SEO and the stock market — two completely different worlds. Yet when you run a correlation analysis between organic traffic and stock price on, say, Nasdaq, you suddenly get a strong positive correlation.
Here’s why that happens and what it means.
Based on monthly close price and organic traffic I calculated the Spearman correlation for each ticker listed on Nasdaq.
To calculate the percentage of positively correlated tickers and market cap weighted data, we used one ticker per company and only the tickers with 36 rows of data (full 3 years). Hence, the difference between the number of tickers on Nasdaq and the number of tickers used for research. Big thanks to our data scientist Xibeijia Guan for the idea and running the analysis!
To find out how positively correlated companies get traffic and links, I selected about 200 sites that have at least one million estimated visits per year.
Backlinks from “regular” PR can help improve search rankings and bring more visitors to the company’s site because, as we know, search engines see them as a sign of credibility.
For instance, quite a few Nasdaq companies are on the Forbes 500 list, each with a link back to the homepage.
The fact alone that you’ve been included in the ranking is an opportunity to grab some more links.
Offering quotes for journalists is a known link building tactic and it’s even more effective when you represent a well-known brand. Your established reputation increases the likelihood that journalists will choose your information over the countless other sources they consider.
In other words, SEO is a way to make online visibility work even harder.
Landing pages capture big (and small) demand
From deep product pages to sophisticated topic clusters, public companies craft landing pages for every type of search.
One of the best examples I’ve seen comes from Electronic Arts: they share real NFL player stats to help promote Madden NFL 25. It’s a clever twist on content marketing, blending authentic sports data with game promotion.
But examples like EA’s are few and far between. Most of the time, companies stick to tried-and-true strategies and simply execute them really well.
For instance, I came across quite a few topic clusters in my research. One stood out in particular: a single product-focused cluster that was pulling in nearly 37% of the site’s overall traffic.
Another thing I saw quite often was optimized clusters showing the site’s inventory. For example, when people look for “flights to Chicago”, they’ll likely find United’s landing page displaying their flight options — 29.3k estimated visits each month.
Makemytrip put together a collection of search-optimized landing pages, each offering different travel ideas based on how people search for their trips.
This helps them cover a wide range of queries resulting in an estimated 2.5M visits each month.
Airbnb uses a similar approach. Their topic clusters cater to searchers looking for specific types of accommodations, such as cabins, treehouses, glamping, and more.
Product landing pages with an informational twist are a common tactic among Nasdaq companies. They seamlessly blend product marketing with content marketing by introducing their offerings within educational content. The structure of this page says it all:
This tactic helped Micron rank twice for the same, high-volume keyword (“ddr5”).
Lastly, Matterport uses its own technology to create engaging SEO content. They maintain a gallery of famous places captured with their cameras, which are typically used to produce 3D real estate tours. That is quite brilliant.
Matterport’s gallery also welcomes user-generated content, which helps them cover even more keywords. This approach brings in over 45,000 visits each month. Here are some of the search queries they rank for to showcase their product:
Dictionaries, FAQs, and basic definitions = surprising traffic
I was genuinely surprised by this. Many public companies are leveraging good ‘ol dictionaries, and FAQs to effectively capture informational search intent and boost their organic traffic.
Some of the examples I found and their results put together in Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis.
And it’s often quite a significant portion of these sites’ traffic. For instance, Crowdstrike generates 33% traffic through a cluster about cybersecurity basics.
Qualcomm added over 18% traffic worth 68k with one landing page.
Why this “boring” type of content? It’s how Google understands the search intent behind these keywords. It means that at least for now, tackling a keyword like “enterprise cloud” with a purely product-oriented has a lower chance of ranking.
Free tools and resources pull in links and leads
Offering a useful resource — even if it’s just a re-packaged version of existing data — earns brands credibility, backlinks, and engaged visitors.
For example, Better makes it easy for people searching for a loan to find them by offering tools to help calculate and understand their options.
SoFi gets thousands of links and visits each month regularly publishing average US salaries.
And it’s not even original data.
Baker Hughes has published a weekly census of the number of drilling rigs actively exploring for or developing oil and natural gas in the United States and Canada… since the 1970s.
