• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 6, 2023

From social to email, paid, video and organic marketing, marketers are tasked with staying on top of a growing number of channels that drive traffic, but organic search remains the most cost-effective and impactful channel in the long term, according to the findings.

On average, organic search produced 36% of overall website traffic for the six key industries that Conductor analyzed for Organic Industry Benchmarks, an overview of organic SEO traffic and search engine-result page trends across industry websites in 2023.

One in three website visitors to a domain come from organic search for the six industries analyzed.

How much organic traffic do these industries receive?:

• Technology -- 41%
• Healthcare -- 39%
• Professional Services -- 39%
• Travel & Hospitality -- 35%
• Retail -- 32%
• Finance -- 28%

From social to email, paid, video, and organic marketing, marketers are tasked with staying on top of a growing number of traffic-driving channels, but organic search remains the most cost-effective and impactful channel in the long term, according to the findings.

Conductor, and enterprise search engine optimization provider, wanted to confirm the benefits of organic traffic and the impact effective SEO has on business and revenue growth. The company identified industry-specific benchmarks for organic search in 2023 to help enterprise companies better evaluate the effectiveness of organic SEO and learn how to adapt as the industry changes.

The research required Conductor to analyze more than 600 enterprise domains from leading brands, each categorized into six industries and broken down by subindustries to identify traffic trends, top content providers, and more. The research adds a layer of industry-specific benchmark data to the information provided by integrated website analytics like Google Analytics.

The industries selected were identified as top economic drivers and are expected to drive significant revenue growth during the next five to 10 years. Department stores and online retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Target were excluded from the retail industry data.

The average organic traffic values were based on global website traffic data for desktop devices. The top content providers by subindustry data and the strategic insights that can be gained from it are based on U.S.-specific search data in Google.

Conductor analyzed each industry’s organic search traffic benchmarks by focusing on the corresponding sub-industries, then evaluated April 2023 organic traffic data to get an average for each subindustry.

The average organic traffic value is based on each industry’s overall benchmark and determined by the corresponding PPC costs for that traffic.

Real estate had the highest monthly organic traffic on average among the sub-industries. These sites ranked well on search-engine results pages (SERPs) because they leverage programmatic SEO to automatically generate landing pages for states, cities, and neighborhoods, according to the report.

Understanding the latest ranking in Google -- as well as trends for the top rich search result types by industry -- can be one of the best ways to gauge whether the company provides the best information to those looking for answers, according to the report.

Searchers looking into real estate are most likely not tied to a brand. This makes investing in SEO and the website experience more crucial, since the return on investment (ROI) could be significant if a site provides the desired property solution.

Many companies in the healthcare industry see a significant portion of organic traffic coming from informational searches.

Building a content strategy centered on defining medical terms, conditions, medications, new research findings, or common healthcare coverage questions in the form of glossary-style content can be a valuable.

For those in the medical sub-industry, there is a drastic uptick in non-branded organic traffic such as hospitals, labs, and urgent care centers.

Retailers can reduce paid spend and increase organic traffic by investing in innovative content strategies.

One missed opportunity for most apparel sites was capitalizing on the 1.3K MSV (monthly search volume) for the search term “eras tour outfits” and related phrases.

As Taylor Swift’s 2023 tour continues to dominate social and search trends, only a few forward-thinking brands have created an Eras-specific grouping of apparel and accessories for fans to wear to the show. This is one example of how keeping a pulse on search trends can increase organic traffic and revenue generation.