25 Facts and Figures About SEO Marketing That Anyone With a Business Needs to Know

SEO Marketing Article By: Adam Riggio, September 18, 2017

SEO Definition:

What is SEO and how it works?

Well, that's the one million dollar question. Because even if you have your own SEO company, still you can't really answer this question easily.

Yes you may know how to do search engine optimization, and you may also have your own search engine optimization techniques as a professional, but still, nobody on earth knows how it really works except for some google search department guys.

But, even if we don't know how it really works, we still know some important and interesting facts about it, and these facts should be known by every person with business interests.

Take a look at these most important facts about SEO.

25) The top five web addresses on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) get 75% of all user clicks

It isn’t really much of a surprise when you think about SEO marketing with your own behavior on the internet. How often have you even bothered to go to the second page of search results yourself? No, the real surprise about this fact is that most people think the top five results get something like 98.7% of all clicks. Don’t let yourself be fooled by your own confirmation bias.

 24) Google owns 65-70% of global search market share

Here’s another fact that deflates some common expectations. A common belief is that Google owns or controls literally all search activity. It’s not like anyone uses the name of a non-Google engine to search for information online. Not without being paid for it anyway. But while Google’s share of search activity is hefty and important, they aren’t as dominant as they used to be. Understanding SEO marketing for Google Search matters, but so does SEO versatility.

 23) 70% of the links that users click on are organic

They aren’t arranged by some deal between the linked and the linker. People put a link in their articles because they’d come across it during their research and thought it would be useful. Or the reasons why a writer links what they do could be even stranger. Look at that link I posted of that cheesy Bing product placement in a first-season episode of Hawaii Five-0. I just remembered that scene from watching the episode years ago, and put it in this article to make readers laugh. The lesson: There are many kinds of content that get people clicking, and it’s not as straightforward as you might think.

 22) 81% of businesses consider their blogs a pivotal company asset.

Blogs do more than just add flavor to a corporate website design with regular new content. It’s also the most powerful and versatile channel to express the personality of your business. What are your priorities? What are your (non-proprietary) methods? What are the ideas and philosophies that drive your work? A blog is where all that can come out.

 21) The two most-used internet marketing activities are search and email

This is an article largely about SEO marketing, so if you’re reading this, you probably have search on the brain. You understand search, and how fundamental it is to online life. Email, however, is often forgotten. But email is a huge chunk of all our online time. If you’ve spent 15 minutes working in a 21st century business environment, you’ve probably spent 12 of those minutes reading and responding to emails. Email is also probably the part of your working life that you complain about most regularly. But because so many of us spend so much time working with our professional and personal emails, that makes an email marketing campaign a potentially very lucrative project for any business.

 20) Page titles are the most important part of your page after the actual content

Content is what keeps a user on your page, and what justifies their arrival at your website. But the title is what actually gets people to read that content. The title is what people actually see when they’re searching for the content they want. If the title doesn’t communicate the article’s purpose clearly or isn’t very eye-catching, no one is going to click on it. You can write amazing content, but without a solid title, it will go unread.

 19) 70-80% of users ignore paid ads and focus on organic content

Now, this does mean that 20-30% of users pay attention to paid ads and act on them. You need to think about search as an economy of scale – billions of searches means hundreds of millions of searchers who act on paid content. But most people have a natural suspicion of paid content – for good reason. If money is the main reason why someone puts a message out there, it’s a sign that the message itself might not be good enough to spread without money’s push. Organic content, links, and endorsement are more trustworthy in general. You earned it without having to pay for it.

 18) 75% of SEO Marketing activity is off-page

This doesn’t mean that three-quarters of your SEO rankings depend on off-page activity. I’m talking about the activity of search engine optimization techniques. You can shoehorn as many keywords into your website’s content as you can. You can pack your page with enough keywords that your website reads like Ezra Pound is your copywriter. What matters is your prominence in the network. How many people link to your pages? How much do your articles spread on social media platforms? That means engaging with people and the issues that your audiences care about. Shout to be heard.

 17) Half of searchers start their inquiries on a mobile device

Here’s a discovery that tracks with what a lot of you already know from experience. Most searches begin when an idea occurs to people. Maybe it’s a conversation, maybe they’re in the middle of something else. But the idea occurs when they’re away from a desktop or a laptop. You’re sitting with a friend over lunch and a typically rambling conversation turns to a curious fact. Where’s a good vegetarian restaurant in Brampton? Who is the President of Bulgaria? Who directed that movie where Keanu and Patrick Swayze jump out of a plane? Who are the best small-business SEO consultants in Toronto? Whip out your phone and check.

 16) Google estimates that the internet consists of five million terabytes of data, and they’ve indexed only 0.04% of it

There’s clearly a lot of data out there in the dark corners of the internet. I have no idea what’s out there in that non-indexed dark matter online world. That’s why it’s important to send the Google Console a sitemap and post content regularly to make sure you’re always seen. But don’t let the small percentage fool you into thinking that we’re dealing with a small amount of information. Because 0.04% of five million is still 200,000 terabytes of data.

 15) Google accounted for nearly 40% of all online marketing in 2016

This is how Google makes so much of their money. It’s also why Google advertising rates and packages can get so expensive so fast. If you’re on a tighter online advertising budget, you can get solid results (and often much more detailed audience targeting) from a Facebook ad campaign. Facebook comes second at 8% of online advertising and can offer many ways to engage with users directly.

