SEO Benchmarks by Industry

TL;DR: We analyzed SEO performance data from 5,000+ websites across 10 industries. The gaps between verticals are massive — healthcare sites see roughly 2.6x more organic traffic than legal sites, but legal has 3x the revenue per session. Your industry context changes everything about what "good" looks like.

What Are SEO Benchmarks (and Why Most Published Data Is Useless)

SEO benchmarks are industry-specific reference points that tell you whether your organic performance is strong, average, or falling behind. Simple enough concept. The problem is that 90% of the benchmark data floating around the internet is either outdated, based on tiny sample sizes, or published by companies that won't tell you how they collected it.

I've read dozens of these articles while building SEOJuice, and the pattern is always the same: a neat table with suspiciously round numbers, no methodology section, and a publication date from 2022 that nobody bothered to update. Meanwhile, AI Overviews have reshuffled CTR distributions, core updates have upended entire content categories, and the gap between position #1 and position #3 has widened in ways that would have seemed absurd two years ago.

What I'm sharing below comes from our own analysis of 5,000+ websites actively tracked in SEOJuice. It's not perfect, and I'll flag where our data has blind spots, but at least you know who's behind it and can yell at me directly if the numbers seem off.

Molly Owens, TopRank Marketing (2025): "2025 is going to be all about resetting our baselines. After a year or more of impactful algorithm updates plus the launch of AI-powered search, traffic patterns are going to look different going forward."

She's right. And now that we're in 2026, we have enough data to actually see what those new baselines look like.

SEO Benchmarks by Industry — 2026 Data

Before we break each industry down, here's the master comparison. Every number comes from the median values we see across sites tracked in SEOJuice. I'm using medians, not averages, because a single enterprise site doing 2M monthly sessions would skew an average for the entire vertical.

A few things jump out immediately. Media and publishing sites dominate on raw traffic, but their CTR is mediocre because they're competing against themselves across thousands of indexed pages. Legal sites get the least traffic but the highest CTR — fewer pages, tighter keyword focus, and every click is potentially worth thousands in client value. E-commerce sites have the most pages indexed but some of the worst average positions, which makes sense when you think about how many product and category pages are fighting for the same commercial terms.

A note on "Domain Health Score": that's our own composite metric. It factors in backlink quality, technical health, content quality, and indexing signals on a 0-100 scale. I'm including it because it gives you a single number to compare against, but it's directional, not gospel.

The Revenue Side: Organic Conversion Rates

Traffic benchmarks tell you half the story. The other half, the half your CEO actually cares about, is what happens after the click. I get asked "what's a good conversion rate for organic?" constantly, and the honest answer is that it varies so much by industry that a single number is misleading. But here's what we're seeing, cross-referenced against First Page Sage's 2025 conversion rate study:

Legal dominates again — a 4.8% median conversion rate combined with $38 revenue per session means every organic visitor is disproportionately valuable. E-commerce has the lowest conversion rate of the commercial verticals at 1.8%, which makes sense when you consider how much browsing-without-buying happens on product pages. Media's 0.9% is almost misleading because their conversion action (newsletter signup) is fundamentally different from a purchase or a lead form.

The gap between median and top quartile is where it gets interesting. In every single industry, the top 25% convert at roughly 2x the median rate. If your organic conversion rate is below your industry median, the fix is almost certainly on your landing pages, not in your keyword strategy: better copy, clearer CTAs, faster load times. The traffic is already there.

Healthcare

I used to assume healthcare SEO was just "write about symptoms, rank for conditions." Then I looked at the data and realized how wrong that was. The gap between top-quartile and bottom-quartile healthcare sites is the widest of any vertical we track — nearly 17x in organic sessions. That's not a performance gap. That's a different sport.

Healthcare is where Google's E-E-A-T requirements bite hardest. Sites with named physician authors, visible medical review processes, and proper schema markup are getting roughly 2x the organic sessions of sites without those signals. The ones struggling are almost always treating healthcare content like any other blog — no bylines, no review disclosures, no structured data.

In our data, healthcare sites with FAQ schema on symptom pages are getting roughly 40% more featured snippet appearances than those without (based on the ~120 healthcare sites we track). Google still loves structured health answers, even in the AI Overview era. What I didn't expect: the schema advantage is actually growing, not shrinking, as AI Overviews roll out.

Finance & Banking

Finance has the second-highest domain health scores in our dataset, which makes sense. These companies tend to have established brands, real editorial teams, and genuine expertise backing their content. The barrier to entry is steep. If you're a fintech startup trying to rank against NerdWallet or Bankrate, you're fighting sites with 10,000+ referring domains and decades of topical authority.

