What your SEO needs to do going forward

As these tumultuous times continue to hurl forward, it remains important to not lose sight of those basic and everyday matters that will help a company or small business move forward. Even in such uncertain times, there are those certain things that have proven to work time and again. The major one, of course, is your search engine optimization. There has been some recent research data published from various sources including at Google, Search Engine Watch and the Content Marketing Institute, among many others, that reveal the direction in which your SEO must go moving forward to keep you and your company ahead of the game. Below are just some of the published findings:

  • Google accounts for just over 75% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 9.97%, Baidu at 9.34%, and Yahoo at 2.77%.
  • Google has received nearly 2.3 trillion searches this year.
  • Of the billions of searches that happen on a given day, 15% of daily searches are new to Google.
  • On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks.
  • Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank websites.
  • High-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search.
  • 57% of marketing executives say on-page content development was the most effective SEO tactic.
  • The average content length of the top position Google article contains 2,416 words.
  • The average word count of a voice search result page is 2,312 words.
  • 91% of all pages never get any organic traffic from Google, mostly due to the fact they don’t have backlinks.
  • 55.24% of pages don’t have a single backlink.
  • The more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it gets from Google.
  • The top four ranking factors are website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate.
  • In 2019, 52% of all worldwide online traffic comes from mobile, 45% from desktop.

  • 36% of SEO experts think the headline/title tag is the most important SEO element.
  • Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate 3% to 5% higher than generic searches.
  • 70% of marketers see SEO as more effective than PPC.
  • More than 1.3 million businesses, website publishers, and nonprofits nationwide benefited from using Google’s advertising solutions.
  • 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
  • “Where to buy” + “near me” mobile queries have grown by over 200% in the past two years.
  • 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles.
  • Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can increase organic traffic by as much as 106%.
  • Images are returned for 22.6% of search queries on Google.
  • 62% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers want visual search more than any other new technology.
  • 40.7% of all voice search answers came from a featured snippet.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer