SEO Statistics 2024 | Latest News, Updates, Trends

Key Takeaways

• Search Engine Market Share: Google dominates online searches, driving 92.96% of global internet traffic, while Bing holds just 4% in North America.
• Mobile devices: 92.1% of internet users access the web via mobile phones, underlining the importance of mobile optimization.
• AI Revolution: AI is shaping the future of SEO, with 72% of US executives considering its use for content marketing, and it’s projected to add $15.7 trillion to the world’s economy.

This article’ll delve into compelling SEO statistics that shed light on the dynamic world of online search and digital marketing. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or new to SEO, these insights will guide your journey to online success.

SEO Statistics: Overview

Here are some exciting SEO facts you should be aware of:

1. Most online experiences, about 68%, begin with a search engine.
2. Very few, only 0.63%, of Google searchers click on results from the second page.
3. More than half, 53.3%, of all website visitors come from organic search.
4. The majority, 92.96%, of global internet traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
5. SEO brings in over 1,000% more traffic than social media.
6. About 60% of marketers consider inbound methods like SEO and blog content their top source of high-quality leads.
7. Leads generated through SEO have a 14.6% success rate.
8. Most, 92.1%, internet users access the web using mobile phones.
9. The SEO industry is valued at over $50 billion in 2023.
10. The first result in a Google search gets an average of 31.24% of all clicks.
11. Google dominates the global search engine market with 85.55% market share.
12. Three-quarters of people, or 75%, never look past the first page of Google search results.
13. Nearly half, 49%, of digital marketers believe that organic search provides the best return on investment.

SEO Statistics: Google Search

1. Most people, 77%, use Google at least thrice daily to search online.
2. In North America, Google is the top search engine, with a significant market share of about 87.97%. Bing is in second place with around 4%.
3. Google handles more than 40,000 search queries every second, adding up to a massive 1.2 trillion searches annually.
4. Younger folks, 80% of those aged 13 to 21, use Google more than three times a day, while 60% of people over 60 search with the same frequency.
5. Many people, 72%, either constantly or mostly click on organic search results.
6. About 68% of people think that Google’s search results have improved over time.
7. When searching online:

• 55.1% prefer written content,
• 29.1% prefer images,
• 13.8% prefer video,
• Only 2% prefer audio content.

8. The most searched terms on Google include Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Wordle, and Google itself.
9. Google had a whopping 87 billion visits in October 2022.
10. Of all Google searches, 60% are done by men and 40% by women.
11. Nearly 91% of web pages don’t get any traffic from Google, and only 5.29% get ten visits or less per month.
12. Almost 70% of requests to Google Assistant are made in everyday language, not using typical search keywords.
13. In the Google App, 20% of searches are now done using voice.
14. About 30% of mobile searches are about finding local businesses or places.
15. 62.1% don’t know why Google shows them specific ads, while 37.9% feel they understand why.

SEO Statistics: Voice Search

1. Nearly 41% of voice search responses come from a special highlighted information.
2. When you ask a voice assistant something, the answer is usually short, about 29 words.
3. About 36.4% of voice search answers come from web pages that use Schema, which helps structure information for search engines. This is higher than the global average of 31.3%.
4. About 70.4% of voice search results have secure “HTTPS” web addresses.
5. About 75% of the time, the answers from voice searches are among the top three results for those questions.
6. The answers given in voice search are typically written at a reading level suitable for ninth-graders.
7. Websites considered authoritative and well-trusted by the internet do well in voice searches. On average, these websites have a high rating of 76.8.
8. Almost half (48%) of people use voice search for general web searches.
9. Voice search results usually load pretty fast, in just 4.6 seconds. This is 52% quicker than the average web page.

SEO Statistics: Keywords and Ranking

1. Most keywords, about 95%, are searched for only about 10 times or less each month.
2. A tiny fraction, just 0.0008%, of keywords are searched more than 100,000 times monthly.
3. Some highly-ranked web pages, 7.4%, don’t have a title tag.
4. Google changes title tags in search results about one-third of the time.
5. Google is now 33% more likely to change title tags than before.
6. When Google doesn’t use the title tag, it often relies on the H1 tag, about 51% of the time.
7. Pages that reach the top 10 in search results are typically at least 2 years old.
8. Google is 57% more likely to change title tags that are too long.
9. A quarter of top-ranking pages need meta descriptions.
10. Many pages have meta descriptions that are cut off.
11. Only about a third of websites meet the Core Web Vitals standard for user experience.
12. About 8% of search queries are questions.
13. 15% of Google searches are for things that have never been searched.
14. In Google Ads Keyword Planner, search volumes are often overestimated, around 91.45% of the time.
15. The top organic result on Google usually has about 1400-1500 words.
16. Top-ranking pages often appear in the top 10 results for nearly 1,000 other related keywords.
17. Google uses about 200 factors to decide which pages rank higher. Content quality and relevance are among the most important.
18. Google only displays meta descriptions in search results about 37% of the time. This goes up to 40% for popular keywords and down to 34% for less common ones.
19. Updating your blog or article can boost search traffic by up to 146%.