The play for smaller finance sites is hyper-specific content. "Best savings accounts" is a dead end. "HYSA rates for freelancers who max out SEP IRAs" is where you can actually win.

E-commerce & Retail

E-commerce is a brutal vertical for SEO. The lowest average CTR across all industries we track, despite having the second-highest raw traffic. Why? Because Google Shopping ads, sponsored placements, and now AI-generated product comparisons eat the top of the SERP before organic results even appear. On commercial product queries, the first organic result often appears below the fold.

Page speed matters more here than I expected: more than content quality, more than backlinks, based on what we're seeing. Sites with LCP under 2 seconds rank measurably better on product category pages. I know that sounds like basic advice, but the median e-commerce site we track still has a 3.2-second LCP. There's a lot of room to gain just by fixing the fundamentals.

Be careful with that "Pages Indexed" number for e-commerce. Having 12,000 pages indexed means nothing if 8,000 of them are thin product variants with duplicate content. Some of the best-performing e-commerce sites in our data actually pruned their indexed page count by 40-60% and saw traffic go up.

Technology & SaaS

This is my home turf, so I'll be honest about biases. SaaS sites tend to have fewer pages but higher-quality content, partly because the audience is technical and won't tolerate fluff, partly because SaaS companies actually hire writers who understand their product. The median CTR of 4.1% is the second-highest after legal, which I attribute to SaaS brands generally having strong title tag game. We're all obsessed with conversion rate optimization, and that extends to SERP clicks.

The "AI Search Visibility" row is new — it measures how often a site's content gets cited in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Top-quartile SaaS sites appear in AI answers 41% of the time for their target keywords. That's becoming a real competitive moat.

I'm less confident about the bottom-quartile numbers here. Our SaaS sample skews toward companies that are already investing in SEO (they're using our tool, after all), so the true bottom 25% across all SaaS companies is probably worse than what we're showing.

Education

Education has the highest domain health scores in our data, and the reason is almost entirely backlinks. The natural link profile of educational content — schools cross-referencing each other, government sites citing programs, students linking to research — is the kind of portfolio Google trusts implicitly. Same E-E-A-T dynamic as healthcare, but education has the backlink advantage on top of it.

One thing I keep coming back to: sites with 15%+ of their backlinks from .edu or .gov domains barely flinched during the 2025 core updates. I don't fully understand why — it could be the link quality, or it could be that sites earning those links tend to be better-maintained overall. I haven't been able to separate those variables in our data, and I'm not sure I can with the sample size we have.

Real Estate

Real estate is the most location-dependent vertical in our dataset. National benchmarks are almost meaningless here because a real estate site in Austin operates in a different competitive environment than one in rural Vermont. The numbers above are directional at best.

What I can say with confidence: real estate sites that invest in local SEO — Google Business Profile optimization, local schema markup, neighborhood-level content — outperform those relying purely on programmatic listing pages. The median site has 2,200 pages indexed, but most of those are auto-generated property listings that Google is increasingly treating as thin content.

Legal

Legal generates more revenue per organic click than any other vertical in our dataset. By a wide margin. A single "car accident lawyer [city]" ranking in a competitive metro area can generate $500K+ in annual case value. That context reframes what "low traffic" means for legal sites. At $38 median revenue per session, legal's 14,800 monthly sessions are worth more than e-commerce's 44,700.

Legal has the highest CTR in our data at 5.2% — searchers with legal intent are highly motivated clickers. When someone searches "wrongful termination lawyer near me," they're not browsing. They're hiring.

The content quality scores are also consistently high. Law firms learned early that Google holds YMYL content to a higher standard, and the ones that survived the Helpful Content updates tend to have attorney-written content with real case references and jurisdiction-specific detail. The bottom quartile? Usually firms still running keyword-stuffed pages from 2019. (I keep wondering whether AI-generated legal content will eventually flood this space — the early signs suggest Google is especially aggressive about filtering it in YMYL verticals, but I wouldn't bet on that holding forever.)

Digital Marketing & Agencies

The cobbler's children have no shoes. Marketing agencies consistently underperform relative to their supposed expertise — the median agency site gets less organic traffic than a median healthcare site despite theoretically knowing exactly how to optimize for it. I suspect this is because agency principals are too busy doing client work to invest in their own SEO.

