74 Important SEO Statistics
Written by Brian Dean
This is a complete list of up-to-date SEO statistics.
On this page you’ll find hand-picked
stats about:
- Google ranking factors
- Search engine usage
- Voice search
- Video SEO
- Mobile optimization
- Backlinks
- Local SEO
- Keywords
- Lots more
So without further ado, let’s see the stats!
01. Key SEO Stats
Let’s kick things off with super critical stats about search engines, SEO and the search engine optimization industry. I pulled these from industry studies, surveys, reports and even statements from Google. Let’s dive right in.
- Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites (Backlinko)
- Google currently has 91.54% market share of the search engine market worldwide (Statcounter)
- The #1 result in Google gets approximately 27.6% of all clicks (Backlinko)
- 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel (Search Engine Journal)
- Organic search results that rank on page 1 of Google contain an average of 1,447 words (Backlinko)
- 49% of US consumers start their search when shopping online on a search engine like Google (eMarketer)
- The median salary for an SEO specialist is around $69.8k per year (Glassdoor)
- Nearly 60% of the pages ranking in the top 10 Google results are 3 or more years old (Ahrefs)
- High-quality content, page experience and links ranked as the top 3 ranking factors of Google’s search results (Search Engine Journal)
- Google organic search is responsible for 57.8% of the world’s web traffic (Sparktoro)
How Many Searches Does Google Get A Day?
Currently, the number of searches on Google a day is over 7 billion, which translates to people searching 81,000 times per second. If we were to look at how many people are using Google yearly, the number was over 2.55 trillion searches in 2020.
Source: Worldometers.
How have these numbers changed in terms of Google’s search growth?
Number of searches in Google in 2020
- 81,000 searches per second in 2020, up from 63,000 searches in 2016.
- 4.9 million searches per minute in 2020, up from 3.8 million searches in 2016.
- 292 million searches per hour in 2020, up from 228 million searches in 2016.
- 7 billion searches per day in 2020, up from 5.5 billion searches in 2016.
- 212 billion searches per month in 2020, up from 167 billion searches in 2016.
- 2.55 trillion searches per year in 2020, up from 2.00 trillion searches in 2016.
Source: Worldometers, SearchEngineLand.
However, for those of you that want to cite actual figures, you should be aware that Google has not provided their data for some time, and these are the most up-to-date estimates available online.
If anything, they are a lower estimate than the actual figures, so it’s a safe bet to cite ‘or more’ with any mention when referring to the numbers above.
How Many People Use Google Per Day?
On average, the typical internet user will search Google 4 times a day. Based on these figures, the number of people using Google search daily has been estimated at roughly 1.7 billion – considering there are 7 billion daily searches.
Source: 99firms
Again, without Google publicly releasing their figures, it’s best to assume this is a rough estimate. Additionally, another study I observed mentioned that only 15% of users search more than once a day in the US. With this in mind, this 15% could be bringing up the overall average they used for this calculation.
How Many Web Pages Or Sites Does Google Search?
The number of websites in the world today is estimated at around 1.72 billion. In 2020, there are 58 billion unique indexed webpages in Google search, up 38.1% in five years. In 2013, Google reported the 30 billion pages in its index, and they crawled 100 billion pages a month, some with higher return frequency of course.
Source: WorldWebSize, Statista.
02. Voice Search SEO Statistics
Voice searches are starting to replace traditional, text-based searches. This should come as no surprise: voice searches are faster and easier than typing on a keyboard or smartphone screen. And if you want to apart your content marketing for voice search, these stats will get you started.
- After analyzing 10,000 Google Home search results, Brian Dean found that 40.7% of all answers from voice search are pulled from a Featured Snippet (Backlinko)
- HTTPS websites account for 70.4% of voice search result pages (Backlinko)
- Voice search results contain an average of only 29 words (Backlinko)
- Pages using Schema only account for 36.4% of voice search results, versus the global average of 31.3% (Backlinko)
- Websites with strong link authority tend to rank well in voice search (Backlinko)
- The average Google voice search result receives 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets (Backlinko)
- The average reading level of a voice search result is 9th grade (Backlinko)
- Voice search results typically load in 4.6 seconds, which is 52% faster than the load time of the average page (Backlinko)
- The average page Google voice search result contains 2,312 words (Backlinko)
- Roughly 75% of voice search results are from one of the top 3 desktop ranking pages for a given query (Backlinko)
- Mobile voice searches are 3x more likely be for something local than text searches (Search Engine Land)
- Smart speaker ownership rate reached 35% in the US in 2022. That’s up from 21% in 2019 (NPR and Edison Research)
What Is The Voice Search Market Share?
According to data from Google, voice search has a 20% market share of all Google searches in the US application. Around 35% of Americans 18+ are estimated to own a smart speaker.
Sources: Google, NRP and Edison Research
How Many People Use Voice Search On Mobile?
According to the Global Web Index, 27% of the entire world population is voice searching on mobile devices. Globally, out of 4.3 billion smartphone users, over 1.16 billion smartphone users will use voice technology once a week – at least!
