Before we get into the details, we want to make clear that this is something we created to scratch our own nerdy itch. We will be using 2019 turnover figures and all data is publicly available using Google’s Ad Transparency platform and of course aHrefs – one of our favourite SEO tools.
Estimated traffic figures are exactly that, estimated. Also, brands can display thousands of ads and bid on thousands of keywords at any given time which is worth keeping in mind.
Now on to the good stuff!
St. James’s Place PLC
Turnover: £15,700,000,000
Proving you don’t have to be in London to succeed in finance, one of the St James’s Place partners (trading as Quayside Wealth Management) is based in Gloucester. St James’s Place has over £140 billion in funds under management. The wealth management organisation SJP also has a great digital presence reaching thousands of visitors every month.
SEO
Ahrefs Domain Rating: 74. They rank for over 21,000 keywords driving an estimated 108,000 visits per month through organic search alone.
Top Keywords
For this massive brand, their top keywords by volume are brand terms – ‘st james’ place’ and ‘sjp’ which is not a huge surprise. In terms of non-brand keywords – they rank 3rd for ‘wealth management which has over 5,000 searches per month.
Competitors
theprivateoffice.com with 4,500 common keywords and 16.7K monthly traffic, nutmeg.com with 4,500 common keywords and 118K est. monthly search traffic. Standardlife.co.uk 5,772 common keywords with 192K monthly search traffic and vanguardinvestegor.co.uk 4,948 common keywords with 340,00 monthly average search traffic.
Google Ads
Thanks to Google’s ad transparency tool, we know that they are running over 200 ads across Google’s Network with search ads targeting Financial Advice, Reports & answering FAQ’s.
SJP has spent years building a brand that does a lot of the heavy lifting for them but still engages users through ads & a top-notch organic search presence.
Spirax Sarco
Turnover £1,150,000,000
The company headquartered in Cheltenham is known for it’s products for the efficient use of steam and industrial fluids. Their turnover is said to have been over £1.15bn. Heavy industry and manufacturing specialists have a brand that spreads far and wide. As does their web presence.
SEO
Ahrefs Domain Rating 71. Spirax Sarco ranks for over 42,000 keywords and drives over 102,000 organic searches to their site every month.
Top Keywords
Naturally the brand terms ‘spirax sarco’ are top traffic-driving terms for the company. Non-brand terms such as safety valve as well as some generic terms including steam table, liquid & safety valves for boilers’. Generally ranking in the top 3 positions for dozens of highly relevant keywords is a good thing and we can see these at scale.
Competitors
tlv.com with 504 common keywords 2,700 monthly visitors, valvesonline.co.uk with 392 common keywords 10,700 monthly visitors and johnsonvalves.co.uk with 290 common keywords and 2,700 monthly visitors.
Google Ads
We couldn’t see any evidence of Spirax Sarco ads running during our research. They may not be advertising on Google. Unfortunately, we did see some competitors running ads for ‘blowdown vessels’ one of their top terms – potentially taking traffic and sales that could be theirs.
Mears Group PLC
Turnover £900,000,000
Mears Group employs over 10,000 people and manages 17,000 homes for local and central government authorities. In addition, the company keeps 750,000 social housing homes in good shape – no small task we imagine. However, with turnover reportedly at £900m it’s no bad business.
SEO
Mears Group has a Domain Rating of 55 and ranks for over 2.5K keywords and an estimated 11,000 average visits from organic search. The company which was founded in 1996 has a smaller niche than some others in the list but is successful nonetheless.
Top Keywords
Again, like many of these mammoth organisations, brand terms are key traffic drivers. The type of business Mears Group means that its communications and web presence is more about contact and customer service than transactions. This shows in search behaviour patterns with the brand name + location showing up as significant traffic drivers to their website.
Competitors
Cross Keys Homes UK with 65 common keywords 10,400 organic search traffic, Hyde Housing with 113 common keywords and 8,700 traffic and Moat.co.uk with 31 common keywords and 9.9K average search traffic.
Google Ads
During our research, we could not find any currently running Ads for Mears Group PLC.
Superdry PLC
Turnover £872,000,000
With over £870m in turnover and 3200 staff, Superdry is a fantastic global brand. With over 500 branded locations worldwide, the company has an expansive global footprint.
SEO
Superdry.com the flagship website has an impressive domain rating of 73. The site receives an estimated 796,000 organic visits per month and ranks for over 294,000 keywords.
Top Keywords
The fashion industry sees different search patterns, for Super Dry the key one is [brand term + category]. Filtering out the brand terms; top-performing key generic keywords include ‘long shorts for men’, ‘varsity jacket’ and ‘hawaiian shirts for men’. Ranking for these generic keywords is a great way to bring a cold audience to the brand although conversion rates are not likely to be as high straight away – this traffic can typically come back and convert via brand campaigns.
