Tober and Andrienko note that word count correlates with rankings, but they also advise not to just “go big” on content and hope for a boost in rankings. Industry specific trends Tober found that different ranking factors seemed to be weighted differently depending on the query itself, so Searchmetrics broke down the ranking factors by industry in their study (looking specifically at e-commerce, finance, healthcare, media and travel). The study looked at how the ranking factors within each of these industries were weighted relative to the average –
this helped determine which ranking factors are most relevant for each of these industries. For example, HTTPS is a bigger deal for financial sites, as these require more user trust; however, it doesn't seem to be that heavily weighted for travel sites. The jewelry retouching service use of images, on the other hand, was not so important for financial websites, but had a greater impact on travel sites. The point here is user intent: what does the user want? This is naturally going to be different depending on the industry. Niche specific trends It's not just different industries
that have different ranking factors, and Searchmetrics also looked at more types of niche websites to see what trends they might be good at. This included dating sites, SEO service sites, and recipe sites. Again, Tober found that certain ranking factors were weighted differently depending on the niche. For example, HTTPS usage is high among SEO sites, but not among dating and recipe sites. On the other hand, usage of structured data and Schema.org markup was highest among recipe sites – likely because recipes have valuable snippets associated with them in the SERPs. Overall,