Waze Organic Growth Opportunities

Readiness Assessment

Domain Authority
99
Organic Search Traffic
6.75M
Organic Keywords
8.86M
Current Performance
  • Driving 6.7m monthly organic visits, valued at $2.4m in equivalent ad spend.
  • Your world-class Authority Score of 99, backed by 71k referring domains, helps you rank for over 8.8m keywords.
  • The /live-map page is your primary traffic driver, capturing high-intent searches for both branded ("waze") and generic navigational terms ("directions," "driving directions").
Growth Opportunity
  • The market leader generates 516.5m monthly visits, highlighting a massive addressable market and a significant opportunity to capture a larger share.
  • Competitors rank for 4-5x more keywords, indicating a clear path to expand your keyword footprint beyond core navigational queries.
  • You capture a low traffic share (0.31%) for extremely high-volume keywords like "directions" (1.5m searches), showing immense potential to multiply traffic by improving top rankings.
Assessment

You have an incredibly strong domain authority and a solid traffic base. The data reveals a major opportunity to close the gap with competitors by systematically targeting a wider array of high-volume, non-branded keywords. AirOps can help you scale content creation to capture this untapped search demand and significantly grow your market share.

Your domain is ready for AI powered growth

Competition at a Glance

An analysis of 2 primary competitors, Google Maps and Apple Maps, shows that Waze currently ranks 3rd in organic search performance. The site generates approximately 6.7 million monthly organic visits from 8.8 million ranking keywords.

The market leader, Google, demonstrates a significantly larger digital footprint, attracting 516.5 million monthly organic visits and ranking for 40.3 million keywords. This represents a substantial gap in overall market visibility and audience reach compared to Waze.

This data highlights a significant opportunity gap for Waze. Top competitors are not only ranking for 4 to 5 times more keywords but are also more effective at capturing traffic from higher-volume search queries. This indicates a clear, untapped potential to capture a much larger share of organic traffic.

Opportunity Kickstarters

Here are your content opportunities, tailored to your domain's strengths. These are starting points for strategic plays that can grow into major traffic drivers in your market. Connect with our team to see the full traffic potential and activate these plays.

1. Event & Venue Parking / Traffic Guides

Content Creation
Programmatic SEO
Content Refresh

Create dedicated pages for every major venue (stadium, arena, festival ground) and recurring event, providing data-driven advice on parking, traffic, and optimal arrival times. This play captures high-intent search traffic from millions of event-goers looking for logistical help before heading out.

Example Keywords
  • “parking at Madison Square Garden for Knicks game”
  • “traffic to Coachella”
  • “best exit for Gillette Stadium parking”
  • “directions to Sofi Stadium Taylor Swift concert”
Rationale

Waze usage already surges around major events, indicating strong user need. By creating static, SEO-optimized pages with historical traffic data and parking insights, Waze can capture this demand before users even open an app, establishing itself as the authority on event logistics.

Topical Authority

Waze already ranks for a few high-traffic venue-related keywords (e.g., Dodger Stadium, Golden 1 Center) but the pages lack depth. This play massively expands on that existing, proven authority by layering unique, proprietary data (historical ingress/egress times, road closure feeds) on top, creating best-in-class content that competitors cannot replicate.

Internal Data Sources

Leverage Waze for Cities data feeds for scheduled road closures, historical anonymized drive-time data to model event traffic curves, partner parking APIs (e.g., SpotHero) for real-time lot availability, and POI data for entrance/exit gate locations.

Estimated Number of Pages

250,000+

2. EV Charging Station Finder Pages

Content Creation
Programmatic SEO
Content Refresh

Develop SEO landing pages for every public EV charger, major highway corridor, and city-level 'charging near me' query. This strategy positions Waze to capture the rapidly growing, high-value audience of electric vehicle owners actively seeking their next charge.

Example Keywords
  • “EV charging station near Brooklyn, NY”
  • “Level 3 charger on I-95 exit 33”
  • “Tesla Supercharger cost California”
  • “24 hour EV charger near me”
Rationale

The EV market is expanding exponentially, and 'where to charge' is a primary concern for drivers. By creating comprehensive, data-rich pages, Waze can intercept these high-intent searches, driving app downloads and usage from a valuable and growing user segment.

Topical Authority

While Waze is known for navigation, its core competency is real-time POI data. The platform already integrates data from charging partners like ChargePoint. By surfacing this data alongside unique Waze insights (live traffic to stations, anonymized queue length data), Waze can establish unparalleled topical authority in the EV charging space, out-competing static directories.

Internal Data Sources

Utilize Waze's Point-of-Interest (POI) database for charger specs (kW speed, connector type), anonymized session data to estimate queue times, live traffic data for accurate ETAs to stations, and the Getty Images integration for location photos.

Estimated Number of Pages

200,000+

3. Smart Commute & “Best Time to Leave” Pages

Content Creation
Programmatic SEO
Content Refresh

Generate thousands of pages detailing commute time analysis for specific origin-destination pairs (e.g., suburb-to-downtown). These pages would answer the universal commuter question, 'When is the best time to leave?', using Waze's unparalleled historical traffic data.

