A study was recently published by SimilarWeb detailing the top 10 sites that grew their organic search traffic in 2015 compared to 2014. Roy Hinkis of SimilarWeb explains the study’s methodology:
“To determine the biggest winners in year-over-year search growth we looked at the top 10,000 sites, judged by volume of traffic from organic search in of 2015, and compared this traffic to the same period in 2014. Of these sites, we discarded any that showed a negative trend in search traffic and only looked at sites that grew by 1% or more.”
Quora took home the crown of greatest percent increase in organic search traffic, growing 120% in 2015 over 2014. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact Quora’s search traffic came from 95% non-branded key phrases. This is in contrast to other sites on the list, like YouTube and Pinterest, where branded search terms make up half of their organic traffic.
In terms of pure traffic numbers alone, YouTube beat the others handily, although it only saw a 1% increase in search traffic. You can view the original chart in the study with the winners ranked by search traffic. I’ll reorder the top 10 winners here for a quick look at those with the greatest percent increases in search traffic year-over-year.
- Quora, up 120%
- Redit, up 73%
- Washington Post, up 51%
- Netflix, up 50%
- CNN, up 42%
- StackExchange, up 11%
- Pinterest, up 9%
- StackOverflow, up 8%
- USPS, up 3%
- YouTube, up 1%
In addition to ranking the overall top 10 sites, the SimilarWeb study ranks the top 10 sites by category. View the original study if you want to see the winners in: Adult, Arts and Entertainment, Education, Finance, Gambling, Online Marketing, Shopping, Social, Sports, and Travel.
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