What importance should be put on the category that Google defines your website in? If you take the Google Ad Planner it categorises a website in a given category related to your sector. Are you unlikely to rank against what you perceive to be a close competitor but to what Google sees as although industry related, unrelated to the niche you would ideally like to be in?
These categories are not only used in Google’s Ad Planner but surface in Google Analytics under benchmarking and also surface in Google Insight in exactly the same format. I recently interviewed a candidate for an SEO role who had worked for Google in India…she stated that she manually vetted sites before they went into the index…I wish I had asked her if some kind of categorisation was taking place or if this was her primary role in the entry process.
There is inevitably going to be websites which straddle categories and see competitors outranking them on a term they feel strongly on. Does this categorisation have an impact on what you can realistically rank for in the SERPS?
