Regular readers of our blog posts will remember that last week we ran an analysis of the UK’s top property portals. This week, to tie in with our professional services theme, we’re doing some SEO insight into three of the ‘Big Four’ professional services companies who offer a variety of audit, tax and consulting services, these being KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young.

Firstly, let’s take a look at the data regarding organic traffic.

The first noticeable aspect of this data is that Deloitte are clearly leading the way for organic traffic. Meanwhile, KPMG and Ernst & Young (EY) are fighting hard with each other to earn the title of ‘next best’, and are often seen to be trading places with each other.

Interestingly, although KPMG and EY follow a similar pattern to each other, this tends to go against the pattern of Deloitte’s traffic, particularly from July onwards.

Secondly, we analyse the number of keywords each site is ranking for inside the top 20 results.

Once again, Deloitte come out on top in terms of the number of keywords they’re ranking for, although it was close between them and KPMG between March and July. However, from this point the number of keywords KPMG ranks for takes a dramatic turn, and loses around 1000 rankings up until January of this year.

With Deloitte firmly ahead from an organic point of view, next we’re analysing the three companies’ performance from a paid perspective. This is how their paid traffic compares.

As we can see here, Deloitte are ahead for the most part, however over the summer months (June to September) there’s a considerable uplift in paid traffic from EY. Normally you would expect this to come as a result of a campaign to get keywords ranking, and so we will look at how each site compares in terms of paid keywords. However, this can be distorted as certain paid keywords will generate more traffic anyway.

It’s interesting to see that when it comes to paid keywords, EY come out on top, outperforming Deloitte and KPMG, suggesting that there is a considerable focus from them on the paid side of things. It’s worth noting that KPMG don’t perform as well from a paid search perspective in comparison to their organic performance, although they did see an uplift in January.

To summarise, it’s evident that there’s two sides of the coin for Deloitte, who perform strongly in terms of organic search, and their competitors don’t look as if they’re going to trouble their ‘top dog’ status. However, looking at paid search, EY are hot on the heels of Deloitte, and outperform them for the number of paid keywords the site appears for. It’s a similar story for KPMG, who perform well for organic traffic and organic keywords, but then are considerably outdone by the other two sites in the paid section.