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The directory

SEO strategies, written per industry

Generic SEO advice is generic because the hard parts are the ones that differ. Who already owns the results page. Which regulator constrains your analytics. Which queries carry an actual purchase behind them. Each playbook here answers those for one industry, with the budget, the tools and the first ninety days.

Browse the directoryRead the healthcare playbook

51 playbooks published · more in progress

53
Industries mapped
51
Full playbooks published
9
Sectors covered
44
With a regulator in the way
Start here

Find yours by how you sell, not what you sell

Two businesses in completely different sectors often run nearly the same playbook, because acquisition model decides more than industry does. Each tile filters the directory to the industries that share your shape.

One location, one catchment

41

The map pack decides most of it, and the profile does more work than the website. Distance from the searcher is a ranking factor you cannot write your way around, which changes what is worth spending on.

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Many locations, one brand

18

The problem stops being content and becomes data: keeping people, services and hours in sync across the site, the profiles and the directories. Location pages that differ only by address are the failure mode.

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A regulator reads your marketing

11

Health, money and anything licensed. The constraint is not the copy, it is the stack: which tracking may fire, which claims need substantiating, and who has to review a page before it goes live.

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Selling software to businesses

3

Review platforms own the commercial terms, competitors publish comparison pages about each other, and the category may not exist as a search yet. Very little of the local playbook transfers.

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Selling products online

8

Category pages carry the revenue, marketplaces take the product queries, and faceted navigation quietly generates more URLs than you have products. A crawl budget problem before it is a content problem.

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The head terms are already gone

20

Every industry marked brutal here has an incumbent you will not outrank: a portal, a marketplace, a national publisher. The strategy starts by conceding those and finding the queries they structurally cannot serve.

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The directory

SEO strategies by industry

53 industries mapped across 9 sectors, with 51 full playbooks published so far. Filter by sector if you know what you are, or by business model if you would rather find the industries that share your shape.

Showing 12 of 53 industries

Healthcare

FeaturedYMYL

Health and medical · Brutal competition

Privacy law decides your analytics stack before SEO decides anything

Patients search for symptoms months before they search for a provider, and a handful of national directories own the results in between. The work is earning the local pack, the condition pages and the insurance queries without breaking privacy rules that most marketing stacks break by default.

Where it comes from
Local pack, condition pages and insurance queries
Time to results
6 to 12 months
Typical monthly
$1,500 to $9,000
Read the playbook

Tour operators

Regulated

Lifestyle and leisure · High competition

The query is the destination, and the buyer is abroad

A local business whose customers are never local. The query is a destination owned by tourism boards and travel media, and the platforms that resell your tours outrank your own page for it.

Where it comes from
Destination and activity content, plus the trade
Time to results
6 to 12 months
Typical monthly
$2,000 to $9,000
Read the playbook

Florists

Retail and ecommerce · High competition

The product is a delivery date, worthless one day late

A retailer whose product is a delivery date. Two days a year carry the revenue, the trade suppliers duplicate every product page across the market, and the picture is never exactly what arrives.

Where it comes from
Local pack, occasion pages and the funeral homes
Time to results
3 to 8 months
Typical monthly
$700 to $4,000
Read the playbook

Auto repair

Regulated

Business services · High competition

The highest-volume queries come from people trying not to pay you

A local trade whose biggest keyword clusters belong to people trying to avoid the bill. The vehicle turns every service into a matrix, and a federal warranty statute is quietly on your side.

Where it comes from
Local pack, cost pages and vehicle-specific service pages
Time to results
4 to 9 months
Typical monthly
$800 to $4,500
Read the playbook

Wineries

Regulated

Lifestyle and leisure · High competition

The appellation is the keyword, and federal law rations it

The keyword you most want is an appellation, and a federal percentage decides whether you may use it. Meanwhile the same domain runs a tasting room and a national shipping business.

Where it comes from
Appellation and visit content, plus the club
Time to results
6 to 12 months
Typical monthly
$1,800 to $8,000
Read the playbook

Physical therapy

YMYL

Health and medical · High competition

Direct-access rules differ by state and decide the whole funnel

Referral-led by tradition and increasingly self-referred through search, with direct-access rules that differ by state and change what you may legally advertise.

