In the ever-evolving world of pop culture, Taylor Swift is one of the most recent artists to have changed their music style to adapt to the shifting trends. From being a little country girl to pop star status, Swift has been able to play around with her music style and maximize appeal to her core audience.
It’s scenarios like these that SEO likes to make a case for itself. While digital marketing shifts and moves, SEO remains dynamic on its own. It’s still one of the staples in digital marketing as search engines will never stop growing businesses. Whenever you think that you already know everything about SEO, a new set of algorithms and strategies emerges.
The competition isn’t getting any easier, though. Businesses are now aggressively targeting keywords and fighting for the number one spot. As 2020 peeks over the horizon and things get more difficult, here are some must-know SEO stats that will dictate the next year and beyond.
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54.68% of clicks from Google originate from Featured Snippets (Ahrefs)
Commonly known as Position Zero, this is what you should be aiming for in 2020. As Google continues to improve its user experience and optimize processes for the voice search revolution, Featured Snippets have emerged successful as they provide quick answers to quick questions. Your content can achieve this status when you provide digestible information such as listicles, answers to common FAQs, and the like. Naturally, searchers click the source and read on especially if it provides what they’re looking for.
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There are over 1.7 billion websites online as of 2019 (InternetLiveStats)
By websites, we mean pages with unique host names. Undoubtedly, 1.7 billion websites is stiff competition. Most are SEO-friendly to a degree, but not all of these websites are completely optimized when it comes to SEO marketing, so you can get ahead of the competition with digital marketing services focused on SEO. A good SEO agency will have state-of-the-art systems and techniques, which can give your business the visibility boost it needs.
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Google searches take up 78% of searches done worldwide (InternetLiveStats) and there are 5.6 billion Google searches per day (SERPwatch)
This number has grown exponentially ever since Google started. In the beginning (over two decades ago), the search engine and tech giant got 10,000 queries a day at most. The adoption of search engines by users has been growing at a rapid pace. By optimizing your content, you can give yourself the opportunity to appear in these searches. Today’s online customer is savvy, and they will inform themselves with content before making a purchase. Having the right content to attract them at this stage drastically increases trust, which means more conversions and more sales!
Also Read: Digital Marketing Amid COVID-19
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About 64% of all searches are done through a mobile device (Statista)
It’s true that smartphones have become an extension of the human body. If someone is unsure of certain information today, they just pull out their phone and do a quick search. What does this mean for your business? We’ll, for starters, you should have a mobile-friendly website, UX and UI combined. Layout, design, placement of website elements—this should all be considered when coming up with a mobile or responsive version of your website.
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2,416 words = top content (SerpIQ via Sweor)
To answer one of the most important questions for content marketers, 2,416 is the average number of words for posts taking the top spots on Google rankings. For 2020, it only makes sense to write longer content because it gives you more opportunities to share detailed information, explain deep concepts, and build links for different sections of your article.
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91% of pages don’t get traffic due to no backlinks (Ahrefs)
Increasing the number of quality backlinks to your article will eventually provide you with more organic search traffic. It builds authority in your industry and it allows you to share your content to a wider set of audiences because of the relevant blogs and websites you outreach to. Based on this graph by Ahrefs, it takes around 80 links in order for you to generate 10,000 organic search traffic. Of course, this is also highly dependent on the actual search volume of your target keyword and how many queries you’re ranking for.
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Long-tail keywords will increase your click-through rate by 3-5% (Smart Insights)
Searchers are becoming more specific with their queries. They want fast, direct (and hopefully correct) answers to their mundane or complex questions. If you aim for long-tail keywords, you are making sure that the right audience sees your content. As a rule of thumb, the more specific your content is, the less traffic it’s likely to generate. But in exchange, the corresponding traffic will be of a higher quality.
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50% of the searches will be voice-based (ComScore via Campaign)
With the emergence of voice assistants (e.g. Alexa, Siri), and increase of smart speaker purchases, 2020 will be more about talking and less about typing. Users can now ask hyper-local and hyper-specific questions which triggers focused content via long-tail keywords. The goal is to make the search experience better and more seamless. Your search optimization strategy for 2020 should focus on micro moments of your target audience, implementation of “natural language” in your content, and produce localized articles.
Back to the Future of SEO
These SEO statistics will not only drive the movement of this ever-evolving discipline in 2020, but also in the years to come. At the same time, now is the right moment for you to sit down and strategize how you can tweak your current SEO marketing to better adapt to modern search trends.
Best practices for reaching the top search results are getting more complex. Do yourself a favor by addressing these telltale statistics and bring your business one step closer in achieving SEO success in 2020!
If you’d like to know how Spiralytics helps businesses just like yours grow their online presence with the power of SEO, contact us for a FREE Strategy Session today!