Competitors
The fashion industry is extremely competitive as you can imagine. With top competitors including Zalanda.co.uk and 59K common keywords and 2.3M visits per month, Houseoffraser.co.uk with 5.5M organic visits per month and 66K common queries, next.co.uk with 28.M visits per month 80K common keywords.
Google Ads
Superdry is at the time of writing running over 500 ads across all formats in Google Networks. Impressive. We saw brand-paid activity and some ‘protectionist’ behaviour – Superdry bidding against their own brand term to protect against competitors. We also saw Google Shopping ads which are great for fashion brands because the end user can see the exact item of clothing they might be clicking on.
Safran Group
Turnover £864,000,000
Selling to airlines, you probably need way more engineers than you do SEO’s.
SEO
According to aHrefs Safran Group ranks for over 53,000 keywords and drives 225,000 site visits per month through organic search. The majority of this traffic is brand activity.
Top Keywords
Key traffic driving keywords for Safran Group are no surprise to be generic terms – interestingly an estimated 5,000 searches per month for ‘safran share price’ – suggests investors are watching the share price very closely.
Competitors
In terms of competitors, we see the usual aerospace juggernauts, including geaerospace.com, airbus.com and rolls-royce.com. With exceptionally long lead times & multiple touch points per sale, we’d like to offer prayers and condolences to all those who work in marketing at Safran Group. As well as our phone number if they want an extra pair of hands ;o)
Google Ads
Google Ads Transparency tool shows no ads being run by Safran Group at the time of writing.
Steinhoff UK Retail Limited
Turnover £784,000,000
We hadn’t heard of them either. Steinhoff owns household brands like Bensons for Beds. From a search marketing perspective, the investor relations site: https://www.steinhoffinternational.com/ has a domain rating of 78 but quite frankly the investor relations site is not too interesting, but the brands are.
We’ve had a look at one of their biggest – Bensons for Beds
SEO
Domain rating of 62, is ranking for 88,500 organic keywords and driving an estimated 334,000 organic search visits. We found this site really interesting to break down.
Top Keywords
Key traffic-driving keywords are the brand terms driving tens of thousands of searches per month. ‘Bensons for beds’ drives an estimated 137,000 searches per month. Bensons for beds also ranks highly for highly competitive keywords ‘bed frames’ ‘single bed’ and ‘bed’. Each of these keywords shows a massive amount of searches per month, combining to over 100,000 searches per month.
Competitors
Key competitors are happybeds.co.uk with 24K common keywords dreams.co.uk with 35K common keywords time4sleep.co.uk with 17.6K keywords. We saw many more ‘lesser known’ brands which were really interesting – highlighting the fierce competition within the niche.
Google Ads
Interestingly for this industry we saw heavy competitor activity in brand term searches as well as spending against its own brand. Many big brands both consumer and B2B will be spending on Google Ads against their brand name to protect from competitors.
Unfortunately, there is almost nothing you can do to stop competitors bidding on your brand & in our testing, the Simba Sleep brand and Dreams were key competitors frequently outranking Bensons for Beds. Bensons for beds has likely spent tens/hundreds of millions of £’s building its brand over the years & (un)fortunately competitors are able to piggyback off that as consumers go to search for the brand.
Bensons for beds is currently running over 800 ads across Google Networks both search and display. We’ll leave it at that.
Renishaw PLC
Turnover £611,000,00
A world leader in 3D printing, Renishaw is the only UK business that prints metal parts from metal powder. The company primarily manufactures products and delivers services used in jet engines and wind turbines as well as dentistry and brain surgery. The Renishaw site does have an e-Commerce function but if we’re quite honest, we’d love to get our hands on it and take it to the next level!
SEO
Top traffic-driving keywords include the brand ‘Renishaw’ – and some generics with interferometry & electric vehicle manufacturing.
Top Keywords
From our experience – for manufacturing companies in niche industries – search volume isn’t the be-all and end-all when choosing which terms to target and prioritise. Ranking in the top positions for ‘electric vehicle manufacturing’ is likely to be more of a commercial benefit than Interferometry as a standalone (which Renishaw currently owns the structured snippet for).
Competitors
Despite being one of the best in the world, Renishaw PLC will still battle it out in the SERPS with the well-funded competition. While in an extremely niche market, the Renishaw website is still competing for traffic with the likes of US-based desktop metal – a newer incumbent in the world of additive manufacturing and 3D printing with a DR of 73 that’s no small competition.
Google Ads
While not currently running any brand campaigns we did see 13 Search Ads currently live for Rotary Encoders (we don’t know what that is either) and some display ads for smart manufacturing solutions.
