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

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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):

Domain Traffic Keywords Top-5 Keywords Top-10 Keywords URLs DR
flipkart.com 50,758,505 93,946 127,886 120,630 13,019 88
amazon.in 46,158,030 91,082 129,386 117,420 16,774 91
91mobiles.com 42,448,015 79,389 99,355 97,906 4,500 75
gadgets360.com 35,822,435 61,473 86,153 83,484 5,691 82
mysmartprice.com 25,186,287 60,036 83,457 82,634 2,817 73
smartprix.com 16,839,842 33,433 74,933 72,925 5,896 63
gadgetsnow.com 15,090,256 20,729 47,767 45,634 5,516 77
digit.in 11,256,543 20,855 57,634 57,520 2,040 74
gsmarena.com 10,226,564 6,323 14,396 14,088 1,614 87
reliancedigital.in 8,823,517 6,910 17,969 17,843 1,120 70
pricebaba.com 6,921,926 12,408 45,822 45,755 1,946 61
dir.indiamart.com 5,995,626 12,172 20,533 20,162 2,750 85
apple.com 5,507,608 2,699 3,885 3,364 357 97
jio.com 5,183,853 3,216 4,148 2,960 261 78
samsung.com 5,127,608 6,598 10,913 9,869 810 92
vijaysales.com 5,094,824 4,576 14,716 13,813 1,517 63
bajajfinserv.in 4,896,719 8,748 22,114 21,910 230 75
myntra.com 4,335,135 3,796 7,581 7,550 569 79
bajajfinservmarkets.in 3,945,860 3,178 15,394 15,324 799 72
croma.com 3,914,277 3,698 10,164 10,009 1,328 70
mi.com 3,835,848 3,803 5,828 5,536 309 90
cashify.in 3,822,195 8,174 22,133 21,858 1,782 60
pricedekho.com 3,650,396 6,791 22,282 22,221 1,028 46
giznext.com 3,406,419 4,484 16,521 16,470 1,376 47
tatacliq.com 3,239,557 3,329 9,332 9,153 1,432 72
en.wikipedia.org 3,149,020 4,136 7,862 7,608 980 96
hp.com 2,898,893 6,219 10,174 8,950 892 91
olx.in 2,853,616 9,939 19,754 16,076 5,414 71
indiamart.com 2,840,636 14,071 24,320 22,028 8,052 85
justdial.com 2,792,295 8,864 12,161 12,129 5,779 82
boat-lifestyle.com 2,330,929 2,113 3,520 3,194 162 71
bgr.in 2,327,768 5,314 15,786 15,743 1,229 76
snapdeal.com 2,312,845 2,514 8,354 8,225 1,864 79
dell.com 2,204,362 8,240 13,056 10,781 1,725 91
realme.com 2,183,004 1,718 2,444 2,395 151 79
tech.hindustantimes.com 2,154,870 980 3,518 3,502 788 88
quora.com 2,008,557 16,504 30,061 29,636 7,260 91
newindianexpress.com 1,867,937 7,812 15,088 15,018 175 84
techradar.com 1,811,475 7,749 17,881 17,820 795 90
gizbot.com 1,780,134 5,808 16,303 16,275 1,308 73
play.google.com 1,743,167 1,721 3,601 3,580 1,304 96
sangeethamobiles.com 1,657,577 1,706 5,328 5,214 464 75
tomsguide.com 1,627,577 4,121 8,023 8,012 342 86
oneplus.in 1,586,280 2,038 2,915 2,796 163 73
headphonezone.in 1,529,637 1,225 2,666 2,659 208 55
timesofindia.indiatimes.com 1,500,159 4,414 11,094 11,064 1,014 91
paytmmall.com 1,451,139 3,057 8,441 8,434 264 73
youtube.com 1,417,869 6,315 14,080 9,561 8,441 99
pcmag.com 1,410,658 4,980 11,036 11,025 676 91
amazon.com 1,390,019 4,400 6,290 6,179 2,471 96

Top 50 URLs with most traffic:

