40 Unbelievable SEO Statistics You Need to Know

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the roadmap that connects potential visitors with websites. It helps us find what we're looking for and draws interested customers to our online stores, blogs and websites.

SEO is one of the most important investments you can make for your website so we decided to put together an awesome list of 40 SEO statistics that show you why search engine optimization is so important.

Website Content

• Quality content is the key factor in any good SEO strategy. Improvements in content have been known to increase blog traffic by as much as 2,000% ¹
• Average length of top ranking pages on Google is 1,890 words ²

• 72% of marketers say the single most effective SEO tactic is relevant content creation ³

Organic Search

• The top 2 online activities are search and email ⁴
• Ranking highly for organic search results is crucial; between 70% and 80% of users completely ignore paid advertisements ⁵
• 66% of distinct search queries result in 1 or more clicks ⁶
• 93% of all traffic comes from a search engine ⁷

• 21% of searchers click more than one result ⁸
• Over 63% of all searches are performed using Google ⁹
• 94% of all mobile and tablet search traffic comes from Google ¹⁰
• Google changes its search engine algorithm roughly 500 - 600 time per year ¹¹
• Search engines drive 300% more traffic to sites than social media ¹²
• 87% of smartphone owners use a search engine at least once per day ¹³
• 60% of clicks go to the top three websites in search engine results ¹⁴
• 50% of search queries are four words or longer ¹⁵

• The average time spent on a search session is less than 1 minute long ¹⁶
• Businesses with a strong keyword in their company name rank 1.5 spots higher in search engine results ¹⁷
• 50% of visitors are more likely to click a result if the brand appears multiple times in search engine results ¹⁸
• SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate compared to only 1.7% for outbound leads such as print advertisements ¹⁹
• 75% of users never click past the first page of search results ²⁰
• On Google, 18% of organic clicks go to the first search result, 10% go to the second, and 7% go to the third. ²¹

• Inbound leads, such as SEO, cost 61% less than outbound leads, such as direct mail or cold calling ²²
• Marketers using both organic SEO techniques and pay-per-click ads see an average of 25% more clicks and 27% more profits compared to using a single technique ²³

Local Search

• 50% of users who perform a local search on their smartphone visit a physical store within one day ²⁴
• 80% - 90% of shoppers read online reviews before buying a product ²⁵

Social Media

• 61% of all visits from social media websites come from Facebook ²⁶
• Posts longer than 1,500 words receive 68.1% more Tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes ²⁷
• More than 2 billion searches are performed on Facebook daily ²⁸
• Companies are predicted to spend $79 billion on SEO by 2020 ²⁹
• 40% of visitors will skip to a different search result if the first is not mobile friendly ³⁰
• Worldwide there are over 3.5 billion internet users ³¹
• At least 2 trillion searches are conducted on Google worldwide in a year ³²
• YouTube is the world's second largest search engine ³³

Blogging

• Business-to-business marketers with blogs receive 67% more leads ³⁴
• Companies who blog receive 97% more site links than those who don't ³⁵
• Companies who blog have 434% more indexed pages than those who don't. That means more leads! ³⁶
• Updating and republishing old blog posts can increase traffic more than 100% ³⁷

Emerging Trends

• Voice queries have increased 3400% since 2008 ³⁸
• The addition of a single image in content has been shown to increase search rankings ³⁹
• A well-optimized video is up to 52 times more likely to show up on the first page of Google than a text article ⁴⁰

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^{* Adapted lead image: Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com}