Nous Recommends
We would highly recommend running retargeting ads for site visitors to key pages on the site – using first-party data to retarget across search, and retargeting across LinkedIn.
GE Aviation Systems – Another aerospace company on the leaderboard.
Turnover: 596,000,000
Thinking about it, with these revenue figures maybe we should pivot industries…
SEO
While we can’t imagine there are millions of everyday people lining up to spend 6-7 figures on high-tech aerospace systems. There are some interesting highlights – more search activity than we would have thought given the market.
Top keywords:
Top traffic-driving terms are the generic terms for the brand. GE Aviation’s website drives thousands of searches per month to its site. Typically for such a niche brand, the top search terms to the site are brand but also some specific product models. We saw a great amount of traffic for the GE9X – which appears to be the flagship engine.
Top competitors: Key competitors include – Rolls Royce, Safran and Airbus. The usual aerospace giants dominate the SERPS, at this level the giants are fighting amongst themselves.
Google Ads
Our research did not pull out any ads by General Electric Aviation. They may not be advertising at all on Google.
Ecclesiastical Insurance
Turnover: £394,000,000
The specialist insurance and financial services group has been around for over 130 years. They provide specialist art insurance, home insurance, and real estate insurance. The firm is the leading insurer of Grade 1 listed buildings.
SEO
The ecclesiastical.com site has a domain rating of 65. It ranks for over 6,000 keywords and pulls in an estimated 5,500 monthly organic visitors. From its’ 1,023 pages.
Top traffic-driving key terms are brand terms with over 5.9K average monthly visitors from the name ecclesiastical alone. We’d bet their Google Search Console account shows all the different ways you can misspell “Ecclesiastical”.
Top Keywords
Ecclesiastical’s non-brand keywords show them ranking #1 for ‘church insurers’ – a position they just lost, ‘charities insurance’ & ‘high net worth insurers’ – no doubt really valuable terms (representing over 2.5K searches per month according to aHrefs) & in terms of the conversion value.
Competition
Typical for insurers there is strong competition with giants such as Allianz, NFUMutual and Zurich appearing in the search landscape all with hundreds to single-digit thousand of common keywords to Ecclesiastical Insurance
Google Ads
Our research showed 17 ads currently live in Google Ads with some dynamic targeting – it’s possible to reach thousands of searches per month using dynamic search ads – given the right budget. Unfortunately, there is almost nothing you can do to stop competitors bidding on your brand term, as we have showcased in this guide, leaving brands with almost no choice but to dedicate a portion of their media budgets to their own brand terms rather than relying on organic search alone. This traffic does (naturally) convert really well, but it is media spend that could be portioned elsewhere.
Heritage Automotive
Turnover: 218,000,000
The franchise automotive company uses a multi-site structure across various brands for VW, Skoda, seat, honda and Ineos. With a small handful of websites to review we looked at the brand’s group website heritageautomotive.co.uk
SEO
While each individual site does not appear as impressive – the collective benefit of having 8+ websites is the focus in particular niches – in this case for automotive companies it is clear to see that owning the car brand + location can be an amazing source of relevant traffic – focusing entire sites on dominating in specific regions can be extremely lucrative & is much easier than to have a single site dominating multiple regions without multi-million budgets.
Top Keywords
Heritage automation owns top positions for car brands and locations within the southwest regions. For example, ‘VW bristol’ [car brand + location], ‘Salisbury VW’ and ‘Dorchester VW’ – owning top positions for these highly relevant terms is a boon for Heritage Automotive and our research for the purpose of this article only really scratches the surface.
Competition
The automotive industry is hugely competitive as one can imagine. For most people owning a car is the single biggest purchase they make outside of owning a home. Ahrefs pulls through a lot of their other sites as competing domains, likely due to the brand activity. Other notable competitors include Bristol Street Motors, Listers and Audi.
Google Ads
Heritage Automotive is currently running over 300 ads across Google Networks, across both display and search. These ads are driving traffic to the sister sites with relevant landing pages. Hats off to the heritage automotive team. We (imagine) would recommend retargeting across social and using first-party data across search.
Conclusion
To conclude, some of the largest companies in Gloucester effectively search engine marketing strategies to reach their objectives. PPC and SEO marketing activity can be a key driver in businesses pushing £ 1 billion a year as is the case with Super Dry & Bensons for Beds and also (at least on our evidence) not that big a deal to some organisations. This presents new entrants to a market with the opportunity to win traffic and more importantly customers – adding revenue to their bottom line. We’ve also seen automotive players use a multi-site strategy to completely dominate a geographic area.
As we said – this level of research only scratches the surface of activities carried out by these organisations. To get started on your Google Ads or SEO campaign, get in touch. The longer you wait to start search activity, the longer it takes for your customers to find you.