Example Keywords
  • “best time to leave Evanston for downtown Chicago”
  • “average commute time I-405 north”
  • “fastest route from Palo Alto to Googleplex”
  • “morning traffic patterns on the 101”
Rationale

Commuting is a primary use case for navigation apps, and search volume for commute-related queries is immense and recurring. By publishing this data, Waze moves 'up the funnel,' capturing users during their planning phase and solidifying its brand as the ultimate authority on beating traffic.

Topical Authority

Waze's core asset is its dense, real-time, and historical speed dataset, which is far superior to any competitor's publicly available information. The domain already ranks for high-level navigation terms like 'driving directions.' This play leverages that authority by applying it to hyper-specific, high-value commute queries, demonstrating expertise in a way no competitor can match.

Internal Data Sources

Use the 12-month historical archive of anonymized travel-time data, incident frequency heat-maps (accidents, construction), and Waze Carpool adoption rates to create uniquely insightful and data-rich pages.

Estimated Number of Pages

100,000+

4. Accident & Incident Hotspot Explorer

Content Creation
Programmatic SEO
Content Refresh

Create data-journalism-style pages for every city and major highway, identifying and analyzing historical accident and hazard 'hotspots'. This play leverages Waze's unique, proprietary incident data to generate highly linkable content that builds domain authority and attracts safety-conscious drivers.

Example Keywords
  • “accident hotspots in Los Angeles”
  • “most dangerous intersections in Houston”
  • “common road hazards on I-90”
  • “pothole report map Chicago”
Rationale

Safety is a primary driver of navigation choice. By transparently sharing insights from its vast trove of user-reported data, Waze can generate significant media attention and backlinks from local news outlets, city governments, and safety advocates, boosting its overall domain authority while providing a genuine public service.

Topical Authority

Waze is the definitive source for real-time, crowdsourced road hazard data, receiving millions of reports monthly. While the app uses this for live routing, publishing historical analyses of this data establishes Waze as an authority not just on navigation, but on road safety intelligence itself. This is content that only Waze can create.

Internal Data Sources

Utilize the multi-year, geolocated archive of user-reported incidents (crashes, hazards, potholes, police presence) and correlate it with time-of-day and day-of-week data to create detailed hotspot analyses and visualizations.

Estimated Number of Pages

120,000+

5. Real-Time Cheapest-Fuel-Along-Route Pages

Content Creation
Programmatic SEO
Content Refresh

Develop pages that answer the specific query 'where is the cheapest gas between city A and city B?'. This play combines Waze's routing engine with its fuel price data to provide actionable, money-saving content for one of the most common driver concerns.

Example Keywords
  • “gas prices on I-75 today”
  • “cheapest gas between Dallas and Austin”
  • “E85 stations near Exit 203 on the Turnpike”
  • “diesel prices on I-80 in Pennsylvania”
Rationale

Fuel cost is a major factor in travel, and search volume for gas prices is consistently high and evergreen. While other apps show local prices, Waze can provide a superior user experience by contextualizing prices along a specific, long-distance route, capturing high-intent users planning their trips.

Topical Authority

Waze already has partnerships and user-submitted data for fuel prices, which it uses for in-app features. By creating static pages for popular routes, Waze can extend this authority to organic search, competing directly with gas price apps by offering a more integrated 'route-aware' solution. This leverages an existing data asset for a new acquisition channel.

Internal Data Sources

Use the live fuel price feed from partners and users, the POI database for station details (brand, amenities), and the routing engine to determine which stations are conveniently located along major corridors.

Estimated Number of Pages

85,000+

6. Striking Distance Audit: Waze Live Map Content Optimization

Editorial
Content Optimization
Content Refresh
Improvements Summary

Add targeted keywords, unique descriptive copy, and structured data to 150+ low-competition Waze live map pages. Implement on-page SEO, internal linking, and city/road hub pages to move these URLs from page 2 to page 1 for navigational queries.

Improvements Details

Update titles, meta descriptions, H1s, and add 150-250 words of unique content focused on each road or POI, including traffic tips and Waze benefits. Integrate Place and FAQ schema, live traffic widgets, and a 'Nearby destinations' carousel. Build city and state hub pages, improve internal linking, and prioritize high-search-volume pages in the sitemap. Example keywords include 'north cave creek road', 'west spruce street tampa', and 'directions sacramento airport'.

Improvements Rationale

Current pages lack keyword targeting, descriptive content, and schema, causing them to rank just outside the top 10 despite low competition. Adding relevant copy and structured data directly addresses search intent and helps Google better understand and rank these pages. Internal linking and hub pages distribute authority, while technical updates support crawlability and user experience, leading to higher rankings and increased organic traffic.

Appendix

Topical Authority
Top Performing Keywords
KeywordVolumeTraffic %
best seo tools5.0k3
seo strategy4.0k5
keyword research3.5k2
backlink analysis3.0k4
on-page optimization2.5k1
local seo2.0k6
Top Performing Pages
PageTrafficTraffic %
/seo-tools5.0k100
/keyword-research4.0k100
/backlink-checker3.5k80
/site-audit3.0k60
/rank-tracker2.5k50
/content-optimization2.0k40

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