Case Studies

The social forum Reddit boasts 70 million daily users and has an estimated organic search traffic of 786 million clicks per month. Market capitalisation currently sits at $12.47 billion. This report analyses Reddit’s organic growth, its key topic areas, competitive landscape, and future stability.

Brands, foods, recipes, clothes, household, information, finance, banking. While it might say Tesco on the domain, evaluating search marketing success across supermarket brands is difficult. You can take a high level domain vs domain comparative approach, or, for a better view of the competitive environment, use a targeted basket of […]

SISTRIX has been analysing the visibility of all domains with rankings on Google.co.uk, since 2010. The SISTRIX Visibility Index (VI) is ideally suited to comparing domains with each other and viewing changes over time. In this article we show you the top 100 most visible domains and analyse some of […]

The second Visibility Leaders study has been published and this time we look at the travel sector – one that’s huge in scale and is dominated by big brands. Five detailed reports from five data journalists and SEO experts include detailed analyses of the winners, key findings, a searchable list […]

The .org.uk domain registry has 440,642 registered domains and nearly all are owned by non-profit organisations. The aim of the non-profit websites in this domain space is to be visible, valuable, trustworthy and transparent, within a defined, sometimes sensitive topic remit – which sounds like a good starting point for […]

Blogs don’t work. Really? Here’s an interesting example of a ‘blog’ that is working, thanks to a plan and some structure. William Russell used data-driven SEO insights from SISTRIX to build a content strategy for long-term, sustainable traffic and higher Google rankings. In this post we take a look at […]

Did the Core Update affect my domain? How’s my domain move working? Did I get a manual penalty on my AI content site? Having a live, up-to-date view of rankings, rather than a synthetic traffic prediction, helps identify success and failure. Here are some examples of content ‘projects’ that have […]

Our TrendWatch research has been running for 6 months now and we’ve covered everything from toys to drugs, and from music to fashion across the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. As we reach the summer season, I’ve taken a look at some additional travel-related trends that appeared […]

As of this week, you can now use the movers and shakers feature for the complete timeline of the top domains, by Visibility Index, all the way back to 2011 for the UK.

The new eCommerce website, launched in April 2022, was aimed at providing more informational content and encouraging more people to visit stores – the long-awaited Primark digital shopfront has arrived! You can look, you can view availability, you can click-and-collect, but you still can’t get products delivered. That’s what makes […]

We enjoy very positive feedback on our Blog content with case studies and data studies the most popular so, to that end, we’ve built a data journalism team that will bring you more. The aim: create high-quality, interesting and transparent data-led stories to help the digital marketing community. The team […]

Founded in 2009, Nerdwallet.com is now aiming for an IPO. Speculation is that the company could launch with a valuation of 5 billion US dollars. According to Similarweb.com, Search (Google) is responsible for around 86% of visitors to the website. Of the 21 million visits per month to the IPO according to […]

An affiliate marketing project by The Sun analysed and compared with similar affiliate projects.

In this article we look at the visibility of some of the top UK supermarkets and reveal some issues lurking behind the fresh, online-only competitor, Ocado.

Visualising the visibility of retail websites as a high street, and why traffic isn’t a good measure of SEO work.

The Visibility Index allows anyone to analyse the relative size, growth rate or major changes in a domains search visibility over time. It helps with monitoring, digital due-diligence, competitor analysis and pitch-preparation. The Visibility Index history for Zarahome.com has a story to tell, and it includes huge periods of lost […]

Brexit is an important example of why keyword visibility tracking is important. New names, new expressions, new buzzwords and new legal terms mean it’s difficult to find out what’s working in Google Search. In October 2018 I started tracking 35 Brexit keywords and the visibility of 7 news media sites […]

Align every stakeholder through education, says Dominik Schwarz, chief inbound officer at HomeToGo. I recently spoke to Dominik to find out more about how a company can be built with SEO at the core. The video interview is shown below.

With 148 visibility points on Google UK you’re the 46th most-visible domain in the entire United Kingdom. Patient.co.uk had exactly that position. It was the most-visible private health-related domain of all. In short, successful. In June 2015 the company made the decision to move to the less geo-focused domain Patient.info. […]

Google has very recently started to use the loading speed of websites as a ranking factor for mobile Google Search results. In this article we explain exactly what ‘fast’ means and we share a new, free tool that will allow you to check the speed of your websites against others […]

Two weeks ago, we looked at the Winners on Google UK. Today we will look at those domains with the highest loss in visibility on Google UK. After reading this blog post, I hope you will have gotten some takeaways that you can use right away, for your projects. We […]

Many things in our environment can influence individuals and drive them to create their own “subjective social reality”. This systematic error in thinking, which affects the decisions and judgments many people arrive at, is known as Cognitive Bias. In short, it happens when someone makes a bad decision, which they […]

For years, Google used to limit the length of snippet texts, are short text previews of the search results, to two rows. Over the last couple of days, Google eased up on this rule and will now also show longer snippets in the search results.