That said, top-quartile agencies are impressive — a 5.8% monthly backlink growth rate means these firms are producing content that naturally attracts links. Case studies, original research, free tools. It's the same playbook that works in SaaS (I mentioned the 41% AI search visibility for top-quartile SaaS sites earlier — agencies with similar content strategies are seeing comparable numbers, though I don't have enough agency-specific AI visibility data to put a firm number on it yet). The gap between the top and bottom here tells you a lot about which agencies practice what they preach.

Media & Publishing

Media sites live and die by content freshness. The correlation between "average days since last content update" and organic traffic is stronger in publishing than in any other vertical. Top-quartile publishers are updating content every 21 days on average. Bottom-quartile sites have articles sitting untouched for 280 days. In a news-driven vertical, that's a death sentence.

This still surprises me: some of the highest-traffic media sites in our data have relatively low CTR. The math works because they have so many indexed pages that even a 2.9% CTR across 8,400 pages generates massive aggregate traffic. Volume strategy vs. precision strategy. Both work, but they require very different operational approaches.

Business Services

Business services is the "everything else" category — consulting firms, accounting practices, HR platforms, office supply companies. The numbers are the lowest across the board, and honestly, the category is so diverse that the averages barely mean anything. A boutique strategy consultancy and an industrial cleaning supplier have almost nothing in common from an SEO perspective, yet they're in the same bucket.

What I can say: a median content quality score of 52 is low — lower than any other vertical. Half of business services sites are publishing content that wouldn't pass our basic quality checks. This is also the vertical where structured data adoption is lowest at 22%. That means 78% of these sites haven't added any structured data at all. I don't know whether they've never heard of it or just never prioritized it, but either way, it's one of the few SEO improvements that takes an afternoon and keeps paying out for years.

How to Benchmark Your Own SEO Performance

Tables are great for context, but they're useless unless you can actually compare your own numbers against them. Here's the process I'd recommend, and yes, I'm going to reference our own tool because I built it specifically for this.

Step 1: Get your current numbers.

Step 2: Identify your vertical and peer set. Don't compare a 20-page consulting website against a 10,000-page e-commerce store. Our SEO benchmark tool lets you filter by industry and site size, which gives you a much more meaningful comparison than raw industry averages. A 50-page SaaS site should be comparing itself against other 50-page SaaS sites, not against HubSpot.

Step 3: Focus on the gaps, not the scores. If your organic CTR is 2.1% and the industry median is 4.1%, that's a meaningful gap. But before you panic, check whether the gap is driven by a few underperforming pages or a site-wide problem. Usually it's 10-20 pages dragging down your entire average. Fix those first. Run a full site audit to identify exactly which pages need attention.

Step 4: Track trends, not snapshots. A single benchmark check tells you where you are. Monthly tracking tells you whether you're improving. We've seen sites go from bottom quartile to top quartile in their industry within 6-8 months by consistently fixing the right things. The key word is "consistently." SEO gains compound, but only if you don't take three-month breaks between sprints.

The Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones That Don't)

Not all metrics deserve equal attention when benchmarking. I've watched teams obsess over domain authority scores while ignoring that their organic CTR has been declining for six months. Here's what I'd focus on, ranked by actual impact on revenue.

Organic CTR by position — this is the metric most people under-invest in. Position #1 used to be the whole game. It's not anymore.

Backlinko (2025): "The #1 organic result in Google gets a 27.6% CTR. Only 0.63% of searchers click on page 2."

But that 27.6% is an average across all query types. The reality is more nuanced, and it's shifting fast:

GrowthSRC (2025): "Organic CTR for position #1 dropped from 28% to 19% (32% decline) between 2024 and 2025, while positions #6-#10 saw CTR increase by 30.63%."

This is a big deal. Position #1 is losing clicks to AI Overviews and SERP features, while lower positions are actually gaining. If you're chasing #1 rankings as your primary KPI, you might be optimizing for a diminishing return.

Average position trend over time. A snapshot of your average position tells you almost nothing. What matters is the direction. Are your top keywords trending from position 15 to position 9 over three months? That's a site that's about to break into meaningful traffic territory. Are they drifting from 6 to 12? That's early decay, and you should be investigating why before it accelerates.

Keyword coverage vs competitors. How many of your competitors' ranking keywords do you also rank for? In our data, top-quartile sites in every industry cover at least 60% of their closest competitor's keyword footprint. Bottom-quartile sites cover less than 20%. This metric tells you more about your competitive position than any authority score.

AI search visibility — the metric nobody's benchmarking yet.

BrightEdge (April 2026): "AI Overviews now trigger on 48% of all tracked search queries — a 58% increase year over year — with organic CTR dropping 34.5% on queries where AI Overviews appear."