Adobe has more free tools than any company I’ve ever seen. They carve out high-demand features of premium products and publish them on optimized landing pages as free tools (with limited usage).
For instance, the background remover generates an estimated 2.9M visits each month promoting their Express tool suite.
Converting PDF to Word and vice verse could easily be one tool. But not if you’re creating landing pages for two separate keywords — you need two separate tools.
Here’s another awesome example: Newegg created a PC builder tool that attracts people searching for custom computers and recommends products from its own inventory. They even use AI for it.
Instacart follows this strategy, too. Their ideas directory attracts an estimated 448k visits each month and contributes 11.2% of the overall traffic. It offers things like metric converters, calculators, and even a list of different types of milk.
Indexing dynamic search results for the most popular keywords
Indexing dynamic search results in SEO refers to getting search engines to crawl and index pages on your website that are generated in response to user queries. These pages are created “on the fly” based on the specific keywords or filters users enter into your site’s search function.
A great example of this in action is Adobe. They effectively rank for time-sensitive terms like “happy new year 2024.” As the season approaches, Adobe can capitalize on the surge in searches, tapping into 206,000 searches in the US and 2.2 million globally.
The secret is to have the pages listed on your site map.
Etsy employs a similar strategy. By leveraging user-generated content, they’re able to target and rank for millions of non-branded keywords, consistently securing top 10 positions in search results.
Low-volume keywords can be hidden gems
Even in a bigger company, targeting niche, low-volume keywords can attract highly qualified leads and contribute to business growth, proving their value despite their lower search volume.
For example, the keyword “mass payouts” only gets around 100 visits each month in the US, but those searches are likely from businesses that are seriously interested. I found two Nasdaq companies competing for that low-volume keyword.
Another example: Beacon optimizes for the long tail to catch demand for high ticket sales.
Local SEO on a national scale
Several companies with a national reach are tapping into local SEO tactics — Texas Roadhouse and Potbelly are great examples. But the standout here is DoorDash and its clever “near me” strategy.
We’ve detailed how this page works in the teardown video below. At that time, the “restaurants near me” page alone received an estimated 9.1 million visits per month and a staggering traffic value of $41.6 million.
(…)we propose several generalized linear models for forecasting the probability of positive or negative directional movements, and propose a trade strategy from the generated forecasts, resulting in a 40% outperformance of a traditional buy-and-hold strategy in our testing period.
The other is from Forecasting stock market movements using Google Trend searches:
Our search trend investment strategy has outperformed average stock market returns in both KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets during the seven-year study period (2007~2013).
I haven’t tried that strategy, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it worked just as it says on tin. I’ve personally used organic traffic data to get nearly 21% ROI in a month on NRDS stock. I bought a tiny bit of stock just for kicks, to test out a hypothesis that their value will bounce back as soon as their traffic starts to bounce back. Well, I wish I had bought more.
In some cases, changes in organic traffic, especially non-branded, might precede changes in stock value, suggesting that SEO data could potentially serve as a leading indicator for investors.
Example: NerdWallet. First, its traffic fell, then the stock. Hypothetically, you could open Ahrefs before the company’s Q2 earnings call, see that traffic has been declining for months, and avoid being dragged through a sell-off.
Final thoughts
There was a time were SEO was the underdog’s game. Small businesses with tiny budgets could snag tons of free traffic, and the playing field was level because the big guys weren’t paying attention to what seemed like “nerdy” tricks. That’s how SEO got famous.
Then, some bigger brands caught on, hopped on the bandwagon, and realized they had a built-in advantage on Google.
That is, until Google shook things up with its recent crackdown on site reputation abuse and its “helpful content” update. In theory, Google aims to promote a sense of parity for independent creators (relatively small sites), making both Google and SEO appealing again for smaller players, while serving as a warning and creating a sour note for larger brands.
But I think SEO is still a goldmine for publicly traded companies — and the bigger, the better. These big companies don’t need to reinvent the wheel. They can use the same SEO strategies as smaller companies and still have a massive head start. It’s kind of ironic.
Got questions or comments? Drop me a line on LinkedIn.
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