For a while now, we not only calculate the general VisibilityIndex but also a separate one for 15 different sectors. For this, we clustered the keywords into categories and based our SectorVisibilityIndex on this. This can be quite interesting, for example, when you want to compare your domain, that is only servicing one sector, with a domain that services a broader range of topics – thanks to the SectorVisibilityIndex, we will only incorporate relevant keywords for that specific query. In this posting, I want to show what other fun things you can do with such a dataset.

I evaluated how strong a sector is concentrating on the strongest domains. For this, it comes in handy that the SectorVisibilityIndex is calculated in such a way, that – independently of the actual number of keywords – every sector has 10.000 points to distribute, which opens up the possibility of comparing sectors among themselves. The following diagram shows the percentage of visibility that is taken up by the 100 strongest domains for each sector:


Real Estate, Communication & Cell-phone as well as Car & Transportation come out noticeably on top. On the bottom we have Erotic, Fitness & Sport and News. Such an observation can come in quite handy if you are trying to decide in which sector you want to start your next project in. Looking at the data, I suggest you keep out of Real Estate – the existing domains are already stronger than average, which makes it rather hard for newcomers to gain ground. I also looked at how the concentration of these sectors was progressing. As far as the Top-100 domains are concerned, it does not look very spectacular, if we look at the Top-10 though, which are shown in the diagram below, we do see a few interesting trends:


The industry-leaders in Real Estate managed to gain even more ground over the last few years, thereby increasing their lead. Car & Transportation were much more “open” in 2008 than they are now, which means that it would have been easier to start a new project there then. All of these progressions have in common that they are still going up – it seems that Google is continuing and increasing to award large sites with trust, which pushes smaller domains from the visible area of the Google-SERPs.