SEO Statistics 2020: All You Need To Know

60 SEO Statistics

The notion surrounding SEO is straightforward — ranking your content on top of search results by optimising your website to convey quality information to search engines

On the other hand, SEO is ever-changing, and so are the facts and figures surrounding it. Consistent updates around search algorithms make SEO a challenge for most small to medium-sized brands. Despite that, your effort and resources spent on SEO will pay off — as once you have built sufficient traction, results naturally tend to snowball.

Keeping up with SEO means completely understanding the many statistics and trends that help shape the industry. To make life easier for you, you’ve put together 60 of the most meaningful SEO statistics that may help shape your SEO strategy in 2020 and beyond.

Here is a comprehensive list of hand-picked and up-to-date SEO statistics about:

  • Google ranking factors
  • Voice search SEO
  • Video SEO stats and facts
  • Mobile SEO statistics
  • Backlink statistics
  • Local SEO trends
  • Keywords statistics
  • Search engine trends

That said, let’s dive right into the facts that help you get the most out of your future SEO strategy.

Google Ranking Factor Statistics

Since we’ll talk about facts and figures surrounding SEO, it is best to start with the core ranking factors that Google uses to rank and index websites. Nobody knows every Google ranking factor, but we can get valuable insights from industry studies and SEO experiments.

  1. Roughly 95% of the websites found on the first page of Google SERPs use HTTPS encryption.
  2. Only 5.7% of webpages will rank on the top 10 search results within a year of publication.
  3. Organic search results on top of Google SERPs have an average word length of 1,447 words.
  4. Approximately 60% of websites that rank within the top 10 of search results are more than three years old.
  5. The #1 organic search results have an average of 3.8 times (3.8x) more backlinks than websites ranking #2 – #10.

Voice Search SEO Statistics

With the advent of personal assistants and artificial intelligence, voice search is eventually replacing traditional and text-based search queries. 

Besides, voice searching is faster and much more comfortable than typing on a keyboard or a smartphone screen. Hence, if you want to leverage voice search for content marketing, these figures will start you off.

  1. By the end of 2020, websites that support visual and voice search will increase eCommerce revenue by up to 30%.
  2. Websites with HTTPS encryption are responsible for 70.4% of voice search results.
  3. Voice search results have an average word length of 29 words.
  4. Schema markup accounts for only 36.4% of voice search results, compared to about 31.3% total websites that have schema markup.
  5. On average, a Google voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 tweets.
  6. Mobile voice searches are three times (3x) more likely about local search than text searches.
  7. Roughly 58% of consumers find local businesses through voice search.
  8. About 62% of people have purchased something through voice searches on their virtual assistant.
 
Also, make sure to check out our latest post where we take a deeper dive in voice search statistics.

Video SEO Statistics

More than voice searches, video content marketing is growing at a tremendous rate. Furthermore, YouTube encourages video creators to release content that maximises user engagement. Therefore, you need to optimise your videos so that they reach the right people.

To help get your video on top of YouTube search results, check out these useful video SEO facts and statistics.

  1. View count and the number of likes, shares, and comments are significant YouTube ranking indicators.
  2. Most videos on top of YouTube search results span an average of 14 minutes and 50 seconds.
  3. More than 55% of online shoppers watch a video while shopping in a store.
  4. 66% of consumers prefer watching a product demo or review than reading about the product.
  5. About 54% of online consumers want to see more video content in 2020, strengthening user preference for video.
  6. In line with the above statistic, 81% of brands use video content for digital marketing — a significant leap from 63% over the last year.
  7. Study shows that 92% of consumers watch video ads without audio, so make sure to include captions on your video content.
  8. Online video content will account for more than 82% of overall internet traffic by 2022 — 15 folds higher than it was in 2017.
  9. More than 2 billion users log into YouTube and spend more than 1 billion hours watching videos, generating billions of views.
  10. Users are 1.5 times more likely to watch video content on their phones than other devices.

Mobile SEO Statistics

With the majority of online searches happening on mobile devices, Google worked on mobile-first indexing for their search algorithms.

With that, they announced that the search engine would switch to mobile-first starting September 2020. Google will also continue moving sites to mobile-first indexing as soon as search crawlers recognise that they’re ready. That said, mobile SEO is a trend that’s here to stay, and here are facts and figures to give you further insights.

