What does Ricky Bobby know about SEO? 31 stats

“If you ain’t first you’re last” said Ricky Bobby.

What’s true for race car drivers with NASCAR is true for businesses online with search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ongoing process of uncovering and discovering non-branded keywords that are driving organic search traffic and conversions, then publishing content optimized for those keywords.

What makes SEO worth the effort? Why should businesses think about SEO like Ricky Bobby?

Here are 31 stats on SEO that show what Ricky Bobby knows.

1. #1 driver of traffic to a web site is organic search. (source: Search Engine Journal)
2. Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t, and companies with more indexed pages get far more leads. (source: Search Engine Journal)
3. 98% of all business to business relationships are traced back to a search on Google. (Source: MarketingSherpa).
4. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (source: Search Engine Journal)
5. 91% of US internet user search every month (source: HubSpot)
6. 88% of mobile search is for a local business or establishment. (source: Digital Marketing Philippines)
7. 88% of search engine optimization marketers believe optimizing for mobile will be more important this year. (source: BrightEdge)
8. 86% of internet traffic is generated through search engines. (source: Google)
9. 81% of search engine optimization marketing believe integrating marketing data and measuring cross-channel return on investment will be more important this year. (source: BrightEdge)
10. Mobile search traffic is growing at a rate of 125% while desktop search traffic is growing at a 12% rate. (source: Visual Solutions)
11. 80% of smartphone searches are spontaneous; 44% are goal-oriented. (source: Visual Solutions)
12. 70-80% of users click on organic search results rather than paid search. (source: Search Engine Journal)
13. 75% of clicks on a search engine page are on the Top 5 results. (source: HubSpot)
14. Over 70% of users find a website via a search engine. (source: Optimus)
15. 75% of users never scroll based the first page of search results. (source: Search Engine Journal)
16. 70% of the links search users click on are organic. (source: Search Engine Journal)
17. 68% of search engine optimization marketers believe optimizing for video will be more important this year. (source: BrightEdge)
18. 63% of search engine optimization marketers believe search engine ranking will be more important this year. (source: BrightEdge)
19. Just having the word ‘video’ in a search result title or meta description improves click through rates by an estimated 55%. (source: eMarketer)
20. Over 50% of online buyers purchase products from websites found via search engines. (source: Optimus)
21. 50% of search users begin their search on a mobile device. (source: Digital Marketing Philippines)
22. 50% of mobile search users who search for a local business visit that business within the same day. (source: Digital Marketing Philippines)
23. 50% of consumers who visit Amazon conduct an online search first. (source: Compete)
24. 45% of US marketers spend more than 2 days per month researching and learning about the latest trends in SEO. (source: Moz)
25. 40% of users click the first ranking site on search engines. (source: Optimus)
26. 40% of users change their keyword search if they cannot find what they are looking for on the first page of search engines. (source: Optimus)
27. 25% of Google search are for local businesses or establishments. (source: Chikta)
28. 4.9 billion internet searches every month. (source: comScore)
29. $2.2 billion will be spent on search engine optimization in 2016. (source: BrightEdge)
30. 133 million unique searches each month. (source: comScore)
31. Video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text results. (source: Forrester)

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes research, effort, tracking, and most importantly, identifying goals at the beginning. While being first is never easy, it’s usually worth the achievement and definitely has its rewards.

Do these stats show you what drives SEO? Do you need to be shown how to drive SEO for your business?