Do you know the direction the search engine optimization industry is moving right now and why?
If it’s strange to you, you may never know how to adjust your SEO strategy to drive your website’s growth.
Maybe SEO is working for you right now, but believe me nothing beats having concrete evidence to back up whatever your decisions.
SEO is a dynamic practice. Some of the best practices that worked five years ago no longer work now, and if you fail to adapt to new algorithm changes, your search visibility might be hindered.
Truth is, the search optimization space is evolving, and it’s only those people who evolve with it that will get consistent results.
Some people also claims that social media, content marketing, and others have replaced SEO.
Well, while these things are important for running a successful inbound marketing campaign, it does not mean they’ve totally replaced SEO.
Like SEO, pay per click advertising which is one of the oldest forms of advertising have changed so much over the years.
Interestingly, it still the most efficient way of getting your products and services in front of your audience.
These 43 statistics will help you understand SEO and PPC better:
1). There are over 10.3 billion Google searches every month, with about 78% of U.S. based Internet surfers researching products and services on the web. (Source: B2B Marketing)
Your audience wants to have the feeling that they’ve made a right decision after buying your products and services. They want to be in control of the entire process.
To make this a reality for customers, if they can find what you offer on their own, they’ll be happy make informed decisions. When they do a search, they trust that Google will always provide them with the best information.
A lot of people are always searching for your services via the search engines, and it’s time you optimize your site properly to make it easy for them.
2). On average, search traffic converts 10x higher than the social media on desktops. (Source: Perform Insider)
Some people believe that social media traffic beats search traffic by far regarding conversion but that’s not true.
Most individuals who see your product page on social media are not necessarily searching for it, they often stumble upon it accidentally and might eventually land on your page If it’s enticing enough. However, the chances of them taking your desired action is often slim.
On the other hand, people who visit the search engine are often looking for something. I doubt if someone can just wake up and start searching for something on Google just for the fun of it, unlike social media.
3). About 57% of B2B marketers confirmed that SEO has the greatest impact on lead generation. (Source: NewsCred)
I’m sure that generating quality leads is one of your principal objective? You want to get these links and then work smart to convert them into paying customers.
It goes to say that the more leads you’re able to generate, the more money you’ll bag in the long run.
So far, SEO has generated more targeted leads for B2B marketers, especially for SaaS companies that sell software products.
4). 53% of marketers said that content marketing is the most effective SEO tactic. (Source: NewsCred)
The only way to get discovered by your customers via the search engines is by creating and publishing compelling content that truly answers their questions.
Google is serious about content, and would find it difficult to rank a low-quality website.
Hence, it’s vital to study your market to understand your audience better, then create content that improves their lives in one way or the other.
5). The search engine optimization industry is worth 65 billion dollars (Source: Search Engine Land)
SEO industry is fast growing and is currently worth over $65 billion.
The good thing is that there’s still a lot of opportunities anyone can still tap into it now. There’s also a prediction that the industry will be worth 79 billion dollars by 2020.
This is proof that the SEO industry is alive and will not go anywhere anytime soon.
6). YouTube has become the 2nd Largest Search Engine (Source: Social Media Today)
YouTube has become a very useful platform for marketers to reach more targeted and broad audience.
As you already know, people consume information in different ways, and for you to become a successful marketer, you must learn how to better appeal to everyone. And you can do it through video marketing.
YouTube is the largest video sharing platform on the internet, it draws lots of attention on a daily basis, thereby becoming the second most used search engine in the world.
You need to start creating videos for your target audience — I’m sure they’ll love it.
7). About 96% of marketers provide informational and educational content via Search Engine Marketing (Source: Regalix)
The best way to engage your customers is by providing value through information content. Of course, you want to make money but don’t get carried away by that.
No matter the product you’re selling, educating your customers is sure to quickly establish relationship that further yields sales.
8). Social media signals have a huge influence on search engine ranking (Source: Digital Marketing)
Even though Google keeps their ranking factors a secret, but on several occasions, Matt Cutts have said that they consider social media signals an important factor that drives user engagement.
Also, lots of brands have confirmed getting a rank boost after getting good social shares and engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and other giant social networking sites.
