• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 30, 2019

Amazon remains the ecommerce brand with the biggest improvement in terms of organic search performance on Google within the past year, but other U.S. ecommerce sites face competition from Alibaba and others.

Etsy came in at No. 2 on the list, according to Searchmetrics' list of the 10 ecommerce companies that have gained the most visibility in 2018.

The Searchmetrics study measures search performance by analyzing weekly search results for millions of keywords throughout the year and scoring the websites for factors such as how frequently they appear in results and how high they rank.

The study focused on analyzing SEO Visibility, search performance, on Google Search in the United States.

Cargurus, the auto listing marketplace, came in at No. 3, and slickdeals.net, a deals and coupons site, ranked at No. 4. Academy came in at No. 5.

Ashley Furniture HomeStore, the website of the furniture chain with more than 800 locations worldwide, improved its search performance by 362%, coming in at No. 6 on Searchmetrics’ list. Dealsplus came in at No. 7, Blackfriday at No. 8, DSW at No. 9. And adding to the list at No. 10 is Alibaba’s online marketplace, AliExpress, which improved 236%.

“Google also increasingly requires ecommerce sites designed to address the specific needs of shoppers in their niche rather than following generic search strategies,” according to the report. “For example ecommerce sites in the 'furniture' niche can get away with displaying nearly 28 images on a page (more than most other niches) and still rank highly − despite the fact that more images can sometimes make pages load slower.”

Searchmetrics determined that it is likely Google learned search queries for the furniture niche work best when giving searchers the opportunity to scan through a large selection of relevant images.