We recently looked at the UK sites that made the biggest SEO gains in 2015, but now it’s time to cross the pond to see which US sites did the best last year.
Juan González the SEO & Country Manager at Sistrix spent a considerable amount of time last week evaluating 200 domains, and has given us an exclusive look at the top 100.
Please note, we haven’t included any adult-entertainment websites in this list – of which there were only three. Also, as there were no major Google updates in 2015, most of these problems were “home-made by the website operators.”
The insights below each domain are from Juan himself, so a massive thank you for his input.
1) Choicehotels.com
In May 2015 Choice Hotels consolidated all of its domains – comfortsuites.com, qualityinn.com, comfortinn.com and many more – into the main domain of choicehotels.com.
The redirects are sound but the only hazard may be the fact the consolidated domains still return a 200 status code when a Googlebot useragent visits. It might be a good idea for them to fix this potential cloaking problem soon.
2) Quora.com
We’ve already looked more closely at Quora in our UK review.
Basically, Quora has cornered the market when it comes to Q&A sites, and has very impressive URLs like https://www.quora.com/Can-I-burn-an-audio-CD-on-a-DVD-R-and-have-it-behave-as-a-CD-R-so-I-can-play-it-in-all-cars-and-players which themselves rank for almost 100 Keywords on Google:
3) Groupon.com
Groupon managed to massively build up their /coupons/stores/ directory during 2015, so that now a good 33% of the top 10 keywords for the entire domain are generated in this directory.
Looking at the top keywords for the entire domain, there are 65,338 top 100 keywords but only 2,545 top 10 keywords, so there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.
4) Angieslist.com
The crowd-sourced local business review site may be massive when it comes to indexed pages (more than 30 million), though it seems that its quality is not what Google wants.
Out of more than 30 million indexed pages, we found only about 32,000 URLs in the Top 100 results, with less than 1,300 URLs making it into the Top 10.
5) Zomato.com
Again, a domain which we covered in our UK review. Zomato provides exactly the kind of information that Google looks for when it serves localised results to searchers – restaurant reviews, user ratings, photos and menus.
Much of its improved visibility was down to Zomato’s purchase of urbanspoon.com, the content of which redirected to zomato.com from June 2015.
Here’s the Top 20 US domains that increased in Google visibility in 2015:
- choicehotels.com 397.81%
- quora.com 394.40%
- groupon.com 195.09%
- angieslist.com 189.35%
- zomato.com 185.29%
- macmillandictionary.com 147.24%
- etsy.com 136.76%
- academy.com 132.74%
- weather.com 130.98%
- cambridge.org 129.74%
- washingtonpost.com 123.25%
- burlingtoncoatfactory.com 119.02%
- wayfair.com 106.22%
- authoritynutrition.com 103.99%
- skyscanner.com 100.06%
- mentalfloss.com 99.85%
- instagram.com 98.93%
- express.com 96.79%
- cinemablend.com 95.22%
- sears.com 86.87%
Related reading
Baidu SEO: How to optimize for China’s biggest search engine
Speak to pretty much anyone about SEO and the rhetoric will largely be in regards to the "Big G". But there are countries in the world where Google is not king, and one of them is China. If you want to optimize for the second-largest economy in the world, here's what you need to know about Baidu, China's primary search engine.
Google Search Console: What the latest updates mean for marketers
Google Search Console has benefited from some significant upgrades over the past decade. That said, it is still far from perfect and few would argue that it provides a complete package in its current guise. Therefore, Google's recent announcement of some changes to the platform was very warmly received by the SEO community.
How to optimize featured snippets for voice search
When it comes to voice search, featured snippets are key. If a searcher is using voice search and expecting a verbal reply, they will not be presented with a choice of results - and where a featured snippet is present, this will be the result read out. So how can you optimize your featured snippets for voice search?
Google Analytics: Misunderstandings that hold marketers back
As Google continues to improve its analytics offerings, marketers need to understand the data in front of them. Unfortunately, there are a few misunderstandings surrounding the way that Google collects, configures, processes, and reports data. Here are some commonly misunderstood metrics and features within the core Google Analytics interface.