9). The highest online shoppers are more likely to use organic search for information (Source: Marketing Pilgrim)
The largest spenders on the internet often rely on the search engines for information on how to get quality products.
As a marketer who wants to generate more sales and revenue, it’s beckons on you to target the right commercial-intent keywords, optimize your products pages properly, and make it easy for search users to buy from your website.
10). 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine (Source: Ipsos)
This is similar to the stat above. What do you always do when you want to purchase a product or service on the internet?
If you’re like most people, you will start by searching for the item on the search engines using a particular keyword to ensure you get the best results.
This is the single reason why most pro marketers often like to target commercial/buyer keywords.
In this vain, online shoppers usually start by reading reviews of the products to know what other consumers are saying, and if it’s encouraging enough, they’ll proceed to make the purchase.
11). There will be about 73,000,000,000 phone calls generated from mobile search alone by the end of 2018. Calls from search are increasing by 42% per year (Source: Acquisio)
John Gagnon made some predictions some time ago concerning search marketing and — he said that mobile marketing will take the centre stage.
It will interest you to know that people are now generating calls through search, but does this have anything to do with SEO?
Absolutely.
12). 61% of consumers stated that they are more likely to work with a local business if they have a mobile optimized site (Source: Bright Local)
You will benefit more as a local business owner if you can properly optimize your website for mobile.
In order to grow your business by attracting more leads to your local business, you had better work on the mobile version of your site.
13). 61% marketers make use of responsive web design as a part of their mobile SEO strategy (Source: Regalix)
If you’re not among this 61%, you’re massively losing traffic, leads, and money. This is because on the internet today, mobile search accounts for the majority of searches in Google.
Having a website that’s not mobile ready is like going to School without your learning materials.
14). 58% of marketers who have used social media for one year and above confirmed that their search engine rankings increased (Source: HubSpot)
It’s been confirmed over and over again that the search engines now uses social media signals as part of their ranking factors. How true is that?
What this mean to you as a marketer is that you need to start promoting your website via social media.
Why? Because, the more likes, shares, and tweets you can get on your articles, the higher it impacts your rankings — maybe not a direct correlation, but social signals is a measure of user engagement of your content.
15). Your landing page is 53% likely to show up on the first page of Google if you have video on it (Source: SCGPR)
It’s said that having a video on your landing page is necessary as it will positively impact your search ranking. The best way to know is when you test it out.
16). 70 to 80% of search engine users only focus on the organic results ignoring paid ads (Source: Search Engine Land)
If you’ve been spending a ton of money on paid advertising, this is the time to have a rethink because a lot of internet users often give organic results more attention than the paid ads.
However, if your paid advertising campaign is yielding good results, you might consider sticking to it, while investing your time and resources on search engine optimization.
17). Articles with 1,000-word and above repeatedly gets more shares and backlinks than shorter form articles (Source: Moz & Buzzsumo)
This is a study conducted by Moz and Buzzsumo when they analyzed the shares and links of over one million articles.
Longer form articles get more traction than shorter ones with respect to social shares and backlinks, and you already know that these metrics will help you rank higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
18). The average number of words for articles in the top 10 search results went from 975 in 2014 to 1285 in 2015 (Source: Search Metrics)
This is similar to the stats above. As far as ranking high on the search engines is concerned, longer form articles have always proven to do better than shorter ones.
This is because long form articles are often more comprehensive, useful, informative and in-depth.
The average number of words is even increasing every day, which is why experts in the industry advised us to stick to writing longer content.
19). Google owns 71% of the entire search engine market share (Source: Net Market Share)
Without any doubt, Google is still the largest and most popular search engine in the world — and proudly controls 71% of the search market share.
The other search engines that are competing with Google are still far behind, and I doubt if they’ll ever get close.
20). The Internet now contains about 5 million terabytes of data, but Google has indexed only 0.04% of it all (Source: Wonder of Tech)
Google indexing only about 0.04% of the data contained on the internet is mind-boggling.
One can wonder how much of data that could be.
21). 60% of companies said that their content marketing and SEO strategy are integrated (Source: Digital Marketing)
Yes, SEO and content marketing goes hand in hand in most cases. A well-planned content marketing strategy will ultimately boost your search ranking.
