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Apple.com and Argos.co.uk both also appeared in the top five most visible brands for both paid and organic search.

The report, published by Epiphany, analyses the most visible websites across Google’s paid and organic search results, where visibility is defined by Searchmetrics’ ‘paid visibility’ and ‘SEO visibility’ scores.

The report looks in more detail at how these brands achieved such high visibility, but for this blog I’ll just summarise the organic findings.

Organic search rankings

When it comes to buying, consumers want to use brands they know and trust. Technical knowledge can be overlooked for a trusted returns policy or an extended warranty from a recognisable brand, such as John Lewis’ two-year guarantee on all products.

The report shows that Amazon dominates in terms of both visibility and number of keywords, which is to be expected given its extensive product range.

However that logic doesn’t necessarily ring true throughout the rest of the rankings. For example, Apple is third most visible overall and appears for 616,491 keywords while Argos appears for less than half that amount despite its extensive range of products.

Most visible brands from Searchmetrics data for organic search

Many specialist online retailers appear near the bottom of the most visible brands list, as these will generally target more specific electronics-focused keywords, hence the lower number of organic keywords.

Domain authority

Domain authority is largely accepted to be one of the best measures of a website’s ability to rank for its target keywords.  

This chart shows that in general the higher a brand’s domain authority the more visible it is in organic search, though there are a few notable exceptions.

Sites such as Very.co.uk, which is online-only, are likely to have a large focus on SEO built around targeted website content and link acquisition strategies, with the aim of ranking primarily for competitive keywords that generate high volumes of traffic and conversions.

Link Acquisition

Finally, let’s take a look at how many links each of the sites acquired in the preceding 60 days according to Majestic SEO.

This chart shows link acquisition against the total number of linking domains and domain authority.

This shows the extent to which the top sites are acquiring new links as they attempt to maintain and improve their organic search visibility. It also reveals a correlation (not a causation) between high site visibility and strong link metrics.

It’s worth noting that Dell and HP both have high domain authorities and a high number of linking domains, yet a lower visibility than competitors with similarly high numbers of links. 

The report points out that this is the likely result of those brands having a more specific keyword data set – because they only sell their own products, they rank for fewer keywords, whereas the more visible brands sell a wider breadth of products.