URL Traffic Keywords Top-5 Keywords Top-10 Keywords
Mobile Phones Online at Best Prices in India – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/mobile-phones-store 
3,168,293 2,602 4,364 6,050
Wireless Headphones – boAt
https://www.boat-lifestyle.com/collections/bluetooth-wireless-headphones 
1,920,975 673 1,318 3,261
Mobile Phones: Buy New Mobiles Online at Best Prices in India
https://www.amazon.in/mobile-phones/b?ie=UTF8&node=1389401031 
1,744,684 952 1,883 2,644
Buy Laptops Online at Low Prices – Amazon.in
https://www.amazon.in/Laptops/b?ie=UTF8&node=1375424031 
1,659,659 1,023 1,513 1,985
Buy Laptops Online | Best Laptop Prices in India – Reliance …
https://www.reliancedigital.in/laptops/c/S101210 
1,588,739 658 1,369 2,843
Mobile Phones – Latest Mobiles Online at Best Prices
https://www.reliancedigital.in/smartphones/c/S101711 
1,582,836 1,065 2,176 5,214
Earphones: Buy Headphones online at best prices in India
https://www.amazon.in/headphones/b?ie=UTF8&node=1388921031 
1,449,779 822 944 1,008
Vivo Mobile Phones Price List in India | 1st June 2022
https://www.91mobiles.com/vivo-mobile-price-list-in-india 
1,392,792 1,139 1,251 1,335
Mi Mobile Phones (MI मोबाइल) and Smartphones … – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/mobiles/mi~brand/pr?sid=tyy,4io 
1,359,374 1,154 1,866 2,231
All Xiaomi Phones in India 2021 – Mi India
https://www.mi.com/in/all-xiaomi-phones 
1,344,221 1,086 1,582 2,287
Xiaomi Mobile Price List In India 1st June 2022 | Redmi Phones
https://www.91mobiles.com/xiaomi-mobile-price-list-in-india 
1,338,757 1,311 1,478 1,564
latest mobile phones under 10000 – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/mobiles/~mobile-phones-under-rs10000/pr?sid=tyy%2C4io 
1,294,623 2,645 3,675 4,369
Mobile Phones | Buy Latest Mobiles Online at Best Prices in …
https://www.croma.com/phones-wearables/mobile-phones/c/10 
1,270,110 758 1,783 4,325
New Mobile Phones 2022 | Latest Mobile Price List in India
https://www.mysmartprice.com/mobile/pricelist/latest-mobile-phones.html 
1,265,613 1,826 2,060 2,211
All Smartphones – Latest Android Mobile Phones – Samsung
https://www.samsung.com/in/smartphones/all-smartphones/ 
1,251,780 1,181 2,262 3,705
Biggest Deals on Laptops Online at Best Price in India – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/laptops-store 
1,213,492 921 1,684 2,645
Best Mobile Phones Under 10000 (Jun 2022) – MySmartPrice
https://www.mysmartprice.com/mobile/pricelist/price-of-mobiles-between-rs-5000-and-rs-10000-in-india.html 
1,192,178 2,370 2,681 2,796
Vivo Mobile Phones Price List 2022 – NDTV Gadgets 360
https://gadgets360.com/mobiles/vivo-price-list 
1,169,604 1,102 1,245 1,307
Mobile Phones | Mobile Prices in India | Online Mobile …
https://www.91mobiles.com/ 
1,134,237 561 1,206 1,697
Best realme smartphones and offers – realme (India)
https://www.realme.com/in/realme-phones 
1,115,262 871 1,178 2,718
Free voice and digital freedom for all JioPhone users
https://www.jio.com/en-in/jiophone 
1,098,020 777 858 1,337
Mobile Phones Under Rs.15000 – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/mobiles/~mobile-phones-under-rs15000/pr?sid=tyy%2C4io 
1,092,068 1,335 2,801 3,617
Upto 80 % Off on Bluetooth Headphones Online – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/q/bluetooth-headphones 
1,089,869 1,198 1,416 1,566
JioPhone Next 4G Smartphone – Fully featured Android Phone
https://www.jio.com/next 
1,089,807 396 503 1,084
Samsung Mobile Phones – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/samsung-mobile-store 