But, can you rank without an effective content strategy? Some marketers claim that this is possible, but I think that can be tagged as blackhat SEO strategy.
22). 75% of search engine users never navigate past the first page of search results (Source: HubSpot)
Could this be the reason why brands are always striving to appear on the first page of Google SERPs? I guess?
Once you’re able to rank your web page on the first page, the result can be mind-blowing especially if your product page is well-optimized to boost conversions.
23). More than 1.2 trillion global searches are being conducted on the internet per month (Source: Internet Live Stats)
People are always seeking for more information on the web from different parts of the world.
No matter the type of service you’re offering, your audience is waiting for you, and one of the best ways to get to them is via the search engines.
Search engines are the very first place consumers turn to whenever they’re looking for information and guidance on any product or service.
24). An average internet user spends over three hours/day on mobile device (Source: Smart Insights)
Today, more and more people are surfing the net via mobile devices, this is because it’s easier to carry these devices about than desktops and laptops.
I do all my online researches are often done with my iPhone. Once I’m on my phone, it doesn’t matter where I am at any given time; I can do my work via my mobile devices.
What matters right now is trying to understand how consumers behave while using different versions of mobile devices and getting a feel of what their preferences are.
25). In Google, 18% of organic clicks go to the 1st position, 10% to the 2nd position, and 7% of the clicks go to the 3rd position respectively (Source: Slingshot SEO)
The first position of Google listing is where the main thing is. As you can see, you can equally get some traction if you manage to get to the second and third position but then, how far can you go?
You need to figure out if you want to limit yourself below the first position, if not strive to go higher so you can get a slice of the 18% clicks.
26). Leads from SEO have 14% conversion rate, whereas outbound leads such as print advertising and direct mail converts at 1.7% (Source: Search Engine Journal)
I’ve said before that majority of search engine users are often looking for relevant information, and if you can give them exactly what they’re looking for easily, they wouldn’t mind paying for it.
At 14% conversion rate, you will agree with me that everyone needs to start paying attention to getting their web pages to rank in Google.
Isn’t it obvious that you can make a lot of money once you’re able to drive organic traffic to your website? I guess so.
The essential thing is to ensure that your product pages have all the necessary elements that are proven to boost conversion.
27). Companies that have more of their pages indexed in Google get far more leads than companies with lesser indexed pages, and businesses that run a blog has 434% more indexed pages (Source: Search Engine Journal)
The benefits of having a blog for your business cannot be overemphasized. Google loves fresh content, hence, you want to develop a useful and relevant content marketing strategy going further.
Ensure you’re constantly updating your blog with useful content. This will help you get more of your pages indexed in Google, and increase your chances of getting higher search ranking.
28). According to Outbrain, search is the number one source of traffic to content based sites, defeating social media by over 300% (Source: Search Engine Land)
If you’re not yet promoting your sites via the search engines, you’re missing enormously on both leads and money. Will you start today?
29). On Bing, sites on the 1st position get 9.7% of organic clicks, sites on the 2nd position get 5.5%, and sites on the 3rd position get 2.7% of organic clicks (Source: Sling Shot)
This is similar to what we’ve already talked about above about Google. Sites on the first position of the search engines often enjoy more clicks and conversions than sites ranking below the first page.
However, if you can get your website to rank on the second or third position respectively, consider yourself lucky because you’ll still enjoy some amount of traffic.
30). 54% of marketers that was surveyed believe that the use of SEO will increase in 2015 and beyond (Source: Regalix)
This prediction is already happening — you must have noticed it if you’re a digital marketer.
Today, a lot of B2B brands and marketers are investing heavily on search engine optimization. The success stories and testimonials are pouring in.
31). 76% of agencies from the U.S confirmed that the return on investment (ROI) of SEO is excellent recording the first and second highest responses from customers (Source: eMarketer)
Another good reason to adopt SEO is the excellent results it brings.
You can never go wrong once you’ve mastered how to run a successful search engine optimization campaign. The result will always be more than the efforts.
32). When it comes to lead generation, 57% of B2B marketers stated that search engine optimization have the highest impact (Source: NewsCred)
As far as lead generation is concerned, search engines will always convert more than other marketing channels including social media.
