69 Important SEO Statistics for 2023
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69 Important SEO Statistics for 2023

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!

SEO Statistics

Contents

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.

  1. Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites (Backlinko)
  2. Google currently has 86.86% of the search engine market (Statista)
  3. The #1 result in Google gets approximately 32% of all clicks (Backlinko)
  4. 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel (Search Engine Journal)
  5. Organic search results that rank on page 1 of Google contain an average of 1,447 words (Backlinko)
  6. 53% of US consumers say that they research products using a search engine before deciding whether or not to buy (Google)
  7. The median salary for an SEO professional is around $60.5k per year (Backlinko)
  8. Nearly 60% of the pages ranking in the top 10 Google results are 3 or more years old (Ahrefs)
    Nearly 60 Percent Of The Pages Ranking In The Top Ten Google Results Are Three Or More Years Old
  9. Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, said links, content, and RankBrain as the top 3 factors for Google’s search results (Search Engine Watch)
  10. Google organic search is responsible for 59.2% 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.

  1. 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)
  2. HTTPS websites account for 70.4% of voice search result pages (Backlinko)
    HTTPS Adoption
  3. Voice search results contain an average of only 29 words (Backlinko)
  4. Pages using Schema only account for 36.4% of voice search results, versus the global average of 31.3% (Backlinko)
  5. Websites with strong link authority tend to rank well in voice search (Backlinko)
  6. The average Google voice search result receives 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets (Backlinko)
  7. The average reading level of a voice search result is 9th grade (Backlinko)
  8. Voice search results typically load in 4.6 seconds, which is 52% faster than the load time of the average page (Backlinko)
  9. The average page Google voice search result contains 2,312 words (Backlinko)
  10. Roughly 75% of voice search results are from one of the top 3 desktop ranking pages for a given query (Backlinko)
  11. Mobile voice searches are 3x more likely be for something local than text searches (Search Engine Watch)
  12. ComScore predicted search queries would account for half of searches by 2020. No up-to-date numbers have been published, but one study puts smart speaker ownership in the US at close to 90 million (Voicebot)

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. By 2023, over half of the American homes are expected to own a device with a smart speaker.

Source: Google.

How Many People Use Voice Search On Mobile?

According to Google, 27% of the entire world population is voice searching on mobile devices. Globally, out of 3.50 billion smartphone users, over 1.1 billion smartphone users will use voice technology once a week – at least!

Source: Google.

How Many People Use Alexa Or Google Home?

There are well over 50 million Alexa and Google Home smart speakers in the US, with 2.52 people in the average American household. In 2018, the Amazon Echo had an ownership ratio of 24% between 18 and 24-year-old Americans, 44% of which order products once a week using voice search.

Source: Google, TechCrunch.

03. Video SEO Statistics

There’s no doubt that online video is growing fast. 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!

  1. An analysis of 1.3 million YouTube Videos found that number of comments, view count, number of shares, and number of likes had a strong correlated with higher YouTube rankings (Backlinko)
  2. First page videos on YouTube are an average length of 14 minutes and 50 seconds (Backlinko)
  3. 68.2% of first page YouTube results are HD videos (Backlinko)
  4. Videos that bring in new subscribers tend to rank higher on YouTube (Backlinko)
  5. Posts with videos earn more backlinks and see a 157% boost in search traffic (Search Engine People)
  6. 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 Wordstream, 49% of marketers grow revenue faster if they’re using video in their strategy, with 51% of professionals naming it as the best content for ROI. Furthermore, 64% of consumers watching branded videos on social media made a purchase after.

In America, 85% of all internet users interact with video content every month – and 86% of consumers say they would like to see more video content from the brands they support!

Source: Wordstream.

How Many Videos Are On YouTube?

The number of videos created on YouTube is over 5 billion, and this came from 50 million unique users uploading them. According to YouTube, they have over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute with people spending upwards of 40 minutes in an average viewing session.

YouTube is one of the few social network platforms that aren’t drastically driven by mobile, and the user base is still pretty evenly split at 50% each way.

Source: Omnicore Agency.

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.

  1. 46% of all searches on Google are for a local business or local service (Search Engine Roundtable)
  2. 25% of small business websites don’t have an H1 tag (Fresh Chalk)
    25 Percent Of Small Business Websites Dont Have A H1 Tag
  3. A Yelp page is present in the top 5 results for 92% of search queries that contain a city and business category (Fresh Chalk)
  4. After searching on a smartphone for something nearby, 76% of people end up visiting the business within 1 day (Google)
    76 Percent Of People Who Search On Their Smartphones For Something Nearby Visit A Business Within a Day
  5. 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

Google’s algorithm recently 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.

  1. 30% of all mobile searches are location related (Google)
  2. Mobile accounts for 58% of all Google searches (hitwise)
    Mobile Accounts For 58 Percent Of All Google Searches
  3. Organic CTR on mobile is roughly 50% less than that of desktop (SparkToro)
  4. 51% of smartphone users have found a new company or product when searching on mobile (Google)
  5. The first organic listing on mobile receives 27.7% of clicks, versus 19.3% of clicks on desktop (SEOClarity)
  6. 87% of smartphone owners use a search engine daily (Go-Globe)
  7. 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 50.21% with tablets coming in at 2.62% (a total of 52.83% for mobile devices). Tablets have largely plateaued, while desktops have increased at the expense of mobiles in the latter part of 2020.