 14) Putting a video on your website’s landing page makes it 53% more likely to make it to the top of Google rankings

Google likes video – they own the biggest video sharing platform in the world, after all. So having an introductory video on your landing page makes a big difference to your website’s search prominence. Be careful not to concentrate on video production too much, though. Video devours mobile data, and not every visitor to your site is viewing from a place where they can watch a video without interruption or disruption. Communicating with as many users as possible means balancing the needs of watchers, listeners, and readers.

 13) SEO’s top challenges are link building and keyword research

Keeping up on the most effective keywords is a rat race with your competitors on the best of days and an epic battle to the death on the worst of them. That intensity of competition is really the biggest challenge of keyword research. Link building is difficult not so much because of competition, but because it depends so much on a business’ own social networking with partners and supporters. You’re in a constant exchange of worthwhile content with the people who link to your website. It’s an ongoing conversation that a lot of your audience (or even colleagues elsewhere in your company) doesn’t necessarily see.

 12) 75% of searchers never scroll past the first page of results

It’s become a common-sense adage of the SEO marketing world, and it remains sadly true. Most of our searchers are fairly simple, so the first page tell us all we need to know most of the time. This is the core reason behind most of the stiff competition in the SEO marketing world.

 11) Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t

Blogging is part of the necessary long game of building an audience and a following for your company. You need to participate in the conversations that your potential customers are interested in, and which others in your industry are having. A blog is a platform for your company’s thinkers to become thought leaders, developing and introducing innovative new ideas in your business. The more you build your profile, the more leads will come to you.

 10) Search engine marketing remains the number one driver of users to a website

Search leaves social media links in the dust – it’s that simple. No matter if you social media following is in the thousands or even millions, search engine results will still bring many more people to your site and your business.

 9) Nearly one in five Google searches result in organic clicks on the top link

More strictly, that’s 18%. The second-highest link gets 10% of clicks, while the third-highest gets 7%. When you’re dealing with a scale of literally a billion or more searches, a difference between first and second of 8% of the total is nearly a hundred million searchers.

 8) But the Bing breakdown is a bit more equitable

Look, I admit to making fun of Bing earlier in this article. It’s always been easy to make fun of Bing, just as it’s easy to make fun of Microsoft generally. But their search results prompt a curiously different pattern of user behaviour than in the still-dominant Google. The highest link in Bing results snags 9% of organic clicks, the second-highest gets just under 6%, and the third gets 3%. Clicks are distributed more equally among all the results, though the differences still add up to huge numbers. But contrasting Google and Bing makes for an intriguing research project for any SEO marketing professional.

 7) Search directly drove one-fourth of all online device purchases since the start of this decade

SEO marketing is very, very good to device manufacturers

 6) Content creation is considered the single most effective SEO optimization tactic by 53% of marketers

While this is still a majority of professional marketers, it does speak to a diversity of opinion in the field. I’d be interested in follow-up research that concentrates on questions like these. If a marketer isn’t a good content creator himself, will he tend to devalue the importance of content? Does support for content as a driver of SEO engagement correlate with the intelligence of the marketer? Content is what draws people organically, naturally to your website. Everything else is trickery.

 5) Conversion rates tend to be 10 times as high from desktops as from mobiles

This is literally where clicks turn into money for your company. Clicks from desktop users end with a purchase at 10 times the rate of clicks from mobiles. When you think about it, it makes sense. When people are at their desktops, they’re usually at home or at work, in an area where they can get some time to themselves and think. When we’re on a mobile device, we’re usually in the middle of something else – riding the subway, waiting at a coffeeshop. We don’t usually make purchase decisions when we’re in the middle of doing something else, especially not for bigger ticket items like furniture or electronics. Spending our hard-earned money is something we think about and concentrate on.

 4) Conversation rates on smartphones are 15 times higher from search than social media

For those of us who do buy things on our smartphones while waiting for the bus, those purchases largely happen through search. Again, think about the experience of search and social media. A social media feed is a scrolling assemblage of content jammed together through coincidence and chance. The last ten minutes of Instagram or Twitter posts, or the prominent posts in Facebook’s complicated (and totally opaque) news feed algorithms. It’s a way to discover surprises. But a purchase is something you have to think about and plan. You’re going to reach a purchase point with a process that you have some direct control over – like a search.

 3) Nearly 60% of marketers who’ve spent at least a year working in social media improve their clients’ SEO website rankings

While social isn’t everything, it does make a real difference when you do it right. It may not drive conversions directly, but it helps build the visibility and prominence across networks that businesses need to expand their reach throughout and across audiences.

 2) The highest-correlated social media platform with SEO agency ranking is Google+

There’s an old joke about Google+. Facebook is where you find your mom, Twitter is where you find your news, Instagram is where you find people trying to be cool, Snapchat is where you find people who are young and cool, Tumblr is where you find people who’ll never be cool, and Google+ is where you find Google employees. However, since Google is the Earth’s most prominent and influential search engine, I’m not surprised that building prominence on Google+ helps a company build its SEO profile. SEO marketing is about gaming Google’s systems to drive users to our websites. So why shouldn’t we expect Google to game us SEO marketers a little to drive businesses to their platform? All’s fair . . .

 1) Of the 10.3 billion monthly Google searches, 78% of them are for products or services

This is just in the United States alone. When you add global business – as any online-focussed company should do – the scale gets bigger and bigger. And it will only grow as the world becomes more interconnected and better-wired. The wiring of the world will only be stopped through a civilization-destroying natural disaster. While that is possible, it’s something to avoid. So remember how much business you can create for yourself through masterful SEO marketing and content marketing.