Case Study: Search Results in Electronics Niche of E-Commerce

The Serpzilla team is with you again. So, this summer, we conducted research in the Electronics niche of e-Commerce. This niche includes products such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other digital gadgets. We previously published the article covering the first study of the research – a study on demand analysis in the niche. Now let’s take a look at our second study – the analysis of search results.

Who is this article for:

• For SEO specialists. It will help you understand what relationships exist, what affects the distribution of sites in the search results, and what their sites lack in order to defeat competitors. 
• Marketers and business owners. The material will help you look at your competitors and understand the SEO potential for your site.

How we got the data for this study

We worked with a list of about 230,000 niche-relevant keywords. You can read more about how we got and processed the data in our first article. We then collected the top 30 results for these keywords and enriched the data with metrics from Ahrefs. As a result, we had several gigabytes of raw data for analysis.

1. Ahrefs, DR and metrics correlations

Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools and, according to our surveys, the vast majority of SEO experts rely on its DR metric to evaluate trust – a degree of trust search engines have to the resource. DR is the evaluation of the strength of a website’s backlink profile, as well as its quantitative and qualitative reflection.

DR (Domain Rating) is measured on a scale from 0 (no trust) to 100 (the highest trust).

There are many similar metrics used in other popular services:

• CF/TF (Citation Flow and Trust Flow) from Majestic,
• DA (Domain Authority) from MOZ,
• AS (Authority Score) from SemRush.

From our observations, even though these metrics don’t always match each other 100% and there might be slight discrepancies, they correlate really well with Ahrefs’ DR. So even if you use some of these metrics instead of Ahrefs’ DR, it’s likely that the score will be close and the results will be similar.

Note: the number of links presented in the tables and graphs below is the median, meaning the average data reflecting “middle” of the website selection. In reality, the Ahrefs data, though quite extensive, does not show all the links. Various SEO specialists have reported there are 40-60% more links than Ahrefs can see.

The correlation between the keywords volume and DR in the top-5 on Google

The correlation is obvious: as the number of keywords in the top-5 grows, the trust of those domains also grows. And it is only logical to assume a large number of requests in the top-5 indicates successful promotion and good search traffic volume.

The correlation between traffic and DR

Looking at the correlation between DR and traffic we observe a similar situation:

The correlation between traffic and referring domains

As you can see, the correlation here is even more obvious:

The correlation between the keywords volume and referring domains

Again, we observe the same thing. No need to comment on that, just take a look at the data table we’ve compiled: 

The graphs and the table shows the volume of backlinks (referring domains) you need to rank in the Electronics niche. For example, websites that rank for 1,000-2,000 keywords need 6,762 domains on average. According to Ahrefs, about 5,000 of those are Do-follow backlinks. Keep in mind that Ahrefs doesn’t see all links. So add another 40-60% to 6,762.

The correlation between total keywords and DR

Now let’s look at how DR correlates with the total number of keywords ranking a website in the top 20:

As you can see, when the number of keywords sits at 100 and below, the median DR is at 30-35. It probably means that such a DR can be seen as a minimum benchmark at the first stage of link building.

However, in order to promote your website and compete with many others on a variety of keywords, you need to continue working on growing your backlink profile. And the competition in the niche is clearly visible, we will get to this soon.

The correlations shown above do not imply causation, but most SEO experts stand by the fact that link building is in the top-3 among most important ranking factors in Google. Here are a couple of articles to support the claim:

1. “Backlinks are arguably the most important ranking factor [at Google]” – Joshua Hardwick, head of content at Ahrefs
2. Correlation between ranking and inbound links – Eric Enge, founder and director of Stone Temple Consulting.

Do you want to get more organic traffic? Put some work into quality link building and do it better than your competitors.

2. SERP structure

As a reminder, we analyzed 230,305 keywords total or 219,718 if we exclude branded keywords. These keywords had 75,634 domains and 714,597 URLs ranking in the top 20. Let’s take a closer look at how these 75,634 domains are performing on SERPs.

Domain distribution by number of keywords

This is what our top-20 data looks like:

Meanwhile, if you look at the same distribution in the top-10, the total number of domains decreases, but the distribution of domains by the number of keywords remains mostly unchanged:

So what do we see above?

1. Only 17.8% of domains rank for more than 10 keywords (both in top-10 and in top-20).
2. Most domains rank for only 1-3 keywords.

URL distribution by number of keywords:

Such distribution data provides us with two more observations:

1. 56% of URLs rank via 1 keyword.
2. 30% of URLs rank via 2-5 keywords.

Top 50 websites by traffic (eCommerce, Electronics niche):

Top 50 URLs with most traffic:

What observations we were able to make at this stage:

1. We can tell which electronics brands are the most popular among the target audience.
2. Most URLs are product listings like catalog pages, etc. Therefore, it is important to pay extra attention to such pages and work with them.
3. A popular approach is to create product selections: for example, “Phones under ₹15,000”, “The best phones in India”, “The most popular phones with great cameras”, etc.
4. A number of pages and stores use dynamic dates to form catalogs and collections (in Title and in other parts of the page).
5. A number of page Titles and URLs contain “in India” – a good way to collect traffic for keywords that also contain “in India”.

Duplicate domains

How common do you think it is when SERP lists more than one result with the same domain? In the Electronics niche in 81% of cases all domains in the top-20 were unique. In 12.8% of cases one domain was listed 2 times. There also are cases when more than one domain was duplicated, or one domain was listed more than two times, but this is a rare occurrence (approx. 5%).

General conclusions from this study:

1. There are many different websites in the search results, but only a small portion of resources (3%) account for the majority of traffic. This indicates extremely high competition in the Electronics niche.
2. The important factor to help you succeed in SERP and even outgun your competitors is a strong, high-quality backlink profile.