Source: Statcounter GlobalStats.

In terms of Google only, mobile devices account for 58% of all searches, as mentioned above in the stat list. Mobile devices also account for a more significant percentage of paid clicks in Google, at 62%.

Source: Hitwise.

  1. 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)
  2. More than 66% of pages have zero backlinks pointing to them (Ahrefs)
  3. On average, long content receives 77.2% more backlinks than short articles (Backlinko)
  4. The #1 ranking page in the search results gets an additional 5%-14.5% more dofollow backlinks from new websites each month (Ahrefs)
  5. An Ahrefs study found that 43.7% of top ranking pages in Google contain reciprocal links (Ahrefs)
  6. 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.

  1. The first 5 organic results in the SERPs account for 67.6% of all clicks (Zero Limit Web)
  2. 50% of search queries contain 4 or more words (WordStream)
    50 Percent of Search Queries Contain Four Or More Words
  3. Over 29% of keywords with over 10K+ monthly searches consist of 3+ words (Ahrefs)
  4. Roughly 8% of searches are phrased as a question (Moz)

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 5 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 Video, Google Maps, etc.

The most searched words on Google – Source: (Ahrefs)
Keyword Search volume
facebook 151500000
youtube 142200000
amazon 87440000
gmail 71240000
google 63840000
weather 43400000
ebay 41010000
yahoo 39170000
walmart 31970000
yahoo mail 31880000
google translate 31640000
google maps 30560000
craigslist 27140000
netflix 26860000
google docs 25100000
translate 23520000
home depot 22040000
news 19110000
fox news 19060000
calculator 17790000
  1. 12.3% of search queries contain a featured snippet (Ahrefs)
  2. 18% of searchers enter a new query before clicking on any results for their original search (Moz)
  3. 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results (HubSpot)
  4. 21% of searchers click on more than 1 search result (Moz)
    21 Percent Of Searchers Click On More Than One Search Result
  5. Google reported making over 3,620 “improvements” to search in 2018 (Search Engine Journal)
  6. Over 3.5 billion searches are performed daily on Google (Ardor SEO)
  7. 94% of clicks in the SERPs go to organic results (Search Engine Watch)
  8. A breakdown of global search engine traffic on desktop: Google (72.4%), Bing (12.3%), Baidu (11.3%), Yahoo (1.9%) (NetMarketShare) (NetMarketShare)
  9. BrightEdge found that organic traffic accounts for over 40% of revenue across Retail, Media & Entertainment, Business Services, Technology/Internet, and Hospitality (BrightEdge)
  10. Pages ranking 1 through 3 on search engine results pages (SERPs) generate a clickthrough rate of 36% (Searchmetrics)
  11. 99.58% of featured snippets already rank in positions 1 through 10 on Google (Ahrefs)
  12. There are over 86,000 searches happening on Google every second (Internet Live Stats)
  13. WordStream found that brand affinity helps boost CTR’s by 2-3x (WordStream)
  14. SEMrush found that users visit 3-3.5 pages every time a user lands on a website from search (SEMrush)
  15. The average bounce rate for domains ranking in the top 3 spots is 49% (SEMrush)
  16. A study by Searchmetrics found that the average time on site for a top 10 search result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds (Searchmetrics)
  17. Organic drives 300% more traffic to websites than social media (IronPaper)
  18. A study conducted by Ahrefs found that nearly 91% of pages receive no traffic from Google (Ahrefs)
  19. The major search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo) account for 70.6% of all website traffic (SparkToro)
    The Major Search Engines Account For 70.6 Percent Of All Website Traffic

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:

  1. 55% of American households will have at least one smart speaker by 2023 (TechCrunch).
  2. Globally, 1.1 billion smartphone users will use voice technology weekly (Google).
  3. 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 that does SEO for a living, I really enjoyed putting this list of stats together.

Now I’d like to hear your thoughts:

Which SEO stat from this list surprised you the most?

Or maybe there’s a stat out there that I overlooked (it happens 🙂 )

So go ahead and leave a comment below.

8 Comments

  1. Great summary,
    Do you have any stats about how important the following items are:
    – H1 – how it helps to have H1 for all pages and only 1 per page.
    – how meta description is important vs no meta description
    – how title tag matters – some stats that confirm that
    – how flat site structure helps – no more than 3 levels
    – importance of sitemap and robots.txt files.
    – canonical and hreflang

  2. Great article again, thank you for the stats! I believe it comes down to building something that’s of value to enough people, that will get you the coveted top search positions.
    And creating value for many people requires passion, time, sweat, and money. There are no shortcuts, at least not for long. And Google is getting better and better, in recognizing the real value to searchers.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Pieter, that’s definitely true to a certain extent. The best SEO “hack” is to create an amazing site. But I still think directly optimizing for SEO has a place.

  3. By 2020, 50% of all search queries will be voice searches – Though data never lies still I’m a little skeptical about this. Maybe it’ll be in the 30-40% range.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Subh, yeah that was a projection from 2017 I think. I’d say it’s well below 50%.

  4. Thank you for gathering all of these statistics. I’m using several in an upcoming presentation to explain the value of SEO for a small business. I appreciate the work it took you to aggregate.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Happy to help, Luzanne.

  5. Hey Brian
    Great share, I came to know many new things about SEO and Content Marketing.
    Just one thing, can you please update the 22nd stat which is out of date.

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