Updated: 13-12-2022

More than 7,000 businesses in 22 different industries to find the answer to the following question: What was their strategy for SEO and paid advertising that enabled them to succeed?

In our analysis, we only considered businesses that received reviews with at least a 4-star rating. Customers also enjoy doing business with these companies, not only Google.

Where is the Data From?

We chose the 7,000+ websites with reviews on TrustPilot that had four or more stars, and we compared this information with Ubersuggest to determine which sites were popular with both users and Google.

Ubersuggest provided us with further information about their SEO strategy, traffic-related factors, backlinks, and more, which you can see in the visualisations below.

What Sectors Did We Examine?

The 22 industries this research examined were:

Training and Education
Local and public services
Services at Home
Wildlife & Pets
Automobiles and Transportation
Press & Publications
Hobbies & Crafts Sports
Entertainment & Events
Eateries & Bars
Travel & Holiday
Buying and fashion
Technology & Electronics
Food, Drinks, and Tobacco
Services for Home & Garden Businesses
Insurance and Finance
Administration & Legal Services
Wellness & Medicine
Manufacturing and Construction
Beauty & Wellness Services

Findings

Digital marketing does not have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Advice that is cut and dry doesn’t apply to every business.

Depending on the target audience in your industry, you will need to adopt a different strategy. Because of this, rather than making generalisations about all industries, we included a diverse variety of industries in our investigation.

We discovered the following crucial insights:

Businesses in all sectors receive more organic than paid traffic. In contrast to other industries, Travel & Vacation and Restaurants & Bars saw greater paid traffic.
For the businesses in each investigated industry, the average website authority score ranged from 30 to 40. Some sectors, like Utilities and Animals & Pets, saw lower growth rates than usual.
Target terms for Public & Local Services have the greatest average keyword difficulty. Target keywords with the lowest average difficulty were Beauty & Well-Being.
Text backlinks made for more than 75% of all backlinks across all industries.
Companies across all sectors sought more informational intent keywords, while a variety of intent keywords together accounted for the majority of traffic.

Analysis #1 – Volume of Paid Search Traffic vs. Organic Search Traffic

Do sponsored or organic searches account for the majority of your traffic? We compared the volume of organic search traffic—that is, traffic originating from search engines like Google—and paid traffic (traffic driven to your site via paid ads.)

These trends show where the top marketers in the sector are concentrating their efforts and whether the outcomes are worthwhile. In this data, we discovered some intriguing trends.

 

NOTE: the numbers below represent the average organic and paid traffic per company website, not a total of all traffic in that industry.

Less than 10% of all traffic to Public & Local Services came from organic search, with 216,861 visits and only 16,931 from sponsored search. Since individuals often only select one of the few services available in their area, paid advertisements are unlikely to be used by public services like a power company.

These businesses might gain more from concentrating on SEO. Nevertheless, the low level of competition for paid advertisements may present a chance to increase their visibility.

With 230,075 visits per month, businesses that specialise in education and training received the most organic searches. Since there is little rivalry, these businesses should concentrate more on SEO and content marketing while also keeping an eye on how to use paid advertising.

 

Compared to other other industries, restaurant and bar websites rely more heavily on bought traffic, with over 50% of their traffic coming from paid advertisements.

Using paid advertisements to enhance conversions makes sense because people who search in this category are definitely looking for a place to go soon.

Sites dedicated to travel and vacation also rely on paid advertisements, which bring in close to 30% of their visitors. Organic traffic is still more prevalent, but it appears that businesses also promote their products through paid advertisements.

Focus on growing organic traffic first if you are new to the industry because it will take longer to see benefits. Paid advertisements might be costly but they are also effective.

Only slightly less than 10% of traffic to Shopping & Fashion came from paid advertisements. Since a lot of content is visual, this can indicate that businesses put more emphasis on social media sharing and advertisements.

The least amount of traffic from paid advertisements, at around 4%, came from the sports sector. This was intriguing because a lot of e-commerce companies in the sector provide sports equipment, outdoor clothing, sports drinks, and team attire.

This can be a sign of a rise in social sharing and social media advertising. The fact that buyers are more inclined to conduct research could also indicate that spontaneous purchases are less typical. As a result, producing instructive content may be the best course of action.

 

Analysis #2 – Trends Related To Authority Score, Keyword Difficulty, and Average CPC

What is the industry-specific variation in domain authority? Does it connect to the price you’ll pay for advertisements? Does the complexity of the keyword matter? We looked deeper into this data to find trends for each sector.