1,063,055 1,541 2,615 3,464
Jio Phone Next Price in India, Specifications, Comparison (1st …
https://gadgets360.com/jio-phone-next-price-in-india-103071 
1,032,861 403 489 554
Samsung Mobile Phones Price List in India | 1st June 2022
https://www.91mobiles.com/samsung-mobile-price-list-in-india 
1,025,167 1,811 2,104 2,200
iPhone – Apple (IN)
https://www.apple.com/in/iphone/ 
1,020,592 220 484 783
Mobile Phones | Buy Latest Phones at Best Price in India at …
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/mobile-phones 
1,011,843 31 195 1,343
Best Mobile Phones Under 15000 (May 2022) – MySmartPrice
https://www.mysmartprice.com/mobile/pricelist/price-of-mobiles-between-rs-10000-and-rs-15000-in-india.html 
1,008,077 1,461 1,718 1,891
Jio Phone Next 32 GB ROM, 2 GB RAM, Blue Smartphone
https://www.amazon.in/Jio-Phone-Next-Blue-Smartphone/dp/B09P8RC8HG 
1,005,403 99 186 247
Laptop Computers – HP
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/cat/laptops 
1,004,410 99 176 367
Latest Mobile Phones 2022 Price in India, Newly … – Digit
https://www.digit.in/latest-mobile-phones/ 
972,360 1,640 2,254 2,531
Vivo Mobile Phones Price List in India – Smartprix
https://www.smartprix.com/mobiles/vivo-brand 
969,895 749 1,294 1,668
Xiaomi Mobile Phones Price List 2022 – NDTV Gadgets 360
https://gadgets360.com/mobiles/xiaomi-price-list 
968,294 1,091 1,251 1,335
Latest Mobile Phones in India – 91Mobiles
https://www.91mobiles.com/latest-mobiles-in-india 
962,581 1,372 1,417 1,454
Upto 80% Off on Headphones & Earphones Online – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/headphones-store 
960,818 490 610 798
Buy Headphones & Earphones Online UPTO 50% OFF
https://www.reliancedigital.in/headphones-headsets/c/S101021 
945,302 462 1,252 2,877
Xiaomi Mobile Phones Price List in India – Smartprix
https://www.smartprix.com/mobiles/xiaomi-brand 
942,089 846 1,512 1,850
Vivo Mobile Phones – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/mobiles/vivo~brand/pr?sid=tyy,4io 
901,930 576 871 1,039
Samsung Mobile Phones Price List 2022 – NDTV Gadgets 360
https://gadgets360.com/mobiles/samsung-price-list 
893,125 1,820 2,160 2,323
Latest & New Mobile Phones List in (2022) – NDTV Gadgets 360
https://gadgets360.com/mobiles/latest-phones 
891,459 969 1,319 1,383
Best Mobile Phones Under 15000 In India [May 2022] – Bajaj …
https://www.bajajfinserv.in/insights/best-mobile-phone-under-15000 
883,894 1,035 1,781 3,082
Mobiles – Realme Mobile Phones: Buy Online at Best Prices …
https://www.flipkart.com/mobiles/realme~brand/pr?sid=tyy%2C4io 
881,443 623 1,062 1,223
Oppo Mobile Phones Online at Best Prices and Offers in India
https://www.flipkart.com/oppo-mobile-phones-store 
877,909 844 1,336 1,476
RealMe Mobile Phones Price List in India | 1st June 2022
https://www.91mobiles.com/realme-mobile-price-list-in-india 
868,759 613 651 674
Buy Apple iPhones online at Best Prices in INDIA on … – Flipkart
https://www.flipkart.com/mobiles/apple~brand/pr?sid=tyy,4io 
864,145 459 645 757
Oppo Mobile Phones Price List in India | 1st June 2022
https://www.91mobiles.com/oppo-mobile-price-list-in-india 
855,657 966 1,068 1,118
OnePlus Mobile Phones Price List in India | 1st June 2022
https://www.91mobiles.com/oneplus-mobile-price-list-in-india 
849,882 917 1,039 1,076
Get up to 70% off on Bluetooth Earphones Online – Myntra
https://www.myntra.com/bluetooth-earphones 
842,282 518 754 1,056

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.
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