Why Do Bigger Companies Generate More Organic Traffic

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find that enterprise companies with thousands of employees—the Slacks, Mondays, and Canvas—have more organic traffic to their websites than, say, a pre-seed startup with a small team of 20.

Now, what would you say to this question: 

“Why do these larger companies generate more traffic through search than their smaller counterparts?”

I know what you’re thinking: 

“…because…they’re bigger…”

But what kind of marketers would we be if that’s where the questions stopped? After all, there are quite a few more questions we could ask from the initial line of question. Things like: 

• What is the relationship between company size and organic traffic?
• Are there any mediating factors that cause this to be true?
• How is this trend represented across SaaS and other industries?
• Are there any outliers or counter examples to this point?

As a part of our 2022 BRICK report (stay tuned 👀), we decided to take a look at the first of those questions. 

During our study of 442 B2B tech companies to quantify marketing excellence, we collected over 50 different data points relevant to both marketing and financial success. Naturally, organic traffic and employee head-count were two of those data points. 

Isolating these two points and running them through our BRICK algorithm, we confirmed our hunch about the obvious nature of the relationship between company size and organic web traffic. 

The box plot below, comparing company size by employee headcount with organic web traffic, suggests that organic traffic grows exponentially as B2B tech companies progress from startup stage through to enterprise level in terms of size. (The graph below compares company size with the log of web traffic so the numbers all fit easily on one graph.)

Companies With More Employees Have Exponentially More Organic Traffic

So, we’ve got some preliminary evidence that B2B tech companies with a large workforce tend to have more organic traffic than their startup or mid-market counterparts.  And that traffic volume increases exponentially with company size. 

Our stats team ran a negative binomial model to confirm that differences between company sizes and 1-10 employees are significant at significance level, α = 0.05.

Okay, with the nitty gritty numbers aside, let’s discuss why this might be the case. Let’s start with the obvious. 

Companies with a large workforce can afford to pay thousands of employees because they have more capital at their disposal. They have larger marketing departments that they can direct towards creating, distributing, and optimizing their web content. 

But that’s not the end of it. 

Organic success for these large B2B tech companies is partially due to Google’s algorithm. These companies have risen to the top of their respective niches through a combination of superior product and service design, as well as high-level marketing and sales. Because of their business success, the search engine views them as an authoritative source. 

And how does this authority translate to  more organic traffic  for large B2B tech brands?

Through higher SERP positions. 

Company Size Translates to Higher Google SERP Authority

Our initial analysis of company size and search volume led us towards a crucial variable for mediating organic traffic: SERP position. 

The Google SERPs are the gateway to online content, so naturally the search engine algorithm prioritizes brands that are likely to produce the most engaging, educational content. Our first level of analysis showed that large B2B tech brands were most likely to fit this description.

The chart below compares the size of a B2B tech company against its average rank in the Google SERPs. As companies get bigger in terms of their total employee count, their position within the SERPs increases steadily and consistently. 

Companies With More Employees Have Higher Average SERP Positions

This isn’t surprising considering that SERP position directly impacts the level of exposure a company has to Google users. The first few SERP positions for any given keyword are prime online real estate—representing the vast majority of all clicks. These initial results show that Google is more likely to defer to large companies as an authority within a certain topic cluster. 

Our findings also align with the idea of EAT — Expertise, Authority, and Trust— a major factor in the algorithm Google uses to rank sites and the content they produce. Tech companies that successfully expand to surpass 1,000 employees often demonstrate the following traits relevant to the EAT concept: 

• Niche expertise required to build and consistently provide a successful software service
• A level of financial and operation health that can sustain both success and growth over an extended period of time
• A reputable, recognizable brand that has built up a pipeline of customers large enough to support an entire enterprise

Interestingly, this trend doesn’t stop with Google. 

We also see this trend play out across EAT-analogue metrics like Moz’s Domain Authority and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating. The graph below shows that B2B tech companies tend to experience a similar increase in Domain Rating and Authority as they increase in size.

Company Size Is Related To Both Moz & Ahrefs’ Domain Scores

Once again, we see the influence that company size and overall workforce can have on a tech brand’s perceived (and real) authority. This is likely the result of how these large companies deploy their workforce. 

In the same way company size contributes to organic traffic and SERP position, these B2B tech enterprises have more robust marketing departments, allowing them to operate like media companies in content output. This output translates to more web pages for search engines to index. As the number of web pages created and indexed by Google increases, the average domain authority and rank values tend to increase.

So, while the value of analyzing seemingly obvious concepts like “bigger company = more traffic” isn’t always apparent, crunching the numbers and unpacking the underlying results is still a worthwhile endeavor. 

Just another thing to keep in mind as you continue your journey as a marketer!