SEO Statistics: Local SEO

Suppose you have a business that serves people in your area. In that case, ensuring you appear in local searches online is essential. These facts help explain why good local SEO (making sure your business appears in local online searches) is so crucial:

1. About 30% of all searches on mobile phones are about finding things in specific locations.
2. When people use their smartphones to search for something nearby, 76% go to a local business within a day.
3. Almost 28% of searches for nearby things end up with people making a purchase.
4. When you search on Google for something in a particular city and business category, you’ll often see Yelp in the top five results 92% of the time.
5. More than half (54%) of people using smartphones search for the business’s hours and 53% look for directions to local stores.
6. Around 45% of shoppers worldwide buy things online and then go to the physical store to pick them up.
7. After using Google to search for something, 78% of people want to buy it locally.
8. The number of searches like “Where to buy” and “near me” on mobile devices increased by more than 200% between 2017 and 2019.
9. About 46% of the time, when people search on Google, they look for something local.
10. Searches on mobile devices for phrases like “store open near me” (for example, “grocery store open near me”) have increased by more than 250% from 2017 to 2019.
11. Searches on mobile devices for phrases like “on-sale” and “near me” (for example, “tires on sale near me”) have also grown by more than 250% year over year from 2017 to 2019.

SEO Statistics: Mobile SEO

1. Most website traffic (about 59%) comes from mobile phones worldwide.
2. About 80% of the highest-ranking websites are designed to work well on mobile phones.
3. Mobile devices are predicted to become more popular than desktops for online shopping by 2023.
4. Smartphones make up nearly 60% of global search engine use, with tablets adding a small part (about 2%). Desktops account for around 38%.
5. Location-based searches account for 30% of all mobile searches.
6. Sadly, 20% of marketing emails don’t work well on mobile phones.
7. Local smartphone searches lead to purchases within a day 18% of the time, compared to 7% for non-local searches.
8. When using smartphones, 51% of users discover new companies or products.
9. More than 30% of mobile searches happen before people visit a store.
10. In stores, 56% of shoppers use their smartphones to shop or research products.
11. Quick answers on a website make 69% of mobile users more likely to buy from it.
12. Every day, 87% of mobile users use a search engine.
13. Many smartphone users (90%) need help deciding which brand to choose.
14. One-third of email clicks are from mobile devices.
15. The first organic search result on mobile gets 27.7% of clicks, while 19.3% on desktops.
16. Voice searches make up 20% of all mobile phone queries.
17. The second most popular way for email marketers to improve is by making emails work better on mobile phones.
18. A poorly optimized mobile website can discourage 57% of users from recommending a company.

SEO Statistics: Backlink SEO

1. About two-thirds (66.31%) of web pages do not have any backlinks.
2. Websites at the top of search results usually get new backlinks that want to share their content. This happens at a rate of 5% to 14.5% more monthly backlinks.
3. On average, if you want to pay for one of these backlinks from another website, it costs around $361.44.
4. If you want to publish a guest post on someone else’s website and include one of these backlinks to your own site, it typically costs about $77.80.
5. Many websites (73.6%) have backlinks where they link to another website, and that website also links back to them. It’s like a friendly exchange of backlinks.
6. Almost half (43.7%) of the websites at the top of search results have these friendly backlink exchanges.
7. Over the past nine years, more than half (66.5%) of the backlinks created to websites are no longer working or “dead.”
8. Some backlinks are marked as “nofollow,” meaning they don’t have as much influence on search rankings. About 10.6% of backlinks to the top 110,000 websites are like this.
9. A tiny percentage of backlinks (0.44%) use the tag “rel=ugc,” and an even smaller number (0.01%) use rel= “sponsored.”
10. Each month, the website that appears at the top of search results gets 5% to 15% more good-quality backlinks from new websites.
11. Businesses that have blogs get 97% more backlinks pointing to their site. This helps them get noticed more in search results.

