SEO Statistics That Should Motivate Your Business

I'm sure you've been told that you need SEO to be successful online. You may even intellectually know that it will help your business. Often though, that's not enough. We still see major website redesigns by non-clients that have completely overlooked SEO. In this day an age of the web, that's simply unnacceptable.

Here are some excellent SEO statistics to consider and hopefully motivate your business to act.

On Average, 12 BILLION Searches are conducted online per month in the U.S.. (Comscore)

There are approximately 318.9 million people living in the United States. That's about 38 searches per month, per person. Since most babies, small children, and elderly folks don't do a lot of searches, I'd guess that number is much higher per online person.

You have to ask yourself, what percentage of those searches are people looking for the solution you provide. Where are you in the rankings?

60% of all organic clicks go to the first 3 search results. (Business2Community)

Organic results are the non-ad listings that mos people click on. Can you see why page one is the goal and position 1-3 is dream? You can't get there for search terms that produce business results without a continous effort to get there. It just won't happen.

SEO Leads have a 14.6% close rate versus 1.7% for traditional marketing such as direct mail and print advertising. (Search Engine Journal)

This is so important to recognize. This is the difference between inbound marketing and outbound, interruption marketing. With inbound, you are serving education for people that are looking for and want it instead of interrupting your way in front them.

75% of Searchers never scroll past page 1.

The top 3 results get most of the love, but making it to page 1 is a definite success. If you want a flow of high quality visitors to your website, use inbound marketing to tune your SEO keyword strategy and work your way onto page 1. Take your own search habits into consideration here. How often do you go beyond page 1? Usually someone will adjust the keywords they using to search before clicking on page 2 results. Only after they have exhausted their keyword combinations do they go beyond page one.

Google gets 65.4% of searches. Bing gets 19.7%. Yahoo! gets 11.8% (Comscore).

Did you think Google's was more like 90%? Most people do! While they are the clear 800lbs gorilla of search engines, Bing and Yahoo! combine for an additional 30% of searches that you should rank in as well. Because Bing powers the Yahoo! search, Microsoft more realistically has 30% of the search market share. In December of 2014, when these numbers are from, Yahoo! actually took 1.6% share from Google. Depending on your budget and goals, you should carefully consider leaving Yahoo! and Bing out of your SEO strategy.

Not having a mobile-optimized website costs you 68% of organic search traffic (BrightEdge Data).

Is your site responsive? If you don't know what that means, it's probably not. Responsive design is a technique that allows your website to adapt to the device it's being viewed on to ensure that smartphone and tablet users have a nice user experience. We've all had to interact with a desktop website on a smartphone screen. It's a terrible, unfriendly experience. Google now uses the mobile-friendliness of your website as one of the factors it uses when ranking your website for mobile visitors.

Over 50% of Google searches are from a mobile device.

At the Inbound 2014 conference, an SEO speaker cited a Google estimate that by the end of 2014, over half of all Google searches would originate from a mobile device. See the previous stat and make sure your website is mobile-optimized. Not having a responsive site may be killing your SEO efforts.

The Way We Find Products & Services Has Forever Changed

If we need something, we Google it. If we have a problem and need an answer, we Google it. If we forgot a company's phone number, we Google it. If we need to buy a new __________, we Google it. The bottom line is that the buying process has forever changed. We are informed buyers and so are your clients. If you don't rank well in search engines, you are not being found when your potential buyers are looking for you. If you don't have an ongoing SEO strategy, you will not be as successful as your competitors that do, and it's much harder to play catch up than to lead the way.

I hope you use these SEO Statistics as motivation to get your business headed in the right direction!

If you're wondering how well your website stacks up from an SEO perspective, download the FREE checklist below. We'd also be happy to complete the checklist for you for FREE.

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