Encrypting your communication through HTTPS is a topic close to Google’s heart. Mountain View showed this somewhat awkwardly by vaguely hinting at a possible connection between good rankings on Google and the use of HTTPS. From that point on, we have kept an eye on the state of the HTTPS […]

One month ago, Netflix.com had a dramatic loss in Visibility on Google, all over the world. To mention just a few of their important markets: they lost 71% Visibility in the UK, 64% in the USA, 59% in France, 49% in Italy, 43% in Germany and 39% in Spain.

The British domain of Marcia Kilgore’s company, FitFlop, recorded a loss of 71.5% visibility points on Google, precisely at the best moment of its history. FitFlop.co.uk was moved to FitFlop.com and the domain move flopped. The Domain managed to continuously increase its Visibility over the past 5 years until it reached […]

Let’s just take a look at the chart above. We clearly see that the SEO strategy of TheSun.co.uk before the paywall was not remarkable, a measly 8% growth over 3 years. After they initiated their paywall the Visibility on Google dropped from 65 to 3 points. The best Visibility score […]

(Translation of our German Blogpost from June 6th, 2017) A lot of companies and organizations have very fancy websites, which sadly miss the mark. Many times they are nothing more than a digitalized, glossy company brochure. To some this may actually sound great. Though sadly, company brochures are usually some […]

The past month has seen a lot of movement in the Google SERPs and – once again – nobody really knows what is going on. Google is keeping silent as to the changes they made – as usual. All we can do is try and spot patterns within the winners […]

When we reported about the Winners of Penguin 4.0 in October 2016, a domain that stood out was Watchshop.com. Almost exactly 4 years ago, in May 2013, Watchshop.com was hit by Google’s Penguin Update 2.0 (losing 40% of their visibility). 5 months later, in October 2013, it was hit again […]

User signals are one thing that you cannot imagine to be missing from a modern search engine optimization: show Google that your result is better than the others. In order to even get a chance at doing so, users need to click on your results. And this is where snippet […]

Within the past few weeks, we released our Winners&Losers list for Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. One domain that stood out for their SEO-success in 2016 was Pinterest.com. We even linked to an interview with Casey Winters, former growth product lead at Pinterest, where he explained how important SEO […]

Back in 2012 I held a conference talk about international and multilingual SEO and was thankful that Johannes gave me some great data from the Toolbox. At the end of last year, I was able to speak at the Inbound conference in Boston (which is nothing like what we know […]

The mobile/desktop scale is tipping towards mobile for more and more Google search markets. And the number of users who do their shopping on their mobile devices are also steadily increasing. No wonder that Google is irked by the fact that they do not have such a nicely controlled ecosystem […]

In August 2015, Parsely.com – a content analytics platform – released an Authority Report where they suggest that Facebook has surpassed Google as a top referring source to publishers. But is this true? Many European publishers would disagree. Anyway, one and half years and a number of report updates later, […]

A few weeks ago, I explained how using a directory structure which uses dates within the URLs can kill your content in Google. The examples TheGuardian.com, HuffingtonPost.co.uk and TechCrunch.com all show us that there is still much room for improvement and an opportunity for more traffic. Using dates in the URLs […]

Google just took off the gloves: yesterday was the day that my Chrome Browser started showing not only the green encryption-lock for HTTPS pages, but also explicitly telling me that the page is “Secure”. Google has already made us aware in a blogpost that they will start showing a “Not […]

An ancient Indian Minister, Sissa ibn Dahir (Sessa), invented the board game of Chess in order to direct the attention of his ruler, Shihram, to the problems in his country. The ruler expressed his enthusiasm for the game and Sessa was allowed to decided how he wanted to be compensated. […]

The domain Spotify.com has massively lost visibility worldwide on Google. The country with the largest loss is France (-82,1%) and the country with the smallest impact are the Netherlands (-44.5%). In the United Kingdom Spotify lost 48% of all their keywords (from 92,588 to 59,102) and 71% of their Visibility […]

The main reason to avoid dates within your directory structure is explained on page number 8 of the Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site […]