SEO Statistics: Video SEO

1. A study of 1.3 million YouTube videos discovered that when more people leave comments, watch the video, share it, and like it, those videos tend to appear higher in YouTube’s search results.
2. The videos you see on the first page of YouTube are typically about 14 minutes and 50 seconds long, on average.
3. Around 68.2% of the videos on the first page of YouTube are in high definition (HD).
4. Videos that attract new subscribers tend to get better rankings on YouTube.
5. If you make posts with videos, they can get more websites to link to them, leading to an enormous 157% increase in the number of people finding your videos through online searches.
6. Having keyword-optimized descriptions for your YouTube videos doesn’t affect how high they appear in search results.

SEO Statistics: AI

1. Many executives in the US, around 72%, are thinking about or already using AI for content marketing.
2. Successful companies are twice as likely to use AI for their marketing efforts.
3. Over 61% of small business marketers have tried using AI.
4. About 44% of small businesses use AI to create content.
5. Most top companies, 91.5%, keep investing in AI regularly.
6. High-performing marketers, 70%, have a clear strategy for using AI.
7. 50% of big companies use AI in at least one part of their business.
8. The use of AI in business has grown by a massive 300%.
9. 57% of B2B marketers use AI chatbots to understand their audience better.
10. B2B marketers can get 10-20% more leads using AI chatbots.
11. AI can make work 40% more efficient.
12. Nearly half, 49%, of marketers use AI to improve customer experiences.
13. 28% of people have complete trust in AI.
14. Most people, 69%, are open to using AI to enhance their experiences.
15. Most employees, 81%, believe AI makes them work better.
16. Many business executives, 77.5%, use AI to personalize marketing emails.
17. Over half, 53.7%, of research about AI in marketing has been done in the last five years.
18. AI is expected to add $15.7 trillion to the world’s economy.
19. Spending on AI is growing faster than predicted, exceeding the expected 28.4% annual growth rate.
20. The value of AI in marketing is predicted to reach $108 billion.
21. 26% of AI marketing research focuses on experiential marketing.

SEO Challenges

Statista conducted a global survey involving 3,623 SEO professionals about SEO challenges worldwide. Here are the results:

• The most common challenge is the “lack of resources,” with 14.9% of respondents highlighting it.
• Other significant challenges include “strategy issues” (12.3%), “scaling processes” (11.9%), and the need for “alignment with other departments” (10.7%).
• SEO professionals also contend with “budget cuts” (10.5%), “management approval” (10.2%), “client relationship issues” (8.6%), and “legal approval” (5.9%).

SEO Latest Trends

1. About 12.3% of search queries show a featured snippet.
2. Before clicking on any results from their initial search, 18% of searchers enter a new query.
3. Most searchers, 75%, stay within the first page of search results.
4. Around 21% of searchers click on more than one search result.
5. In 2018, Google made over 3,620 “improvements” to its search engine.
6. Google handles over 3.5 billion searches daily.
7. About 94% of clicks in search results go to organic (non-paid) results.
8. On desktops, Google dominates with 72.4% of search engine traffic, followed by Bing (12.3%), Baidu (11.3%), and Yahoo (1.9%).
9. In various industries, over 40% of revenue comes from organic traffic.
10. Pages that rank 1 to 3 on search results pages get a clickthrough rate of 36%.
11. Nearly 99.58% of featured snippets are already in the top 10 positions on Google.
12. Google handles over 86,000 searches every second.
13. A solid connection to a brand can increase clickthrough rates by 2-3 times.
14. When people come to a website from a search, they typically visit 3-3.5 pages.
15. Domains that rank in the top 3 spots have an average bounce rate of 49%.
16. On average, people spend 3 and 10 seconds on a website from a top 10 search result.
17. Organic search brings in 300% more website traffic compared to social media.
18. Shockingly, almost 91% of pages get no traffic from Google, according to a study by Ahrefs.
19. The big search engines like Google, YouTube, Bing, and Yahoo make up 70.6% of all website traffic.
20. A new study from the digital information world found that in approximately 49% of searches, Google’s “People also ask” feature is now displayed for 2.5 million search terms.

SEO Predictions

• According to SEO Market Overview by Market Watch, the worldwide SEO market was worth $1455.59 million in 2021, and it’s predicted to grow by 25.54% each year. By 2027, it’s anticipated to reach $5698.12 million.
• Statista predicts that by 2025, there will be approximately 7.49 billion mobile users across the globe. As mentioned, ensuring mobile-friendly websites should be a top priority when optimizing them for search engines.
• As reported by Salesforce’s research, 8 out of 10 digital marketers use AI and machine learning-powered solutions for their marketing efforts. This number will increase in the future.

Bottom line

In conclusion, these SEO statistics provide valuable insights into search engine optimization. Understanding these trends and challenges is crucial for digital marketers and businesses aiming to improve their online visibility. As the SEO market continues to grow and evolve, staying informed about these developments is essential for success in the digital landscape.