD PVT ~ $1.5k-$2k/M ~ Remote (WW)

Digital PR Links That Move the Needle

If you want to see how we smashed our client's link KPI and got our client's brand huge coverage, check out our case study here.

Ok, that's the notes over.

Back to the newsletter.

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What is Parents.com?

Parents.com is a well-established website dedicated to providing comprehensive parenting advice, from starting a family to raising children. It's part of the Dot-Dash Meredith group, a major media conglomerate known for its authoritative and trusted content across various niches.

The site offers a wealth of articles on topics such as pregnancy, baby names, child-rearing, and product reviews, aimed at supporting parents and families with expert advice and reliable information.

What are Their SEO Metrics Like?

Ahrefs gives the site a DR of 87 and a UR of 43. They have over 1.8 million backlinks from 59,400 domains, which helps them attract 4.5 million monthly visitors. The estimated cost of this traffic, if purchased via PPC, is valued at $966,000.

Ok, so how do they gain this traffic?

Did they prune their pages?

When I look at Parents.com, we can see they've got a huge amount of traffic, but when we look at their page views and the number of pages on their site, it does look like they've ruined a lot of pages.

So their traffic has gone up, and they've got rid of a lot of pages.

Now, I'm not sure this has happened, but it's what Ahrefs says.?

This is interesting.

Did they have a crawl budget issue?

Did they remove the dead weight?

I haven't done enough digging to know, but we can see that since this happened their traffic has increased.

Don't read too much into this, but it's food for thought.

When we look at their number of organic pages, Ahrefs tells us that it is 5,877. We can see that the 63 pages generate 38 percent of their total traffic, and over a million visitors come from just 63 pages.?

We can see that 101 pages deliver 15 per cent, and 710 pages deliver 34 per cent of their traffic. So their traffic is quite mixed, and only a small number of pages relative to this are doing the heavy lifting.

However, let's dig into the site.?

Smart Use of a Subject Navigation Bar

The site, Parents.com, does some really good things.

When we go to the homepage, parents.com, we can see they've got a great navigation bar. Now, this is what I would class as a 'subject' navigation bar.

It says, Starting a Family, Pregnancy, Baby Names, Babies, Raising of Kids, Kindred, Products and Gear News, and About Us.?

And you can see that that really addresses everything that a parent starting a family, or a parent with a family would need. It's got information on the core issues, but you can see it's mostly geared towards people starting a family.?

Leveraging Social Proof

Now, the other thing that was great on the homepage is the fact they've got these huge three social proof elements, which is 96 years of fact-based parenting advice and 8,000 expertly written and reviewed articles, and also 40 million people, families supported annually.

I mean, these are big social proof elements that show that this site knows what it's talking about and shouts it quite loudly.

User-Focused Features

Now, there are some other clever things going on here. For example, they have a Go To Your Week of Pregnancy filter, which will help you get all the information about a pregnancy. This is really clever because it focuses on the user. So, if you're looking at a pregnancy, you can see that there's a lot of information.

Expert Validation and Promises

So the next section I realized is our promise to you. It's got basically a four point promise section and alongside that is our expert review board. So what they're doing is really standing by the fact that they are experts, here are the experts, and here's our promise to you regarding information. They are very definitely signaling that they are a quality source of information.?

But let's look at their content.?

Content That Drives Traffic

https://www.parents.com/baby-names/

Now, a lot of their traffic does come from baby name-related content, and there's no doubt about that.

But is that any good?

https://www.parents.com/top-1000-baby-girl-names-2757832

Well, it's not particularly amazing content because it's literally one of the top 1000 baby girl's names in the US, and they repeat that kind of formula quite a lot.

It's just a very long list and we call that an RLL post, a really or ridiculously long list.

So it's proof that these list posts do still work. Now, let's have a look at some other types of content.?