This week, the domain Cnet.com shows a 22% loss in their Visibility Index for Google US, this means that Cnet.com went from a Visibility index score of 266.07 last week, down to 208.8, right now. This may not sound like much, at first, but 22% for a such huge domain actually comes […]

In May of this year, the BBC announced far-reaching cuts to their web presence. “Soft news“ content such as magazine articles, recipes and travel advice would be reduced. The BBC’s director-general, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, said that the broadcasters’ websites “cannot be all things to all people“. All this is […]

The SEO Congress “Congreso SEO Profesional” is held every July in Madrid and specialises on presentations where website operators put their cards on the table, for all to see. Last year, for example, we had the opportunity to check out the exact data for the costs, auctions and traffic for TV-adds […]

A few weeks ago, I saw a great “Whiteboard Friday” episode by Rand Fishkin, which we agree with 100%. I too think that Google is all about delivering the best answer for the user, and for this, Google needs user behaviour data in order to decide which search result deserves […]

The Visibility history for Softonic.com shows a large loss on Google US (-40%), UK (-33%), Germany (-42%), Italy (-61%), France (-53%), the Netherlands (-31%), Brasil (-43%), their home-market Spain (-45%) and many more search markets. For our analysis, we will therefore simply stay on the US market, as the cause […]

About two months ago, Monster changed quite a bit of their internal website structure for both their USA and UK sites. Although the website architecture for both domains is very similar – both before and after the change – the positive effect is much more visible in the UK. Monster.co.uk […]

The most common mistake during a website redesign is that 301 redirects are not set, which causes Google to miss that the addresses for the pages have changed, as in the case of Zippo.co.uk: Please imagine the following: “Al Capone’s Spaghetti” is the UK’s most well known brand of Spaghetti. […]

Five years ago, in April 2011, Zappos’ market share in Google was more that 3 times as large as Nordstrom‘s – in numbers: 43 visibility points for Zappos vs 13 points for Nordstrom. Today, Nordstrom has twice the market share on Google as Zappos. During the time from April 2011 […]

Football, it is simply impossible to not talk about the most popular sport in the world, when you are in its homeland. Today, we will take a closer look at the domains for the Premier League clubs. These domains have a natural affinity for being great sources for evaluations, because […]

Microsoft is a huge company. Looking at their web properties it even seems somewhat like a public administration. They decide to develop a new product (etc.) on its own domain and, sooner or later, the decision is made to completely or partially incorporate the service into Microsoft.com. It is quite […]

A few months ago, we found this interesting blogpost “89% of Websites that Ranked 7 Years Ago are Not Ranking Now!“.  At first sight, 89 percent of all webpages losing all of their rankings after 7 years may look drastically high. On second thoughts, we believe this is due to the methodology […]

We will most likely see the Google Penguin 4.0 update early next year. This makes it a great time to look back at the domains on Google.co.uk that were penalized by the very first Google Penguin update in 2012 and see how they are doing today? I decided to select […]

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson announced that the website for the Mayor of London has been redesigned to be closer to Londoners. A true statement, as the new design is a positive change, though they lost about 40% of their visibility on Google in the process. This means that […]

All over the past week there has been major movement in the Google SERPs and many SEOs believe that the source of all the commotion is a Google Update. These ranking changes can be observed, measured and, if you understand them well, you can gain great benefits from them.

The Visibility Index score for SeneranataFlowers.com has crashed and there are no signs that the domain name has changed or that a redesign took place. On the Visibility Index chart for SeneranataFlowers.com you can see that SISTRIX automatically adds pins noting known Google updates, if the domain’s visibility has significantly […]

In theory, changing your domain name should not be complicated, especially if you follow the instructions Google provides. In practice, we can find numerous examples that contradict such rosy expectations. Changing the address of a website will always be accompanied by a certain degree of risk and the price you pay, […]

Ever since there has been such as thing as search engine optimization, the question of “How often are people clicking on each ranking position?” has been posed. Of course, there is no universal answer to this question – too many factors have a bearing on the click probability per position: […]

A “relaunch” is effectively a “reboot” and in our case means the fundamental revision of a web presence. A so-called “website relaunch” does not have to be limited to design changes only. Rather, it gives you the opportunity to review and redesign content, simplify the navigation structure or optimize the […]

Within the month of September the website Style.com took a sharp drop in their visibility index, to be more precise a decline of more than 90%. Therefore the domain lost almost all of their keyword rankings on Google.co.uk and Google.com. But for which reason?