Recently, Advertising Age released their Search Marketing Fact Pack for 2007. This is a great document to download and keep by your computer for casual reference as it is jam-packed with little factoids.
One of the sections provides the top industry categories that are getting the most traffic from search. At first, I was pretty surprised by the results and so conducted a straw poll around theVL office to find that we were all were guessing similar industries – travel, news, sports, etc. But we were all wrong.
Here’s the top 10 industry categories who are getting the highest percentage of their traffic (visits) from search engines:
| Rank | Industry | Percent of Traffic from Search Engines |
| 1 | Education | 44.64% |
| 2 | Health and medical | 44.43% |
| 3 | Food and beverage | 39.74% |
| 4 | Music | 39.16% |
| 5 | Community | 34.73% |
| 6 | Travel | 32.51% |
| 7 | Government | 31.78% |
| 8 | Shopping and classifieds | 25.55% |
| 9 | Aviation | 24.85% |
| 10 | Automotive | 23.75% |
So we were way off.
I never would have guessed Education or Health and medical… perhaps its because these industries spend less on other forms of advertising as ways of driving traffic to their site (compared with Travel, Shopping etc). Amazingly – Sports came bottom of the list with only 9.84% of their traffic coming from search engines.
Either way its some intriguing statistics and highlights the need/opportunity for some industries to place more effort into search marketing.
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