The Domain Authority of your website is measured by Authority Score, which also affects rankings. Based on factors including the quantity of backlinks, referring domains, outbound links, etc., it rates the overall website quality.

Your industry’s authority score is also relevant.

 

Average Authority Scores Across All Industries

This first chart shows the average website authority score for businesses in each industry.

The average authority score for commercial websites across all industries ranged from 30 to 40.

The values above were obtained after looking at hundreds of business websites in each industry with a mixture of higher and lower authority scores.

Public & Local Services came in right behind Media & Publishing with a score of 44.61, which was the highest average authority score. This makes sense because commercial websites tend to be more reliable sources in each industry.

On the other hand, the sectors with the lowest authority scores were Utilities (28.09) and Animals & Pets (27.08). Many variables, such as the proliferation of new websites in every area, could be to blame for this.

In this investigation, the median authority score across all industries ranged from 38.06 to over a 20-point range.

Websites with 40 to 50 pages are regarded as average.
50–60% of websites are regarded as decent.
Websites scoring over 60 are regarded as outstanding.

What does this signify for marketing campaigns and business websites?

This investigation focused on businesses with high review ratings, indicating that they prioritised reputation management, perhaps even more than SEO criteria.

We can observe that a company’s authority score had little bearing on whether or not they received positive reviews. Reviewing goods and services was more popular than focusing on the company itself.

Average SEO Keyword Difficulty Across All Industries

The average keyword difficulty for phrases in each industry was the next thing we looked at. The majority of content producers focus on high volume, low difficulty keywords, which is simpler for some businesses than others.

Public & Local Services (49.02), Money & Insurance (47.72), and Education and Training (47.62) were the industries with the highest difficulty.

These industries will probably need to devote more time to their SEO strategy or increase their spending on sponsored advertisements to raise their search ranks.

Sports, Beauty & Well-Being, and Shopping & Fashion had the lowest difficulty scores (36.26, 35.12, and 33.75 respectively). Finding keywords to rank for in these industries will be simpler.

The typical keyword difficulty for SEO across all sectors is 41.

What does this actually mean? When looking for keywords with low difficulty, relativity is important.

Take the case of a company in the money and insurance sector that discovers two terms for which it is not currently ranking. One has a keyword difficulty of 45 and 12,000 searches, whereas the other has a keyword difficulty of 40 and just 6,000 searches.

Knowing that 45 is below the industry average for difficulty, it might not be a terrible idea to target the larger volume phrase. Additionally, you might focus on comparable keywords while boosting some of the trickier ones with paid advertisements to increase your reach.

Target terms that are simple to rank for in industries with low average keyword difficulty, like beauty and wellness, to boost traffic. Then, employ CRO methods to make the most of that traffic.

 

Average CPC (Cost-Per-Click) Across All Industries

This section’s last graph examines the typical CPC for each industry. We were interested to discover if there was any relationship between the average authority score of business websites. Here is what we discovered:

The average authority score and average CPC of the sector were found to have very little in common.

The discrepancy between acquisition costs and purchase value may have an impact on this.

A website that sells $20 t-shirts, for instance, won’t spend $10 per customer, but an investing site with an average purchase price of over $100 might.

Money & Insurance has the highest average CPC in this analysis, coming in at $4.12.

Due to the significantly higher lifetime value (LTV) of each customer, businesses in this sector may be ready to pay more on average per click.

With an average CPC of $1.12 across all industries, Hobbies & Crafts has the lowest CPC.

They only receive about 5% of their traffic from sponsored advertisements, which may be a sign that businesses prefer to use social media channels where there are numerous influencers and hobby/craft groups.

The average CPC for home services is greater, at $3.17. Plumbers, lawn service providers, and other businesses are located in this sector. The higher average CPC is probably a result of more competition for local clients.

With an average CPC of $1.40, Shopping & Fashion has one of the lowest CPCs.

This can be yet another sign that companies are promoting their visual material on social media more. The low average CPC, however, can give a chance to be inventive with paid advertisements.

Analysis #3 – Average Number of Backlinks Per Industry and Their Most Popular Formats

That backlinks are important is nothing new. What about those backlinks’ formatting? Is a text link more advantageous than an image link? How many backlinks are sufficient?

We set out to learn the answer to it.

 

Average Number of Backlinks Per Industry

The most backlinks are found in the following industries, with a wide range in average number:

– Over 6.5 million for public and local services per site
– At somewhat more than 6 million per site, media & publishing
– Just over 4 million people per site receive education and training.

