This week I analyze an 11-year-old kids activities site with the exact match domain KidsActivitiesBlog.com. Despite a decline in recent months, it still receives an estimated 257k organic traffic per month according to Ahrefs.
The niche of kids activities presents a good opportunity because parents are in constant need of activities to entertain and educate their kids and they are willing to spend money on this problem. This niche also does well on Pinterest and other social media platforms which is great for traffic diversification.
Additionally, this niche overlaps with homeschooling which presents many great opportunities for monetization like info products and affiliate links to courses and other products.
In this teardown I will look at the keys to success that have helped this site become one of the top sites in the kids activities niche and things it could improve to generate more traffic and revenue.
This is what I cover in this report:
- Website overview
- Major highlights
- Competitor overview
- Easy wins to increase revenue and/or traffic
- Actionable takeaways you can apply
Let’s get into it!
✅ Website Overview & Highlights
The website has grown tremendously since 2020 and reached a peak of 600k organic traffic before falling from the September Helpful Content Update to around 258k organic traffic.
Ahrefs shows a downtrending traffic trend with an impressive domain rating of 75 with 29,000 referring domains.
The website’s domain has been active since 2011 according to Archive.org and over the past decade it has published about 8,000 articles about kids activities like crafts, recipes, and coloring pages.
The site was created by Holly Homer, a Dallas homeschooling mom with three kids who started the site as a blog to share ideas for kids activities. As it grew she brought on her husband as a CFO and hired a large team of outside writers.
The owner has published 4 books about kids activities which gives the site added credibility. Self-publishing a book can be a great way to build credibility in your niche.
Each article displays a banner of logos of large media sites that have featured KidsActivitesBlog.com which helps boost trust and credibility with visitors.
The site earns from multiple revenue sources including its own membership product which costs $5.97 per month for unlimited access to a library of premium resources and printables.
The website has a top-notch design that matches the target audience of parents with young kids. The homepage highlights the most popular categories and presents a Pinterest-like experience of interesting images to click on.
Highlights
- 250k email newsletter subscribers
- 450k Pinterest followers with over 10 million monthly views
- 29,400 referring domains including many high-authority sites
Why is this site winning?
- Tons of high authority links such as Good Housekeeping, USA Today, Wired, etc.
- Lots of unique photos of kids activities show first-hand experience in the niche
- Content is highly sharable on social media like Pinterest and Facebook
Top 3 Competitors
Here are similar competitors targeting many of the same keywords.
- PreschoolPlayandLearn.com – A preschool kids activities site with 51k organic traffic (Ahrefs)
- HappyToddlerPlaytime.com – Another young kids activities site with 32k organic traffic (Ahrefs)
- Kidadl.com – A large kids activities site that previously had 5.9 million organic traffic and now appears to be deindexed
Let’s get into the easy wins to grow this specific website.
🔥 5 Easy Wins To Grow This Website
There are opportunities to significantly grow this brand. I break down the following easy wins:
- Conduct a Content Audit and Prune Unhelpful Pages
- Add Local Kids Activities Content
- Redirect KidsActivitiesBlog.com to KidsActivities.com
- Review Children’s Products
- Repurpose Content for Video
Let’s get into it!
➡️ Win #1: Conduct a Content Audit and Prune Unhelpful Pages
Organic traffic is down an estimated 300k since September 2023 which suggests that Google’s algorithm has identified unhelpful content on this site.
Over the last decade, the site has published around 8,000 articles so it would be worth conducting a content audit to identify any issues related to user experience and visitor satisfaction.
Firstly, pages with thin content or pages receiving very little traffic can be removed and redirected if they have any links. According to Google’s documentation, “having relatively high amounts of unhelpful content might cause other content on the site to perform less well in Search, to a varying degree”.
Additionally, articles that were once timely but now obsolete can be deleted. I found many obsolete articles on the site that are no longer helpful like “Baby Names Expected To Be Popular In 2020” and “Target Released Their 2020 Halloween Collection and I Need it All”.
Do you have the same issue on your site? Hire WebOperators for a one-off content audit analysis.
➡️ Win #2: Add Local Kids Activities Content
I found only a handful of articles about local activities for kids. This presents a valuable opportunity for this site which already has strong topical authority for kids activities.
By covering local activities with topics like “best kids activities in [city] for X” and related topics the site can promote lucrative affiliate programs like Viator, Ticketmaster, and City Pass or set up lead gen partnerships for local businesses. With a strong domain authority of 75 and great topical authority, there is a good opportunity to rank high for these valuable keywords.
An example of a large site that focuses on local activities for kids is Day Out With the Kids, a UK site that says it receives 35 million visitors per year. This shows the huge search volume and interest for the topic of local kids activities.
➡️ Win #3: Redirect KidsActivitiesBlog.com to KidsActivities.com
The header of the website shows a logo for “KidsActivities.com” but if you go to that URL it redirects to KidsActivitesBlog.com.
I would set up a 301 redirect from KidsActivitiesBlog.com to KidsActivities.com. Since Google says 301 redirects no longer lose PageRank value, it should be safe to redirect with minimal impact on ranking.
KidsActivities.com is a more credible domain name that legitimizes the site and makes it look more trustworthy to visitors and media sites that could link to it.
Using “Blog” in the domain name can have a negative connotation which can hurt credibility for some topics. Using the more brandable URL of KidsActivities.com can help the brand grow.
A related issue is using clean URLs for articles. The URLs of many articles use a random number in the URL for the subfolder instead of the category name. This is similar to the problem of using dates in URLs.
For example a typical article has a URL like: “https://kidsactivitiesblog.com/28889/how-to-make-flowers/”.
Using a category name instead of a random number would help make the URLs more SEO friendly and helpful for visitors. An example would be:
https://kidsactivities.com/kids-crafts/how-to-make-flowers
➡️ Win #4: Review Children’s Products
A hot strategy right now is for affiliate marketers to partner with high authority sites to publish affiliate content. If you already have a high authority site then you don’t need to partner but can leverage the authority to grow revenue by publishing buying guides and product reviews for moderately competitive keywords.
This works well because Google has increasingly favored high authority sites like Forbes over smaller niche sites in search results.
I found a small percentage of commercial pages on this site that link to an affiliate program like Amazon. There is a lot more opportunity to explore with a high domain authority site like this.
A good example is to review some of the best learning and educational toys like “best toys for learning robotics for young kids”. A good tactic could be to see what buying guides are ranking well on lower authority sites and consider those topics.
➡️ Win #5: Repurpose Content for Video
With hundreds of popular tutorials published about kids activities like crafts and drawing, there is a good opportunity to repurpose this content for video.
Currently, the YouTube channel has 13.7k subscribers but they have not published a video in over a year.
Some previous videos have received over 180k views which demonstrates that videos published on this channel can perform very well.
Organic traffic to this site has decreased by about half in the last 6 months, so it makes sense to look for new sources for audience growth.
People are spending significant time on video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, so this site can recycle ideas that have performed well on the website that may also be popular on YouTube.
Additionally, the videos can be added to articles to improve the user experience and be monetized via Mediavine video ads.
👉 Actionable Takeaways
Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:
- Consider removing “unhelpful” pages from your site especially if you were affected by the Helpful Content Update.
- Look for adjacent topics to cover that have strong opportunities for affiliate revenue.
- Brandable domains have advantages over exact match domains such as helping to increase branded searches and increasing credibility.
- With Google sending much less traffic to many websites, consider investing in growing platforms like YouTube.
