BrightEdge here, reporting on the weather! 

At BrightEdge, we’ve spent a lot of time in the past year looking at how organic search varies across different industries.  We shared some insights into how Core Web Vitals impacted keywords across industries, we looked at how vaccines shaped search behavior and most recently, we’ve been looking at how attributes of winning sites vary across industries.  With last year’s announcement of SearchIQ, we’ve been able to take a deeper look at different attributes of high-ranking sites to see if there are discernable differences that could be useful.  We found that while there are many commonalities, there are some big differences worth considering.

Defining industries and measuring results

Using some indices and Data Cube, we researched the top 1,000 keywords for 10 industries we were curious about — a total of 10,000 total keywords.  This was fed into SearchIQ to pinpoint the attributes of all the pages ranking in top positions.  We then ran a correlation analysis to see if better metrics corresponded to higher rankings. We categorized these attributes into four buckets:

• Page Speed – Factors that would indicate pages load faster- including Core Web Vitals
• On-Page Factors – We assembled common factors SEO’s look at including keyword presence in places like titles, content length and so forth
• Schema Usage- We collected the most common schema types the winning sites were using
• Backlinks- we looked at a few top level attributes of the backlink profile for the top ranking pages to see if there were noticeable correlations to higher results.

Benchmarks across industries vary significantly

When we looked at all 10 industries, we saw that the common attributes of top sites vary significantly.  For example, we saw that with the top software-related keywords, the top pages loaded fairly quick but that did not necessarily translate to higher rankings.  We also found that schema usage is still pretty thin for many categories.  There were some interesting surprises; we saw how-to schema types common in real estate, suggesting the nature of winning pages may speak to users looking to learn.  We are sharing our weather report on all the different attributes we collected here.  You can use this infographic to see how your site stacks up. We’ll be checking in regularly on these top attributes and sharing how things change over time. With 2022 being our first full year since the page experience update rolled out, and new concepts like MUM improving how Google interprets content, we expect to see some interesting changes over the coming years! 

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