Side note: Linkedin outsmarts both Twitter and Facebook for lead generation.
33). 86% of web surfers said that they were able to learn something important that equally boosted their knowledge via the search engines (Source: Pew internet)
The search engines have helped a lot of people in learning different things.
This is the primary reason Google wants to ensure they always give their consumers the best possible search results.
34). 52% of consumers stated that search engine results had gotten more useful and relevant over time (Source: Pew internet)
People are now happy with the results often delivered by the search engines, this is as a result of Google’s commitment to quality and their fight against low-quality content and websites.
This goes to confirm that you can only hope that Google will rank your websites only when you write useful and relevant contents.
35. Half of the search queries on the search engines contain four or more words (Source: Wordstream)
Surely, this is one of the reasons why SEO experts are always advising you to target long-tail keywords.
If you want to succeed at SEO, you will have to focus more on the specific problems your target audience is facing. You need to niche down the more instead of being broad and generic.
50% of search queries are longer because people are searching for solutions that are unique to their problems.
Updated PPC Statistics
36). Your brand awareness can be boosted by 80% with a PPC ad (Source: PPC Resellers)
Pay per click advertising isn’t only good for people who want to sell their products, but it can help you create brand awareness drastically because even if consumers do not click on your ads, but you’re also still getting your name out there, that would be enough.
Remember that the moment your audience gets used to your brand, your chances of selling more products are high.
37). 50% of your audience can’t differentiate between organic and paid search (Source: Wordstream)
There’s a belief that people don’t click ads anymore on the search result. If you think about it, you will find out that people ignore the sponsored ads showing in the right column of the search result.
However, recent research proved that 50% of the searchers couldn’t recognize the ads above the fold.
Therefore, if searchers don’t know your ad, they won’t become skeptical of its intent. But why should they even be if it gives them exactly what they want?
38). Google’s algorithm updates can’t affect PPC ads (Source: Wordstream)
The different updates Google have rolled out in the past including Panda, Penguin, EMD, etc., targeted thin content, spammy links, expired domain link building, and more.
Their aim of these algorithm updates is to flushed out undeserving websites reward only sites that are truly helpful and easy to use.
But wait, you can still be hit by any of these updates even when you have a clean site; you should always check your rankings regularly. This can be frustrating at times.
However, PPC marketers are often less likely to have such experience even though AdWord accounts can sometimes be shut down without any good reason. But you can never experience any drop in ranking as a result of Google algorithm changes.
39). Sponsored Ads get 65% clicks for commercial queries, while organic results get 35% (Source: Wordstream)
Overall, organic results still get more clicks than paid results.
However, different types of keywords have different values for any business.
For high commercial keywords that indicate the buyer’s intent to buy a particular product, the majority of the results are devoted to sponsored listings.
40). For every $1.60 spent on Ads, businesses generate an average of $3 in revenue (Source: Power Traffick)
Except you don’t know what you’re doing, you will always see a good return on investments (ROI) from your paid ad campaigns.
However, this can also be a disaster if you’re not good at it, you will only be losing money and eventually quit to embrace SEO.
41). Pay per click visitors are 50 percent likely to buy something than organic visitors (Source: Unbounce)
Search intents matter in every search engine listing, both paid and organic.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, commercial intent queries are often dominated by sponsored ads in Google organic listings — making it easier for searchers to purchase products and services with ease.
42). A certain company used Facebook remarketing to boost their PPC return on investments (ROI) by 2.5x (Source: Adroll)
Remarketing works like magic once you know how to do it, this approach can drastically give you a good ROI as it did for the company above.
43). About 65% of B2B marketers can use LinkedIn ads to grow their client base (Source: Protocol80)
A PPC advertisement doesn’t only appear in Google, you should consider other high-traffic social networks as well. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even StumbleUpon allows PPC advertising.
If you’re a B2B SaaS company, then LinkedIn may be one of such places to advertise your products.
Takeaway
With Google constantly changing their ranking optimization factors, it’s pertinent for you to pay adequate attention to these statistics.
They will help you to understand what’s happening in the SEO and PPC industry, and keep you at the top of your game.
We’ll be updating this resource page every other month. So stay tuned.