The Top Domains and Content for Spring Cleaning

From:

Charlie Williams

Published: 20.02.2025

The big spring clean might not be the most exciting of traditions, but it is one with surprisingly ancient roots.

According to one survey, over nine in ten UK households take part in the tradition of a spring clean each year. And another shows at least 80% of US homes do the same.

Forecast data predicts that the market for household cleaners will reach $1.6bn in 2025, with our spending on overall home and laundry care products set to reach a remarkable $6.18bn. Online sales are estimated to account for 73.6% of the total revenue in the home & laundry care market this year, making this a search battleground.

As we leap into the seasonal of renewal, whose content smells like clean linen after a thorough SEO scrub and whose strategy might smell a little stale?

The top domains in the UK for spring cleaning

So, who’s content is making a clean sweep of the rankings? Based on a sample of some of the most popular ‘know’ (informational) searches in the spring cleaning market, here are the winning domains:

Know searches:

1. reddit.com
2. goodhousekeeping.com
3. thespruce.com

Top 20 domains for informational (‘know’) searches for spring cleaning: 

What’s trending in the spring cleaning search market?

By analysing our keywords – and our TrendWatch data – we can spot trending spring cleaning search queries. As many of our keywords are seasonal, we’re looking for any topic trending up in search demand over recent months or over several years.

• bathroom cleaning
• best oven cleaner
• how to clean air fryer
• musty odor house
• cleaning bricks
• cleaning furniture
• best limescale remover for toilets
• cleaning a mattress
• drum clean washing machine
• how to clean the dishwasher with baking soda and vinegar
• cleaner checklist
• washing machine drum cleaner
• how to clean a mattress with baking soda
• how to clean vertical blinds without removing them
• limescale on shower screen

Many of these topics have multiple keywords with the same intent all trending upwards recently.

If you’d like insight into more search trends, and the back-story of those rising keyword searches, subscribe to TrendWatch, the monthly newsletter from the SISTRIX Data Journalism Team.

The top URLs for spring cleaning

To research which domains are cleaning up, we created a keyword list in SISTRIX. We curated 1415 keywords that have a ‘know’ (informational) intent to find the common questions people have when it comes to cleaning their home.

Keyword lists in SISTRIX provide a variety of reports to help analyse your set of queries. These reports include the best-performing competitors (listed above), traffic forecasts (which we share at the end of this article) and the best-performing individual pages. Here are the pages with the most polished performance:

Content examples: What type of content is performing?

Now that we’ve given Google’s search results a good dusting to see which sites have swept the competition away, we find some immediate takeaways:

• The big winners in this space are a mix of household-name publishers, community-driven platforms and video content plus specialist cleaning advice from suppliers in the sector 
• Reddit ranks at #1, showing the increasing dominance of community-driven Q&A content, but especially the continued rise of the site in Google’s results. Real people sharing cleaning hacks seems to be resonating with Google’s algorithms as the search giant continues to emphasise Reddit content as helpful answers from genuine experience
  • The appearance of Quora at seventh in our domain list shows that Google is giving a serious polish to direct answers & real-world discussions to question-based searches
  • Although not community-based in the same way, YouTube is our fourth most successful site. With our keywords usually representing a search for practical advice, video content demonstrating tips, techniques or options is often seen as a highly helpful format
• Household media brands lead the pack, with popular brands making up five of the top ten domains
  • Long-standing publishers with trusted home and lifestyle advice plus plenty of brand and E-E-A-T signals continue to rank well
  • Good Housekeeping, Better Homes & Gardens and Martha Stewart continue to scrub up well in the rankings, leveraging their long-standing authority in home and lifestyle content
  • The Spruce says it is all about practical tips to make your bets home. Here, it cements itself as a go-to source for practical cleaning guides, showing that Google values specialist home-focused content from a trusted brand
• It isn’t only big-name media houses cleaning up. Some true experts in the field such as suppliers or manufacturers are also doing well. Molly Maid, Mira, Hoover, Beko and Whirlpool all make the top twenty-five domains with specialist guides on subjects they know very well. Relevant deep-dive expertise in a specific niche still has a place in Google’s rankings

High-performance content examples

Finding the sites that deliver a tidy triumph is only half the work, however. We’ve also cleaned under the sofa to find examples of the content Google wants to reward.

We want to highlight any high-performing content formats, such as pages, templates, or sections that rank on page one for a high percentage of their keywords. This means Google consistently ranks this type of content strongly for both our curated list of keywords and the wider search market. 

With these examples in hand, we can learn from them to polish our approach to ranking.

Reddit is at the top of our list of winning domains. The online discussion platform nearly sweeps our sample keyword list, ranking for 95.48% of our keywords (1352 out of 1415) and being on page one for 58.76% of them.

If you ask a question about cleaning your house, Reddit appears on page one more than half the time.

The rise of Reddit in Google’s results over the past 18 months has been well documented in SEO articles. However, this is a fantastic example of how Google relies on Reddit – plus Quora and others to a lesser extent – to add community-based first-hand expertise to informational search results.

Reddit is spread across over a million subreddits, each on its own directory. For our keyword set, the directory /CleaningTips/ is the leading subreddit. Pages from this directory appear eight times in our top 200 URLs. This includes discussions on:

• How should I clean my washing machine?
• How do people keep their homes clean?
• Why does cleaning windows leave marks?
• How do I get candle wax out of fabric?
• How do I remove the limescale on my shower glass?
• And plenty, plenty more

This directory exemplifies the rise in Reddit’s organic search success, rising from little organic presence to appearing for thousands of keywords:

The /CleaningTips/ subreddit is a dedicated “community for helpful tips and advice on keeping your living spaces clean and organised”. This sounds like potentially useful advice and it’s note to “Share your own experiences and learn from others in a friendly and supportive environment” is exactly what Google hopes it brings to the search results.

Overall, this subreddit ranks for over 40k keywords in the UK, bringing in an estimated 124.7k organic visits a month. While it doesn’t rank on page one quite often enough to classify for what we call high-performance content, it still ranks on page one 15.94% of the time and certainly sweeps away the competition for our keyword set.

Second on our list of winning domains is Good Housekeeping, the legendary American lifestyle publication. Founded in 1885, Good Housekeeping has been part of the Hearst publishing empire since 1911.

The site ranks for 76.5% of our keywords, and on page one for 32.7% (461) of them, including many ‘how to’ searches such as how to clean fabric sofa (4,400 searches a month on average in the UK),  how to get rid of kettle limescale (3,200), bathroom cleaning (2,450) and best way to clean windows (1,850).

A look through the site’s top rankings shows it appearing for a huge range of popular topics on how to clean a specific part of the house, tips on general house cleaning or reviews for ‘best of’ products.

Famously, Good Housekeeping is home to the Good Housekeeping Institute, which specialises in product reviews by a staff of scientific experts. It certainly appears that Google respects this reputation and legacy. 

There are articles from several sections, including the UK-specific /uk/house-and-home/household-advice/ directory. However, the /home/cleaning/ directory (which ranks for almost 27k keywords in the UK and 62k globally) appears most often with 10 pages in our top 200 URLs.

This directory is an interesting example of search success.

If you look at the the Visibility Index chart, there is a clear opposite pattern to Reddit with the directory becoming less visible over the past two years:

However, the site ranks on page one for 23.9% of its keywords, making it high-performing content. The directory is home to 556 pages that rank for at least one keyword in the UK. These cover every house cleaning challenge you can think of, from a review of the best upholstery cleaners to how to clean shower doors and the many ways to clean with baking soda (bicarb soda in the UK!)

Good Housekeeping articles in this directory are split into two main types:

1. How-to guides that give step-by-step instructions on how to complete a cleaning task, such as getting rid of ink stains
2. ‘Best of’ product round-ups that review and recommend products, such as the best drain cleaners or best air fresheners

Interestingly, the /home/cleaning/ directory is US-based content. It appears Google’s overall trust in the quality of the content outweighs showing localised alternatives.

The directory is well-positioned within the site structure. Its dedicated homepage acts as a magazine hub of the latest cleaning content and offers easy navigation to all the major subsections.

Both article types have some common factors, including well-optimised on-page SEO signals like the title tag, meta description and H1 and usually at least two expert authors, complete with bio and a link to the author page.

The reviews include top picks, pros & cons for each listing, and a detailed overview of each top product. There are also extra details on how the Good Housekeeping Institute reviews these products, including first-hand images plus a final section on ‘Why trust Good Housekeeping?’.

There are also extra sections with more detail for the particular product type. For example, the air freshener round-up includes subsections on ‘What type of air freshener is most effective?’, ‘What to look for when buying an air freshener’ and ‘How to make your home smell great’. 

Good Housekeeping hugely benefits from the experience Hearst has publishing a range of sites all looking to earn a lot of traffic from organic search. These publishing houses use some of the most successful SEO strategies around.

Combine this SEO savvy with a trusted brand and demonstrable expertise thanks to over 100 years of the Good Housekeeping Institute and it’s clear why Google favours its content.

This isn’t the only example of this in action, however.

Third in our rankings is The Spruce, which is published by Dotdash Meredith. MarthaStewart.com is fifth in our list of winners and is also published by Dotdash Meredith. As is Better Homes & Gardens (sixth on our list). And also Real Simple (twelfth on our list).

It’s clear Dotdash has put its SEO knowledge to good work across these well-known lifestyle publications, allowing it to rank many times for the same topics through having multiple properties.

Better Homes & Gardens ranks for 55.8% of our keywords, primarily through articles in the /house-cleaning/tips/ directory.

This directory ranks for over 10k keywords in the UK across 107 different pages, bringing in an estimated 17k organic visits a month.