  1. Most websites on search results are mobile-ready, while 70% of pages shown on SERPs have already shifted over.
  2. About 30% of all searches done on mobile devices are related to location.
  3. More users access the internet using an Android device (39.06%) than desktop or other mobile devices.
  4. 58% of all Google searches come from mobile devices.
  5. Organic CTR on mobile devices accounts for 53% more than that of desktop searches.
  6. The top search results on mobile get 27.7% clicks than 19.3% visits on desktop search results.
  7. By 2021, people expect mobile eCommerce sales to account for 54% of total eCommerce revenue.

Backlink Statistics

Link building has always been part of Google’s algorithms when ranking sites. In 2020, let’s take a look at a handful of figures that will determine how relevant backlinks are for your search engine optimisation.

  1. More than 66.31% of pages online don’t have even a single backlink. 
  2. Roughly 26.29% of websites in Google SERPs have links from less than four websites. 
  3. Longer content receives 77.2% more backlinks than short blog posts/articles. 
  4. Most of the #1 ranking pages on SERPs get 5% up to 14.5% more followed backlinks from new websites per month.
  5. Around 44% of top-ranking sites on Google SERPs have reciprocal links.
  6. Online brands that engage in blogging content get 97% more backlinks to their website.
  7. About 74% of domains have reciprocal links — meaning that several sites that they link also link to them.

Local SEO Statistics

When it comes to local searches, Google uses local packs, which they rank using unique sets of ranking factors. Let’s take a look at stats and trends that could shed light on local SEO.

  1. About a quarter (25%) of small business sites don’t have an H1 tag.
  2. Roughly 46% of Google searches are for local services and businesses. 
  3. Yelp is present in the top five search results for about 92% of Google SERPs that includes a city and business category.
  4. 76% of people visit a business within the day of searching them on a smartphone.
  5. 28% of local searches result in an offline purchase.
 
Check out our latest post here that takes a deeper dive into local SEO statistics in Australia.

Keyword Statistics

In general, keyword research is the beginning of almost every SEO campaign. Along those lines, here are some facts about how people search on Google.

  1. Out of 1.9 billion search queries, 92.42% of keywords get less than ten (<10) monthly searches.
  2. Only 13.53% of keywords with less than ten (<10) monthly searches consist of one or two words.
  3. 70.87% of keywords with more than 10,000 searches per month has only one or two keywords.
  4. Roughly eight per cent (8%) of search queries are question phrases.
  5. 0.16% of the most popular long-tail keywords account for 60.67% of all searches.

Search Engine Statistics

Search engine optimisation, as discussed, is ever-changing. Besides, the advent of Google’s mobile-first indexing and voice searches improved its algorithm at a faster rate than before.

Here are some stats and facts that focus on upcoming SEO trends, such as featured snippets, current average ROI, organic CTR, algorithm updates, and more.

  1. Three out of four searchers never go beyond the first page of SERPs.
  2. About 12.3% of search queries consist of a featured snippet.
  3. 21% of online users visit more than one (1) page per search result.
  4. 18% of web users plug in a new search query before clicking any pages from their previous search results.
  5. Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, translating to roughly 3.5 billion daily searches.
  6. Pages within the top three spots on SERPs get an average of 36% clickthrough rate (CTR).
  7. 99.58% of all featured snippets are sites that rank within the top 10 on Google SERPs.
  8. Domains within the top 3 spots of SERPs have an average bounce rate of 49%
  9. Websites that fall under the top 10 search results have an average dwell time of 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
  10. 90.63% of websites receive no organic traffic from Google.
  11. The leading search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo!) share about 70.6% of the entire web traffic.
  12. Google accounts for 94.47% of the Australian search engine market share.
  13. To date, Google reported over 130 major search algorithm updates, excluding events like XML sitemap and canonical tag introduction. 

To Wrap It Up

There’s a lot to look out for in 2020 regarding SEO. The stats, figures and trends should help you establish a data-driven SEO strategy that will work for your brand.

At Red Search, our experienced SEO specialists will provide robust and data-driven SEO services, centered around driving revenue for your business. As a Sydney SEO agency, we work with your team to formulate a bespoke SEO strategy to achieve your business goals.

If you have any questions, contact us at 1300 101 712 and speak to one of our SEO specialists.



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