An Introduction To SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of improving online content to acquire targeted traffic to your website. This is done by using SEO tactics that help enhance your site’s rankings pertaining to the non-paid section of a search engine.
SEO is vital to the majority of businesses. It helps you appear in search engines for relevant keywords that are used by your target audience. This allows your prospective customers to find you with ease when searching for products or services that you offer.
Year after year, SEO proves to be more and more popular and important for businesses. As many stats show, consumers are using search engines more than they ever have to search for products or services. Based on these trends, marketers and businesses have also adapted their marketing strategy in order to get the best marketing results.
Let’s now take a look at some of the most recent trends and stats for SEO in the year 2020. If you want to skip the infographic, you can select one of the topics below to get right to reading again:
- General Trends and Stats
- New SEO Trends and Stats
- SEO Algorithm Trends and Stats
- Update Your SEO Strategy
For the full list of our sources follow this link: https://mymarketing.io/sources/
General Trends and Stats
Let’s first look into some of the general trends that surround the world of SEO.
Google is an absolute search engine powerhouse, it receives 96% of all smartphone search traffic and has over 90% of the search engine market share worldwide. It also boasts a strong 10-15% search volume increase year over year for the past decade. Billions of people around the world use Google. Nowadays, the average person conducts 3-4 searches every single day and Google receives an average of 3.5 billion searches every single day.
Many of these users and searches are consumers researching information about virtually every industry in the world. Due to this consumer behaviour, businesses across the globe have had to adapt their marketing strategy to reach these prospective consumers. Businesses must find ways to market on these search engines in order to find, attract, convert and retain clients.
Ranking
User behaviour has highly fluctuated with the evolution of technology. Consumers turn to online mediums to find and learn about the products and services they desire. As consumer behaviour evolves, marketers and businesses must adapt to follow the relevant trends. One of the main marketing trends companies have been pushed to focus on is improving their search engine rankings.
Ranking high on search engines, particularly Google, has become a necessity for many businesses in recent times. There are numerous studies that show that businesses that succeed to rank their webpage highly on the search engine result pages see an extreme performance boost. In fact, the first page of Google receives more than 90% of user traffic and 68% of user traffic clicks on one of the first five organic results. It goes without saying that sites that rank on the first page of Google are likely to see positive results on their business performance.
Organic
Organic search refers to all unpaid results in the search engine result pages. Ranking your website highly in the organic search results can have a great impact on your business. Time and time again, websites that rank highly organically prove to be more successful than those that pay for search engine ads. According to statistics, 94% of the total clicks on the search engine results are dominated by organic search leaving only 6% to paid search ads.
With this said, businesses must remember that it’s not easy to rank highly in the organic search results. It takes months of work and a lot of SEO knowledge. Search engine algorithms also experience frequent changes for which businesses need to consider. For a business to secure the top position, they need to be aware of the driving forces behind SEO and follow the trends that revolve around organic SEO.
New SEO Trends And Stats
Just like many other digital marketing trends, SEO trends have also been evolving rapidly. Utilizing local SEO for the promotion of locally owned businesses, using mobile devices and voice search are some of the latest trends. While you might already have an SEO strategy in place, make sure to incorporate these relatively new SEO trends to improve performance.
Here are some of the newest and most common SEO trends to watch out for.
Local SEO
Local Search Engine Marketing commonly referred to as local SEO helps in the promotion of services and products to local consumers. Local SEO has grown exponentially in the past few years. Nowadays, approximately 46% of the total searches on Google are related to a local business or service and 30% of all the searches through mobile are location-based queries. With these shocking statistics, it comes to no surprise that business should and are adapting their SEO strategy to improve local SEO performance. To do this, businesses modify their on-page SEO to improve location-based search appearances. This helps them become easily discoverable by consumers searching for their products or services in their region.
Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO is the optimization search performance for consumers on their tablets and smartphones. Over 50% of total Google searches are done on mobile devices and close to 90% of smartphone users use search engines at least once a day. As you can see, mobile searches are a growing trend that has become very popular for consumers. Since consumers are constantly turning to mobile for their search queries, businesses must ensure they do their absolute best to be easily searchable on these devices. There are many ways marketers can optimize their webpage to improve their performance in mobile search rankings. This is something that businesses must begin prioritizing sooner rather than later to avoid finding themselves behind this growing trend.
Voice Search SEO
Voice search is one of the fastest-growing search trends in recent years. People often want to find answers to their questions the fastest and easiest way they can. Voice search has become the easiest, fastest and most convenient way for many to search. This is why a large number of people have taken to searching through voice instead of typing. Over 60% of mobile users make use of voice searches at some point in time and 31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice tech at least once a week.
SEO Algorithm Trends and Stats
Next, let’s speak about a few trends that reflect both on-page and off-page SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of improving web pages to rank higher and earn more traffic in the search engine. It refers to optimizing both the HTML code and content of your page in order for it to be more attractive to search engine algorithms and consumers. On-page SEO keeps changing over the years as Google’s algorithm becomes more sophisticated. Thus, it is important for businesses to consider the latest on-page SEO trends to improve their search performance.
A few recent on-page SEO trends and stats are:
- 1890 word is often considered an ideal content length
- Long-tail keywords of 3-4 words generally receive a higher click-through rate
- The title tag is often considered the most important SEO factor
- Content with images generally performs better
- A blog should include 2-5 keywords
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the practice of using promotional methods like link building, brand mentions, and social media marketing to improve a website’s ranking in the search results. Off-page SEO success is highly dependent on the quantity and quality of backlinks of a website.
Here are a few important SEO stats that demonstrate the importance of off-page SEO:
- Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website
- Long content is expected to receive 77.2% more backlinks compared to short articles
- 43.7% of the top-ranking pages on Google are seen to contain reciprocal links
Update Your SEO Strategy
Being aware of the latest SEO stats and trends in the market can help you optimize your website to the best of your abilities. If your business can succeed to implement a strong SEO strategy that takes into consideration the industry’s most recent trends, you’re likely to substantially improve your overall business performance. Now that you know the basics of SEO trends of 2020, it is a good time to begin implementing or updating your SEO strategy.