In-Depth, Practical Articles

https://www.parents.com/pregnancy/stages/ultrasound/ultrasound-accuracy-is-it-a-boy-or-a-girl/

So we've got here an article about finding out your baby's sexual ultrasound. The usual things are there such as the author's names and who's medically reviewed it.

But I also liked this little nice editor's notes section, which was around various pieces of content. Now, I love the editor's notes; I use them myself similarly in this newsletter, and they just give some extra information.

Here, we're talking about gender, but it adds that little spice that an editor has reviewed this article and shows that.

Another element I quite liked was the fact that you had a sidebar menu, which obviously has jump links, but the writing is exceptionally clear.

For example,

'What is a gender ultrasound?' A prenatal ultrasound is a non-invasive test.

They answer the question quite well. We've seen this time and time again with semantic-related content.

However, let's look at some other types of content.

Comprehensive Product Reviews

Again, we've got this nice menu that shows their favourites, notable mentions, testing process, factors to consider, etc.

And then we jump into a huge introduction.

It shows personal experience and talks about how they loaded each car seat with a sandbag and tested it. There's no doubt about it: They've gone to great effort to explain the process and make out that this is a very real test of a product.

Once you get through that proof of how they've done things, you've got 'Our Favorites,' and they rank their favourites based on experience: best overall, easiest to use, best for city use, etc.

That was a nice touch and again helps to make the review even more useful by rating products on user needs.

They have a 'Why We Like It' section and a 'But Take Note,' which goes further.

I love this structure because it gives a high information gain rate.

The casual reader can quickly scan the page and gain all the needed information.

But for the more in-depth reader, perhaps someone buying this for their granddaughter, they can take all the information in.

This is truly user-considered content.

Finally, a details section gives the actual product details, such as the weight, size, and inches. These will be from the product, but it shows they gathered all this information.

They've done a unique review. They have their own testing process, which gives information you wouldn't find elsewhere. You have to test these products to be able to have that.

All the reviews the Meredith group does are very similar.

They go to great effort to show that they've done the work.

Backlinks: Leverage Your Own Network

So, regarding the backlinks, I won't go over this in great detail. The Meredith group is huge, but I did find evidence that they are interlinking from their own web properties, and that's smart. I don't blame them for doing that; they have that advantage, so why not? A lot of people do that with sites they own.

What You Can Takeaway From This?

Now, a lot of people have been hit recently with updates, but the one thing I think you should notice with this site and how it is made is that they go to great efforts to explain that they are experts, they are a body of people, and they think about user needs.

The homepage is worth spending some time looking at to see how you could do something similar and think about the users that you serve.

How would it best help them, and how can you help them find the information they need fast?

Now, this is obviously a large media site, but one of the things that stands out is that even though the dot-dash Meredith group is huge, they make a great effort to show that they've reviewed the product, and the reviews are still systematic.

They tell you what they've done and how they've done it, and then they give you a lot of information that you can easily pick out, such as the best for city use, the best for your budget, and so on.

Now, Dot Dash Meredith is a huge group of sites. We know that small publishers have been hit in the updates, and I don't pretend that just doing what they've done will help you fix traffic losses if you've been hit.

However, if you want to be a website that serves your sector, you can take note of the other things that are going on, such as the massive effort of social proof, the ease of helping people to gain information, and also the depth of content.

Dot Dash Meredith put the work in, and it can't be easy, and it must be challenging, but they do it, and this is the game we're in.

Now, you don't necessarily have to do this from a publisher's point of view.

You can use this same approach if you're in the B2B or B2C niche. You can look at how they're delivering their content and the effort they go to, and it makes all the difference.

Ok, so here are some tips:

• Consider content structures.
• What information do you want to convey to visitors and how would a really useful page be built to best serve the audience?
• Social proof. Are you underusing this element? Probably.
• Are you giving the users the information they need as fast as they need it?
• Are you showing you're experts?
• Are you doing the actual hard work? If so, show this.

So, that's it for this week.

Andrew Holland