These sectors cover more reliable business websites including crucial local services, media outlets, institutions, certification systems, and more.

Utilities, Animals & Pets, and Beauty & Well-Being had the fewest average backlinks. This can mean that each industry places a greater emphasis on social media or has a large number of new company websites.

That Money & Insurance scored so poorly surprised me. I had anticipated the sector to average at least 1 million fewer backlinks per site than Shopping & Fashion.

Backlink Distribution by Format

In order to determine which backlink types worked the best, we also examined the distribution of each industry’s backlinks. The following two backlink types stood out:

– backlinks with images and text

– backlinks with an image

NOTE: the graphs below represent the total number of backlinks for each industry, not the average for each company website.

Across all industries, text backlinks were the most prevalent type:

• Public & Local Services received the most at just over 1.6 billion
• Education and Training was next at just over 1.5 billion
• Business Services followed at just over 1.3 billion
• Media & Publishing was the last with just over 1 billion

The second most common kind of backlinks were images. The two sectors that made the most use of them were:

• Electronics & Technology at close to 180 million
• Media & Publishing at just over 100 million

Form backlinks and frame backlinks were the other two types of backlinks utilised. However, when combined, they accounted for fewer than 5% of all backlinks across all business websites analysed in this study.

What does this mean?

All industries use text backlinks the most frequently, but some also rely heavily on image backlinks to drive traffic.

You should vary your strategy by using various backlink types to speak to various audiences.

 

Analysis #4 – Target Keyword Intent and the Intent That Led to the Most Traffic

Lastly, we looked at target keyword SEO intent in each industry based on the following categories:

• Commercial intent keywords: related to specific brands or services (“find a Starbucks near me”)
• Informational intent keywords: searching for answers to questions (“How to unclog a tub”)
• Navigational intent keywords: users looking for specific pages (“Comcast login page”)
• Transactional intent keywords: users are ready to buy (“buy converse shoes”)

When selecting target phrases, considering various keyword meanings might help you identify trends and business prospects in your sector.

So, what did we learn?

NOTE: The first chart indicates the keyword intent of target terms in each industry. The bottom chart shows which intent type resulted in traffic to each business site.

Informational intent was the most common keyword intent across all industries, accounting for more than 40% of target phrases.

Users are still at the beginning of their journey because they are typically top-of-the-funnel keywords.

With between 15 and 20 percent of phrases per industry, transactional intent was the next biggest intent category.

It is a good idea to create content that targets these terms or utilise paid advertisements because these users are prepared to buy.

The most popular purpose keywords for each industry’s corporate websites were then examined.

 

Utilities sites mostly target informational keywords, like other sectors of the economy. However, the majority of their traffic comes from search phrases that are more closely related to certain pages and their brand name.

This is probably the result of search behaviour rather than poor targeting techniques.

For instance, to find the appropriate page if someone wanted to pay a power bill, they may type “pay bill X” into Google. Although you wouldn’t explicitly target this term, it does drive traffic to your website. The best course of action is still to concentrate on authoritative, trustworthy informational keywords.

Similar to this, websites for money and insurance emphasise informational phrases but mostly rely on navigational terms for visitors.

This may be the result of effective branding combined with typical user search behaviour patterns. Users typically read your educational content before choosing you were the best option for them, thus for your navigational terms to be effective, they will typically have done so.

In contrast, firms in the construction and manufacturing sectors target transactional keywords more frequently than businesses in other sectors. This tactic obviously works because transactional terms account for the majority of their traffic.

Finally, compared to other businesses, Home Services targets more keywords with commercial intent. These are probably expressions that are more geographically specific, utilising words like “near me” or “in [city]”.

However, it is clear that less than 50% of their traffic is derived from transactional phrases. They may want to change their strategy to incorporate those terms into both their commercial approach and their focus.

Remember that not all of the traffic to your website is necessarily converting. Ensure that your website’s traffic is directed to the appropriate pages and that each page is optimised for conversions.

Conclusion: Summary of Findings

This data contained a few surprises as well as some outcomes that were precisely what we predicted.

Consider the importance of backlinks. The fact that the best-reviewed business websites typically have a lot of links is something that Google has been telling us for years.

The difference in the types of backlinks between various businesses caught people off guard. For websites wanting to create a more effective backlink profile, this information can be immensely beneficial.

I was also curious about the variations between the sources of traffic and the kinds of keyword intent that most websites target for SEO (mostly informational). This information may reveal fantastic marketing opportunities or weaknesses in your present strategy, depending on your industry.

With thanks to Neil Patel for the images.