A look at the home of house cleaning on Better Homes & Gardens shows a well-structured content department signalled as important through its position in the main navigation, with clear sub-sections for tips, how-tos, reviews and checklists. It does lack some of the depth & clear first-hand experience signals of Good Housekeeping.

You don’t have to be part of a big-name publisher to do well with guides in this sector.

We also see some success for industry suppliers. The best example of this is Molly Maid, a Canadian cleaning company with franchises across the world.

Molly Maid has jumped into a classic content marketing strategy, producing guides around subjects they are experts in. Their /cleaning-tips/ and/practically-spotless/ directories rank for 3.5k and over 7k keywords respectively, bringing in a combined 25k monthly organic visits.

The /cleaning-tips/ section has 75 guides and ranks on page one 24% of the time, and on page two 29%.

Summary

Here are the top sparkling insights from our deep-dive into the spring cleaning search sector:

• In the UK’s spring cleaning search sector authority, community-driven content, and multimedia formats are all fighting for space
• Community-driven content is sweeping up: Reddit takes the top spot thanks to Google’s desire to always have real-world, community-based expertise in the search results. We see Quora also doing well for the same reason
  • This could present barnacle-SEO opportunities for savvy sites that can get their content or products out there in a non-commercial manner
• Structured, well-optimised content wins: Top-ranking articles follow a clear formula: strong title tags, well-optimised headings, expert authorship, and useful sub-sections. High-performing sites, like Good Housekeeping, also include detailed overviews or how-to instructions, pros & cons lists, and trust-building elements to strengthen credibility
  • You could argue that with publishers dominating the rankings, the content formats on show are a little formulaic, but they at least give us a starting point to iterate on
• Household media giants sparkle: Trusted lifestyle brands like Good Housekeeping, Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Gardens, Ideal Home and The Spruce dominate our sample keyword set. Their legacy authority, strong E-E-A-T signals, and well-structured content strategies keep them at the top of Google’s results
• Content marketing for industry manufacturers or suppliers can still work: Though the returns on this work are hard to quantify and are possibly getting squeezed by competition and AI Overviews
• There is a real opportunity with video content: Not only is video content loved by consumers, but it presents an opportunity to rank for brands who perhaps can’t compete for the traditional ranking positions but can get creative with video guides or reviews. If a task needs demonstration, video content is an ideal format

Keyword research in the cosmetics sector

To scour Google’s results for the best-performing content and sites, we curated a large list of sample keywords that represent some of the UK public’s most popular ‘spring cleaning’ searches.

When researching popular topics, we always split our keywords by their search intent. We group queries by shared intent to compare content aimed at the same search types and buying-cycle stages. Since Google tailors results to user intent, clustering these queries helps us pinpoint which content formats and styles Google rewards across each aspect of this sector.

In this instance, we have one large list of common ‘know’ keywords, representing common informational searches. For spring cleaning, we found many searches divided amongst several key themes:

• How to clean different items, such as ovens, mattresses, ovens and dishwashers
• How to clean rooms, such as the kitchen or bathroom
• How to clean equipment, such as showers
• And queries on how to clean quickly, create rotas or get a checklist of jobs to do, as well as general cleaning tips or hacks

Examples include spring cleaning, which has an average of 2,100 searches a month in the UK and sees a huge peak in March. In 2024, this peak was 8,100 searches.

Other example keywords include how to clean washing machine (14,700 on average), how to clean a mattress (4,900 searches), how clean fabric sofa 4,400), best oven cleaner (1,900), cleaning schedule (1,900) and how to clean air fryer (1,600).

We have a detailed, step-by-step article on keyword research with SISTRIX tools and data, in which you can see our list-building process.

Our SectorWatch process

For this SectorWatch, we used relevant keywords from a curated selection of spring cleaning keyword discovery tables. We selected highly targeted keywords with either a ‘do‘ intent or a ‘know’ intent. From these, we harvest all the ranking keywords for the URLs in the SERPs. We call this the Keyword Environment. Most SERPs will have some mixed intent so we re-filter the list for the correct intents and sanitise it by hand to leave a smaller, highly-relevant set of searches made by the UK public broken down by searcher journey. The results are based only on organic result rankings.

Curated keyword set and sector click potential

Core keywords: how to clean washing machine, how to remove limescale from toilet, bathroom cleaning, spring cleaning, cleaning schedule, best way to clean windows

The full data set used for this study is available as a Google Sheet. Further analysis can be done in the SISTRIX keyword lists feature, including competitor analysis, SERP feature analysis, questions, keyword clusters and traffic forecasts.

SectorWatch is a monthly publication from the SISTRIX data journalism team. All SectorWatch articles can be found here. Related analyses can be found in the TrendWatch newsletter, IndexWatch analysis along with specific case studies in our blog. New article notifications are available through X (Twitter) and Facebook.