One of the most challenging aspects of competitive SEO analysis is understanding performance within specific industry contexts. When I was leading enterprise SEO teams, we’d constantly struggle with questions like:
“Are review sites or e-commerce sites winning more visibility in our product category?”
“Which affiliate sites are gaining traction in the financial services industry?”
“How are different business models performing specifically in the health and wellness space?”
Traditional SEO tools simply couldn’t provide these insights because they lack the ability to analyze performance across different industry segments and business models. You might know who’s ranking, but not how specific types of sites are performing as a collective within your market.
This was the driving force behind SiteCurve’s Industry Aggregation feature—a powerful capability that transforms how you analyze competitive landscapes by revealing winners and losers across different market segments.
What is Industry Aggregation?
Industry Aggregation is SiteCurve’s approach to grouping and analyzing website performance based on industry classifications, business models, and website types. While our AI Segmentation automatically categorizes individual keywords and URLs, Industry Aggregation takes this a step further by allowing you to analyze aggregate performance trends across entire segments of your market.
This creates an entirely new dimension of competitive intelligence—showing not just which specific domains are winning or losing, but which types of sites are collectively gaining or losing ground in your industry.
The Three Dimensions of Industry Aggregation
SiteCurve’s Industry Aggregation works across three key dimensions:
1. Industry Categories
Based on the keywords you track, SiteCurve automatically identifies the primary industries represented in your landscape. Whether you’re focusing on finance, healthcare, e-commerce, travel, or any other vertical, the system creates industry-specific views showing how different websites perform within each category.
This allows you to isolate performance trends specific to particular industries, even if your landscape spans multiple sectors.
2. Business Models
Perhaps most valuable is SiteCurve’s ability to aggregate performance by business model. This classification includes:
- E-commerce: Sites directly selling products online
- Affiliate: Sites monetizing through affiliate links and partnerships
- Lead Generation: Sites capturing and selling leads to service providers
- Advertising: Sites monetizing primarily through display advertising
- Subscription: Sites operating on recurring revenue models
- Marketplace: Multi-vendor platforms connecting buyers and sellers
- Service Provider: Direct service business sites
By aggregating performance across these business models, you can identify which monetization approaches are gaining or losing visibility in your space—intelligence that’s impossible to glean from traditional rank tracking.
3. Website Types
SiteCurve also aggregates performance by website structure and content approach:
- Review Sites: Focused on product/service evaluations
- Forums/Communities: Discussion-based content
- Blogs/Publishers: Editorial and news content
- Directories: Listing-format information
- Comparison Sites: Side-by-side product/service comparisons
- Brand Sites: Official company websites
- Educational Resources: Learning-focused content
- Local Business Sites: Geographically focused businesses
This dimension reveals which content formats and site structures are most effective for capturing visibility in specific industries—insights that directly inform content strategy development.
Beyond Individual Rankings: The Power of Aggregate Analysis
What makes Industry Aggregation so valuable is its ability to reveal patterns that simply aren’t visible when looking at individual domain rankings.
For example, you might notice that while a particular competitor is gaining ground, review sites as a whole are actually losing visibility in your industry. Or you might discover that affiliate business models are collectively outperforming direct e-commerce sites for your target keywords.
These aggregate trends often signal fundamental shifts in how search engines are evaluating content in your industry—shifts that require strategic responses rather than tactical optimizations.
Practical Applications of Industry Aggregation
Let me share some examples of how this feature could be applied to drive strategic SEO decisions:
Content Format Strategy
A healthcare company could use Industry Aggregation to discover that educational resource sites are consistently gaining visibility across their target keywords, while traditional blog formats are collectively losing ground. This insight could prompt a shift toward more structured, educational content formats rather than conventional blog posts.
Business Model Evaluation
A financial services provider might use business model aggregation to identify that comparison sites and lead generation models are outperforming direct service providers in their keyword landscape. This could inform decisions about potential business model pivots or expansions to capture shifting visibility.
Competitive Group Monitoring
A travel brand could track the collective performance of online travel agencies versus direct hotel booking sites versus review platforms. By monitoring these competitive groups over time, they could identify emerging threats before individual competitors become dominant.
Industry Shift Detection
A technology marketplace could discover through industry aggregation that review sites focusing on video content are collectively gaining significant visibility, while traditional text-based reviews are losing ground. This early indicator of an industry shift would be missed if only tracking individual domain performance.
How Industry Aggregation Works in Practice
Let me walk you through how this feature transforms your competitive analysis workflow:
1. Automatic Classification During Landscape Creation
When you upload keywords to create a landscape, SiteCurve automatically identifies the industries represented in your keyword set and begins classifying ranking domains by business model and website type. There’s no manual setup required—the system does this classification automatically.