How Many People Own Smart Speakers?
Around 100 million people in the US estimate to own a smart speaker. Amazon Echo ranked as the most popular device in the category, claiming a 65% market share in the US, followed by Google Home with a 26% market share.
Here’s a complete ranking of most popular voice-activated smart speakers in the US:
| Device | Share of owners |
|---|---|
| Amazon Echo | 65% |
| Google Home | 26% |
| Apple HomePod | 19% |
| Google Nest | 16% |
| Bose | 16% |
| JBL LINK Series | 12% |
Sources: NRP and Edison Research, Statista
03. Video SEO Statistics
There’s no doubt that online video is growing fast. The question is: how do you optimize your videos so they get in front of the right people? And how do you get your videos to rank at the top of the world’s 2nd largest search engine (YouTube)? Well, check out these super interesting video SEO stats!
- An analysis of 1.3 million YouTube Videos found that the number of comments, view count, number of shares, and number of likes had a strong correlated with higher YouTube rankings (Backlinko)
- First page videos on YouTube are an average length of 14 minutes and 50 seconds (Backlinko)
- 68.2% of first page YouTube results are HD videos (Backlinko)
- Videos that bring in new subscribers tend to rank higher on YouTube (Backlinko)
- Posts with videos earn more backlinks and see a 157% boost in search traffic (Search Engine People)
- Contrary to popular belief, there is no correlation between YouTube rankings and video descriptions that have been keyword optimized (Backlinko)
Video Marketing Engagement Statistics
According to Wyzowl, 87% of marketers claim that video marketing has helped them increase sales. Furthermore, 53% of marketers say that videos have helped them reduce support queries.
Over half (51%) of people claim that they are more likely to share video with their content, more than any other type of content.
Source: Wyzowl
How Many Videos Are On YouTube?
The number of videos created on YouTube is 3.86 billion in 2023, and this came from 61.4 million creators uploading them.
According to YouTube, they have over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute which equates to 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day.
Sources: Photutorial, Statista
How Many Daily Video Views Are On Facebook?
The number of daily video views on Facebook is over 8 billion. On average, this adds up to 100 million hours of video consumed each day. Surprisingly, 85% of these videos get viewed with sound off, one in five of these videos are live broadcasts too, and 98% of all views come from mobile devices.
Source: Omnicore Agency
04. Local SEO Statistics
It’s no secret that Google uses a different set of ranking factors for the local pack (aka the “Map Pack”). These stats shed some light on how important a SEO strategy can be for any business that serves a specific area.
- 46% of all searches on Google are for a local business or local service (Search Engine Roundtable)
- 25% of small business websites don’t have an H1 tag (Fresh Chalk)
- A Yelp page is present in the top 5 results for 92% of search queries that contain a city and business category (Fresh Chalk)
- After searching on a smartphone for something nearby, 76% of people end up visiting the business within 1 day (Google)
- 28% of local searches result in a purchase (Google)
How Many Local Searchers Are There Per Month
Based on the previous report stating 46% of all searches have local intent, the number of monthly local searches is 97 billion; over 12 months, this will end up totaling 1.17 trillion a year. Likewise, if we want to break this down it’s 3.2 billion a day, 37,000 local searches a second.
Source: 99firms
What Percent Of People Searching Locally End Up Visiting?
According to Google, people using them for local search queries visit 1.5 billion locations every month as a result. That works out to be 32.8% of all internet users visiting a local business.
What Percent Of People Searching Locally Actually Buy?
The number of people that will buy locally after searching is 78%; this includes online and instore purchases from local businesses. Globally, 56% of individuals will shop both online and locally offline.
Source: Google
05. Mobile SEO Statistics
A while ago, Google’s algorithm switched over from “desktop-first” to “mobile-first”. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise: the majority of Google searches now happen on mobile devices. And that’s a trend that’s not about to change anytime soon.
- 30% of all mobile searches are location related (Google)
- Mobile accounts for 83.58% of all Google visitors (Semrush)
- Organic CTR on mobile is roughly 50% less than that of desktop (SparkToro)
- 60% of users claim that they discovered a new company or product when searching on their smartphones (Google)
- The first organic listing on mobile receives 6.74% of clicks, versus 8.17% of clicks on desktop (SEOClarity)
- 87% of smartphone owners use a search engine daily (Go-Globe)
- Voice searches now account for 20% of the queries on mobile (Search Engine Land)
Percentage Of Searches On Mobile vs. Tablet
When looking at the entire search engine market share for all search engines worldwide, mobile makes up 53.59% with tablets coming in at 1.82% (a total of 55.41% for mobile devices).
Source: Statcounter
06. Backlinks Statistics
Does Google still use backlinks in their algorithm after all these years? Yup! Let’s take a look at a handful of statistics that prove that link building is still super important for search engine optimization.
