Commentary
Can You See Me Now? Companies Ranking Highest In Search Visibility
- by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 14, 2013
Amazon, Zappos and Best Buy Web sites have become the most visible retailers in paid-search campaigns and the most likely to be seen in organic
search results, according to a recent study. Ask.com takes the top position for paid search overall.
The findings from a Searchmetrics study put Ask.com at the No. 1 position for the most visible paid-search advertisers on google.com overall with an average paid visibility score of 689,991.41. Amazon follows with 491,752.04; Zappos, 197,048.39; Google, 195,311.08; AT&T, 157,210.06; Best Buy, 133,838.84; Netflix, 123,876.55; eBay, 123,053.53; J.C. Penney, 119,278.55; and Apple, 115,217.33.
The visibilities score reflects the advertising activity of a domain on Google.com. Changes result from changes in the budget, so typically the higher the budget, the higher the score.
Google takes fourth place in the list of 20 top paid-search advertisers by using the ads to attract customers for its own products such as AdSense, and promoting its Web browser Google Chrome.
It makes sense that the "highly visible ads" and organic listings push consumers to the domain, such as Amazon. Wikipedia takes the No. 1 spot for the top 20 most visible sites in organic search on Google.com with 57,228,403.82, followed by Facebook at 11,505,117.71; Twitter, 9,390,714.43; IMDB, 9,161,111.31; Amazon, 8,560,202.10; Yahoo, 8,404,013.63; YouTube, 6,334,316.53; About, 6,046,110.78; Google, 5,957,750.14; and Apple, 4,448,499.47.
The study suggests Facebook and Twitter serve up at No. 1 and No.2, respectively, in the organic listings on Google's search engine because of the "massive volume of content generated on social networks every second."
Searchmetrics said it measures paid and organic search visibility on google.com by tracking paid and organic ranking of millions of keywords weekly and calculating the visibility scores based on the number of times a domain appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs) across the keyword set, its prominence within the search engine results pages, and the competitiveness of the keyword, such as higher search volumes equate to a higher visibility score.
Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.
Yet another data source that puts Ask.com's paid search arbitrage at number one advertiser in visibility. Of course they may not be a number one spender as they tend to prefer low positions on less expensive keywords that they can transform into higher yielding search results on Ask.com. Fascinating to see their continued arbitrage despite Google's policy annoucements.