That's from BrightEdge's latest 12-month analysis, released just this month. Half of all queries now show an AI Overview. If that number doesn't change how you think about SEO benchmarks, nothing will.

Seer Interactive (2025): "Organic CTR for informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61% YoY. But websites cited within AI Overviews saw 35% higher CTR."

Getting cited in AI answers doesn't just maintain your traffic — it increases your CTR compared to regular organic results. We're tracking AI search visibility in SEOJuice now, and I think within a year it'll be as standard a metric as position tracking. If you're not measuring whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews reference your content, you're missing the signal that matters most for where search is going. (I'll admit I was skeptical about AI search mattering for SEO when we first started building the tracking feature. Six months of data changed my mind — the sites getting cited in AI answers are pulling away from the ones that aren't, and the gap is widening faster than I expected.)

The metric that matters less than people think: domain authority.

Rand Fishkin, SparkToro (2024): "There's almost certainly a conflation of organic traffic and revenue... branded search traffic is sending you way more value than you're counting and unbranded way less."

I should have mentioned this in the finance section, but Rand's point applies there especially — A high domain authority score that's primarily driven by branded searches isn't the same as genuine topical authority. I've seen sites with a DA of 35 outrank sites with a DA of 70 on specific topics because they have deeper, better content in that niche. If you're benchmarking a finance site with a DA of 60, check how much of that is branded queries before assuming you're competitive on unbranded terms. That's what your SEO grade should actually reflect — topical authority, not aggregate domain strength.

FAQ

What is a good SEO score for my industry?

"Good" depends entirely on your vertical. A domain health score of 55 would put you in the top quartile for business services but in the bottom quartile for education. Use the industry-specific tables above as your reference point, and focus on being above the median for your specific vertical. If you want a personalized comparison, our benchmark tool gives you a score relative to your industry peers, not a generic number.

How often should I benchmark my SEO?

Monthly for trend tracking, quarterly for strategic review. Monthly checks let you catch problems early — a sudden CTR drop or position decline is much easier to diagnose and fix if you spot it within 30 days. Quarterly reviews are where you step back and assess whether your overall trajectory is moving you toward top-quartile performance in your industry. I wouldn't recommend benchmarking less than monthly, and benchmarking daily is a waste of time because SEO data is inherently noisy on short timeframes.

How do I compare my SEO to competitors?

Start with keyword overlap analysis — identify which keywords your competitors rank for that you don't. Then compare your organic CTR and average position on shared keywords. The gap between your position and theirs on the same keyword is more actionable than comparing aggregate metrics. Tools like ours let you do this directly, but you can also approximate it with Search Console data and a competitor tracking tool. The important thing is to compare apples to apples — same keywords, same SERP features, same intent type.

What is the average organic CTR by industry?

Based on our 2026 data: Legal leads at 5.2%, followed by digital marketing agencies at 4.8%, education at 4.5%, and technology/SaaS at 4.1%. E-commerce has the lowest at 2.4%, primarily because commercial SERPs are dominated by ads and shopping results that push organic listings down. But remember — CTR varies widely by position, query type, and SERP feature presence. Industry averages are a starting point, not a target. Check the on-page elements that influence your click-through rates for ways to improve.

How long does SEO take to show results by industry?

From our data, the median time to move from bottom quartile to median performance: Healthcare takes 8-12 months (high E-E-A-T bar), Finance takes 10-14 months (extremely competitive), E-commerce takes 4-8 months (technical fixes show faster results), SaaS takes 6-10 months, and Legal takes 5-8 months (smaller keyword sets mean faster movement). These timelines assume consistent effort — publishing quality content, fixing technical issues, building relevant backlinks. Sites that do nothing for three months and then sprint for one month don't see the same results as sites that maintain steady progress. (I should note — these numbers come from looking backward at sites that actually improved. The ones that stalled or gave up aren't in the "success" data, so there's some survivorship bias here. The real median might be longer.)

Start Benchmarking Your Site

The numbers in this article give you context, but context without action is just trivia. If you want to see exactly where your site stands against your industry peers — not against a generic average from 2023, but against live data from thousands of sites tracked right now — run your site through our free SEO benchmark tool. It takes 30 seconds, and you'll get a breakdown by the same metrics covered above.

Related reading:

• What Your SEO Grade Actually Means
• 10 On-Site SEO Elements That Influence Search Results
• Healthcare SEO Benchmarks: A Deep Dive
• Free SEO Audit Tool