- A study published on Backlinko found that the number of domains linking to a page was the factor that had the highest correlation to rankings in Google (Backlinko)
- More than 66% of pages have zero backlinks pointing to them (Ahrefs)
- On average, long content receives 77.2% more backlinks than short articles (Backlinko)
- The #1 ranking page in the search results gets an additional 5%-14.5% more dofollow backlinks from new websites each month (Ahrefs)
- An Ahrefs study found that 43.7% of top ranking pages in Google contain reciprocal links (Ahrefs)
- Companies who engage in blogging receive 97% more backlinks to their site (HubSpot)
07. Keywords Statistics
Let’s quickly check out some stats related to how people search for things in search engines.
Top 20: The Most Searched Words On Google
The top search engine queries in the US are as follows below. As you would expect, it’s almost entirely brand-related search terms.
When looking into what people are searching for on Google, you’ll notice that number 6 is people Googling ‘Google’ which may seem a bit crazy at first glance. However, there is a large number of people that want to get to Google’s homepage options to direct their queries in Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, etc.
| Keyword | Search volume |
|---|---|
| youtube | 173,700,000 |
| weather | 133,000,000 |
| amazon | 124,000,000 |
| 124,000,000 | |
| 68,000,000 | |
| wordle | 55,600,000 |
| gmail | 55,600,000 |
| walmart | 45,500,000 |
| google translate | 42,700,000 |
| nfl | 39,400,000 |
| fox news | 37,200,000 |
| yahoo mail | 37,200,000 |
| home depot | 37,200,000 |
| yahoo | 37,200,000 |
| weather tomorrow | 34,900,000 |
| nba | 32,700,000 |
| translate | 32,700,000 |
| traductor | 30,400,000 |
| google maps | 28,600,000 |
| food near me | 28,600,000 |
Source: Semrush
08. Search Engine Trends
SEO is changing all the time. And it feels like it’s changing faster than ever before. That’s why I decided to include a collection of statistics that focus on emerging trends in the search engine optimization world, like Featured Snippets, Google algorithm updates, current ROI, organic CTR, and more.
- 12.3% of search queries contain a featured snippet (Ahrefs)
- 18% of searchers enter a new query before clicking on any results for their original search (Moz)
- 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results (HubSpot)
- 21% of searchers click on more than 1 search result (Moz)
- Google reported making over 4,000 “improvements” to search in 2022 (Google)
- Over 8.5 billion searches are performed daily on Google (HubSpot)
- Clickthrough rate for the first organic search result is 39.8% vs. 2.1% for the first ad position (Matomo)
- A breakdown of global search engine traffic on desktop: Google (82.74%), Bing (9.55%), Yahoo (2.95%), Yandex (2.34%), DuckDuckGo (0.67%), Baidu (0.63%) (Statcounter)
- BrightEdge found that organic search accounts for 44.6% of revenue across Retail & eCommerce, Media & Entertainment, B2B, Technology, Travel and Hospitality (BrightEdge)
- Pages ranking 1 through 3 on search engine results pages (SERPs) generate a clickthrough rate of 36% (Searchmetrics)
- 99.58% of featured snippets already rank in positions 1 through 10 on Google (Ahrefs)
- There are over 99,000 searches happening on Google every second (HubSpot)
- WordStream found that brand affinity helps boost CTR’s by 2-3x (WordStream)
- Semrush found that users visit 3-3.5 pages every time a user lands on a website from search (Semrush)
- The average bounce rate for domains ranking in the top 3 spots is 49% (SEMrush)
- A study by Searchmetrics found that the average time on site for a top 10 search result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds (Searchmetrics)
- Organic drives 300% more traffic to websites than social media (IronPaper)
- A study conducted by Ahrefs found that 96.55% of all pages receive no traffic from Google (Ahrefs)
- The major search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo) account for 70.6% of all website traffic (SparkToro)
- 87.6% of Google search results have little to no AI content, only 12.4% contain high amounts of AI content, and pure AI-generated makes up 3.0% of results (Graphite)
- Commerce (7.98%), local (4.96%), productivity (3.93%), and crypto (3.26%) have the most AI-generated content compared to the typical average of 3.0% (Graphite)
- Food (0.94%), travel (1.70%), and news (1.79%) are the categories with the lowest percentage of AI-generated content (Graphite)
- An analysis of 100,000 keywords shows Google AI Overviews available for only 8.71% of keywords (Search Engine Land)
- On average, Google AI Overviews contain 4,342 characters (Search Engine Land)
Top 3 Search Engine Trends To Watch
We’re almost at the end of my SEO statistics roundup, from the data we’ve seen it’s clear that there are some standout elements we need to look out for as marketers. However obvious they are, consider these search engine trends:
- 55% of American households will have at least one smart speaker by 2023 (TechCrunch).
- Globally, 1.1 billion smartphone users will use voice technology weekly (Google).
- Voice search has a 20% market share of all Google searches in the US application (OC&C).
Maybe something to make us all a bit nervous?
Conclusion
That’s it for my list of SEO statistics.
As someone who does SEO for a living, I really enjoyed putting this list of stats together.