2. Aggregate View Navigation
Within your landscape, you can navigate to specific aggregate views:
- Business Model Trends: Shows visibility trends across different monetization approaches
- Website Type Performance: Compares different content formats and site structures
- Industry Category Breakdown: For landscapes spanning multiple industries
Each view shows both individual domain performance and aggregate metrics for each classification.
3. Filtering for Specific Insights
The power of Industry Aggregation becomes even more apparent when combined with SiteCurve’s filtering capabilities. You can apply filters to focus on:
- Specific time periods to identify when shifts occurred
- Particular keyword groups to analyze segment-specific trends
- Combinations of classifications (e.g., review sites using affiliate models)
This allows for incredibly nuanced competitive analysis that reveals not just who is winning, but how and why they’re winning.
4. Trend Monitoring and Alerts
You can set up alerts specifically tied to aggregate performance changes. For example, you might want to be notified if review sites collectively gain more than 10% visibility in your landscape, or if affiliate business models start showing consistent gains against direct e-commerce sites.
Real Strategic Value: Identifying Market Shifts
The most significant value of Industry Aggregation lies in its ability to identify fundamental market shifts that would otherwise remain hidden.
Consider these scenarios that Industry Aggregation would reveal:
Search Intent Evolution
By monitoring aggregate performance of informational versus transactional website types, you might notice search engines increasingly favoring educational content in categories that were previously dominated by commercial sites. This signals a shift in how Google interprets user intent for those keywords—a strategic insight that would inform your entire content approach.
Business Model Viability
If affiliate sites are collectively losing ground to direct e-commerce across your landscape, this might indicate changing algorithm preferences that impact the viability of certain business models in your space. This insight could save you from investing in approaches that are falling out of favor with search engines.
Content Format Trends
When certain website types consistently outperform others across your landscape, it reveals patterns in the content formats and structures that search engines are preferring. These patterns provide a blueprint for content strategy development that goes far beyond simple keyword targeting.
How Industry Aggregation Complements AI Segmentation
While our AI Segmentation feature focuses on automatically categorizing and filtering individual keywords and URLs, Industry Aggregation takes a broader view by analyzing collective performance across business models and website types.
Think of AI Segmentation as the tool that helps you organize and navigate your data, while Industry Aggregation is the lens that reveals patterns across entire segments of your competitive landscape.
These features work in tandem to provide both granular filtering capabilities and high-level strategic insights.
Getting Started with Industry Aggregation
If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of aggregate analysis, here’s how to start leveraging this capability in SiteCurve:
- Create a comprehensive landscape: Include a diverse set of keywords that represent your market (at least 250-500 keywords is ideal)
- Review automatic classifications: Explore how SiteCurve has classified ranking domains by business model and website type
- Navigate to aggregate views: Explore the Business Model Trends and Website Type Performance sections
- Look for divergent patterns: Pay special attention to aggregate trends that differ from individual domain performance
- Set up alerts for significant shifts: Create notifications for meaningful changes in aggregate performance
The most valuable insights often come from comparing trends across different classifications rather than focusing solely on individual website performance.
Beyond Rankings: Strategic Intelligence for Market Positioning
Industry Aggregation represents a fundamental evolution in competitive SEO analysis. Instead of simply tracking who ranks where, you gain intelligence about which approaches are winning across entire segments of your market.
This shift—from tactical ranking data to strategic market intelligence—transforms how you develop and adapt your SEO strategy:
- Instead of simply copying a successful competitor, you can identify which business models and content approaches are collectively succeeding
- Rather than reacting to individual ranking changes, you can respond to fundamental shifts in how search engines evaluate content in your industry
- Beyond chasing rankings for specific keywords, you can position your site to align with the content formats and structures that are gaining favor
For executives and strategists, this provides the context needed to make informed decisions about not just SEO tactics, but broader business model and content strategy choices.
Conclusion: From Individual Rankings to Market Intelligence
Industry Aggregation elevates SEO analysis from tracking individual performance to understanding market dynamics. By revealing which types of sites and business models are collectively winning or losing visibility, it provides strategic context that traditional rank tracking simply can’t deliver.
This capability is particularly valuable in rapidly evolving markets where understanding industry-wide shifts is essential for staying ahead of competitors. Rather than simply reacting to individual ranking changes, you can identify and respond to fundamental shifts in how search engines are evaluating content in your space.
Whether you’re an agency helping clients understand their competitive position, an in-house team developing long-term content strategy, or a consultant providing strategic guidance, Industry Aggregation provides the market-level intelligence needed to make truly informed decisions.
Because in today’s complex search landscape, knowing who ranks isn’t enough—you need to understand which approaches are winning and why.
