I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.
Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.
That's it. That's my pitch for you to stick around (or perhaps let you know this isn't the site for you).
This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
Thank you for being here!
The team behind the popular reviews site TrustedReviews.com today announced the acquisition of product review network, Wareable Media Group.
The three sites involved in the deal are:
- Wareable – wearable technology reviews ⌚️
- The Ambient – connected home product reviews 🛋️
- Get Sweat Go – travel & fitness product reviews 🏃
I won’t go into the specifics of traffic and rankings to each of the sites as they’re a private company and I don’t think that would be fair, but Similarweb estimates their monthly combined monthly visits total around 1.2 million.
Wareable is clearly the biggest brand of the three.
Wareable Media Group have actually been on my radar for a few months now, as Wareable kept showing up in independent crawls we were doing of product-specific search queries. The site was launched in 2014 by James Stables and Paul Lamkin, smartly focused on a niche that was only going to get much bigger (the Apple Watch wasn’t even a thing yet).
Paul and James will still be involved in the sites, with Paul focused on The Ambient and James focused on Wareable. It’s an exciting time to be following Trusted Reviews to see what changes they make, if any at all, to take the brands to the next level.
Trusted Reviews itself has one of the most stable Semrush traffic graphs I’ve seen in recent months, with estimated monthly visitors from organic search right around the 1.8 million mark.
As always, to be respectful I won’t dive into the keywords they’re ranking for, link building activities they may be engaged in and so on.
Since the site was founded in 2003 they’ve reviewed over 17,000 products, and at least on the pages I navigated to it certainly seems like they actually use the products they recommend.
For instance, here’s their blurb on their page covering the best 4K TV’s and how they actually test them:
You can find similar notices on soundbar, headphone and laptop reviews.
While there are some design elements I think they need to work on – the table of contents on every review overlaps the footer when you get to the end of a page – it’s fair to say Trusted Reviews is one of the best looking review sites I’ve personally came across.
There are a lot of smart elements sprinkled throughout that show they care about the details, and I’m very curious how many will make it over to the new sites they’ve acquired.
Did Wareable Just Become Sister Sites with Investment Week and Business Green?
The short answer is: No.
I’m really proud of the private database we’ve built to track the connections between large media brands and the sites that they own.
It’s updated a few times per week (digital media goliaths are busy) and I’ve very likely made dozens of ownership connections that other people haven’t reported on elsewhere.
With that said, I’m not too proud to admit when I’m not entirely sure of who owns who.
It would have been very easy to introduce TrustedReviews.com as being part of Incisive Media (owners of Investment Week, Business Green a number of other popular sites). After all, as I write this their Wikipedia page makes that pretty clear:
Similarly, you can find news reports announcing that IncisiveMedia purchased the brand in April of 2020.
That should really be the end of the story, but then I was a little confused as to why Incisive Media don’t mention Trusted Reviews on their own website. Not even under the ‘Brands’ section.
Similarly, on the about page for Trusted Reviews they don’t make any mention of Incisive Media.
Before publishing this article I verified with Chris Dicker, a managing director at Trusted Reviews, that they are an independent company and not owned by Incisive Media. I was also told that management will share more official updates on their ownership structure in the near future.
This is one of those announcements that makes me glad I started tracking this space a lot more seriously a few months ago. I’m always interested to see how people look to grow their digital empires and I wish the Trusted Reviews team the best of luck going forward.
