Looking for tools to benchmark an industry

[growthat]

Hi everyone - I'm trying to benchmark an entire industry. Given that Google seems to adjust what ranking signals should be counted more heavily based on the industry/query - I'd like to be able to benchmark a specific industry.

As a silly example - let's say I want to know what ranking signals would most effect coffee shops, real estate agents, or manufacturers. Has anyone here ever found an efficient way to analyze:

1. Who the top 10 are for 5-10 keywords, in that industry

2. What they have in common (e.g. meta info, content length, ssl certs, etc.)

3. What were the differences in the higher ranking ones (domain name registration age, content quality, etc.)

It seems like there has to be a way to do this given that Moz, SEM Rush, and others release yearly reports that detail which ranking signals seem to be most important.

I'd just like to be able to know what the top ranking signals are for a specific industry, based off of who is ranking really well in that industry already.

Thanks!

[effectdigital]

Maybe not for a whole industry, but we have a pretty good way of evaluating very similar data for large query-spaces. A Query-space is basically a fuzzy search entity, or a group or relatively tightly bound keywords

Instinctively we know the types of keywords to type in (at the 'summit' of our query-space) to define the 11 sites we wish to compare. We can then rank up to 10,000 keywords across those 11 sites using a web-based ranking platform (to do a one-off snapshot of data, not to rank all 10,000 keywords daily / monthly, the cost of that would be mental!)

We have a special agreement with a particular platform whereby, they will allow us to pay for a 1-off ranking report (without any subscriptions) as long as the scope of it is large enough... For most people it probably wouldn't be cost efficient to even get the data (let alone put it to use)

When we have all the ranking position and ranking URL data for the 11 specified sites, we build a giant sheet that helps us to analyse and compare the data. We leverage certain click data against the ranking data (and against search volumes) in order to see who has the most 'SEO visibility' (worked out via a  bespoke formula) for any given keyword

Keywords are divided into keyword groups thematically to pin down the different areas of the query-space. We can then make bar charts that show which sites are doing best in which specific areas. Once that's done it's not hard to look at the ranking URLs and identify technical, content-based or off-site reasons why those pages are ranking better than our own (or our clients')

It's quite a big undertaking but what is produced is pretty useful. Unfortunately I can't give a step-by-step guide to reproduce the work as it relies on technology which only we have access to ('on-demand' web-based ranking platforms are hard to find) and is in the process of being patented

That being said, maybe this will get some ideas firing in terms of how you could do something similar

It's not quite an 'industry-wide' thing but it is pretty darn broad and usually comes out with at least 2-3 site alterations that could make tremendous ranking differences

[growthat]

Thanks for the thoughful response. I totally understand you can't give step by step - but that does spark some ideas, thanks!