Matt Southern wrote an article on Search Engine Journal that included an infographic on who has the most valuable search traffic. His takeaway from the data was:
It’s interesting to note that the site with the most valuable search traffic, Wikipedia, is one that does not attempt to generate a profit from its traffic.
Besides that one outlier, the results are more or less what you would expect for each vertical. Some other surprises to me was the value of Yellow Pages’ search traffic, and the fact that Instagram has fairly valuable traffic for a network that exists primarily as a mobile app.
Sites that focus on providing users with decision-making information seem to, for the most part, have considerably more valuable traffic than sites that focus on selling products. For example, TripAdvisor’s traffic is 4 time as valuable as Expedia’s.