Where it comes from
Condition and recovery pages plus the local pack
Time to results
4 to 9 months
Typical monthly
$1,200 to $5,000
Read the playbook

Locksmiths

Home and trades · High competition

Fake listings are the competition, so verification outranks optimisation

The only trade where your main competitor is not a company. Fake and hijacked listings occupy the results a locked-out customer sees, so the work starts with proving you are real and ends with ranking.

Where it comes from
Local pack, verified profile and emergency service pages
Time to results
3 to 6 months
Typical monthly
$700 to $3,500
Read the playbook

Flooring companies

Regulated

Retail and ecommerce · High competition

The sample and the estimate are the conversions, not the sale

A retailer whose website is not a shop. The conversions are a free sample and a measurement appointment, and the product copy arrives from the manufacturer already published by every other dealer.

Where it comes from
Material and cost pages feeding sample and estimate requests
Time to results
5 to 9 months
Typical monthly
$1,500 to $6,000
Read the playbook

Optometrists

YMYL

Health and medical · High competition

The regulator hands your customer the prescription your competitor needs

A clinic and a shop sharing one website, where federal rules oblige you to give every patient the prescription your biggest competitors need, immediately and free of charge.

Where it comes from
Local pack, plan-coverage pages and exam booking
Time to results
4 to 8 months
Typical monthly
$1,500 to $6,000
Read the playbook

Staffing and recruiting

Regulated

Business services · High competition

Job boards own the candidate side, so the money is on the other one

Two-sided, with one side already lost. The job boards own candidate search, so the winnable half is the employer, who searches rarely and buys on proof rather than on ranking.

Where it comes from
Employer-side content by role and market
Time to results
6 to 12 months
Typical monthly
$2,000 to $9,000
Read the playbook

Podcasts

Lifestyle and leisure · Moderate competition

The content is audio, so the search engine cannot read it

The only category here whose content a search engine cannot read. Discovery happens inside apps you cannot influence, so the work is manufacturing a text surface that can rank at all.

Where it comes from
Episode pages and transcripts on your own domain
Time to results
4 to 9 months
Typical monthly
$500 to $3,000
Read the playbook

Higher education

YMYL

Business services · Brutal competition

The search starts two years before anyone can apply

A purchase considered for three years, decided by a family rather than a person, on a domain that forty departments publish to and nobody owns. The ranking sites answer the top of the funnel and the federal government answers the cost question.

Where it comes from
Programme pages, career-outcome content and faculty research
Time to results
9 to 18 months, against an annual admissions cycle
Typical monthly
$3,000 to $25,000
Read the playbook
What is in one

Ten sections, and the part that changes every time

A hundred pages built from one template is a hundred pages nobody needs. So each playbook is structured around the questions that only have an industry-specific answer. The right column is what differs, and it is the test a new industry has to pass before it gets a page.

  1. 01

    The landscape

    Who already ranks: the directories, aggregators and publishers occupying the results before you get there.

    What differs

    Healthgrades and Zocdoc in healthcare. G2 and Capterra in SaaS. National portals in real estate. Named, with what you can actually do about each.

  2. 02

    The intent map

    The query clusters that matter, what each one wants, and the page type that wins it.

    What differs

    Healthcare has an insurance-coverage cluster that barely exists elsewhere. Trades have an emergency cluster with no research phase at all.

  3. 03

    What the regulator forbids

    The rules that change the SEO work rather than just the copy, each with its source and its date.

    What differs

    This section is empty for some industries and is the longest one for others. In healthcare it decides your analytics stack before SEO decides anything.

  4. 04

    Proving expertise

    What a search engine can read as evidence that you are qualified to say this.

    What differs

    A named clinician and a review date in health. Original research and disclosed vulnerabilities in security. A portfolio in trades.

  5. 05

    The first ninety days

    A sequenced plan with the artefact that exists at the end of each phase.

    What differs

    The order changes. Where a regulator is involved the compliance audit comes first, because it can invalidate the measurement everything else is judged on.

  6. 06

    Technical low-hanging fruit

    The fixes with the best effort-to-payoff ratio, and why each one is endemic here.

    What differs

    A small number of specialist website vendors build most sites in any given vertical, so the same handful of defects recur across the whole market.

  7. 07

    Structured data that applies

    The schema.org types that fit this industry, and an honest note on what each earns.

    What differs

    MedicalClinic and Physician in health. LegalService in law. Most of these produce no rich result at all, and the playbook says so rather than implying one.

  8. 08

    Budget, and the free path

    Four spend tiers with what each buys and where each stops, plus everything that costs nothing but time.

    What differs

    The ceiling on the free tier is industry-specific. In healthcare it is clinician review time, which no budget below the top tier buys.

  9. 09

    The tool stack

    Jobs to be done, the tool for each, and the free option where one is adequate.

    What differs

    Rows link into our researched reviews of the SEO APIs and headless CMS platforms rather than restating them, so the recommendation has a page behind it.

  10. 10

    What to measure

    Leading indicators and business indicators, reported separately, with the gap between them stated.

    What differs

    In healthcare most conversions happen on the phone and the tooling that would close that loop is constrained by privacy law. That gap is named, not modelled away.

Methodology

How these are researched, and what they are not

Writing SEO strategies by industry properly means reading the results pages rather than repeating what other agencies have written about a vertical. Every playbook starts from the queries and the regulation, and states its sources where a claim depends on one.

  • The results pages come first

    Who ranks is observed, not assumed. The gatekeepers named in each playbook are the sites actually occupying those queries, with a note on whether a free listing is worth claiming.

  • Regulatory claims name a source and a date

    This area moves. A rule quoted without its source and the date it was read is a liability, particularly in health and finance, so every one carries both.

  • Budgets are estimates and say so

    They come from what the work takes, not from a survey, and they are wide on purpose. No figure on this site is restated as a statistic when it is a judgement.

  • No invented numbers, anywhere

    The same rule that governs the other two directories on this site. If a number is not real and attributable, it does not appear, and a mechanism is described instead.

  • No affiliate links, no paid placements

    Tool recommendations are editorial. Outbound links carry nofollow and nothing on this site is sponsored, so a recommendation is worth exactly what it appears to be.

  • We run this playbook ourselves

    This site is the working example, which is a conflict of interest as much as a credential. Where a tool we use is recommended, the playbook says that is why it is there.

FAQ

Questions we get

  • Is this not just the same advice with the industry name swapped?
    That is the failure mode this directory is built to avoid, and it is why the data model is structured the way it is. Each playbook has to answer questions that only have an industry-specific answer: which directories and publishers already own the results page, which regulator constrains the analytics stack, which schema types apply, which technical defect is endemic to the software that industry runs on. The generic advice that is true everywhere lives in shared sections rather than being restated as though it were a per-industry insight. An industry that cannot fill those fields with something distinct does not get a page.
  • How are the budget figures worked out?
    They are editorial estimates and every playbook says so where they appear. They are built from what the work actually takes at each tier rather than from a survey, and they are deliberately wide because the real range in any market is enormous. Treat them as a sanity check on a proposal, not as a quote. Nothing on this site restates an estimate as a statistic.
  • Can I actually run one of these myself?
    Yes, and every playbook has a section on doing exactly that with no budget. For a single-location business the free path is genuinely most of the available value: claiming and completing the profiles, fixing the directory listings, rewriting the pages that prove who you are, and reading Search Console properly. What money buys is speed and the parts that need a specialist, not access to a secret.
  • Which tools do the playbooks recommend?
    Whichever tool does the job, with a preference for the free option where it is adequate. Where a tool has a full review on this site the playbook links to it rather than restating the pricing, so a recommendation always has a researched page behind it. There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site and no paid placements in any directory.
  • How often are the playbooks updated?
    Each one carries the date it was last reviewed at the top of the page. The regulatory sections are the ones that move, so those name their source and their date inline, and re-reading them is the first job on any revision. A dated claim that has quietly gone stale is worse than no claim, particularly in the regulated verticals.
  • My industry is not here yet. What now?
    The cards without a playbook link are the ones already on the list. The order they get written in is driven by which industries people actually ask about, so telling us is the fastest way to move one up. If your situation is closer to a different industry than to your own sector, the situation tiles above are usually a better route in than the sector filter.

Or have someone own it

Every playbook here is written to be run without us, and plenty of teams do exactly that. Where it stalls is rarely the plan: it is that nobody owns it after the first month. That is the job we do, and search is one distribution layer inside it rather than the whole engagement.

See how that worksWhere search fits