With all of the focus on paid ads, keywords, link building, and local listings, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s one thing that truly drives the trends behind anything and everything search engine related: the searchers themselves.
Much like athletes giving a shout-out to all of their fans at the end of a gruelling season, we in the SEO community would like to thank the searchers for all of the support that they give us each week. Without them, this wouldn’t be possible.
OK, that’s enough of that.
Recent stats have popped up from Google that paint an interesting picture in terms of the behaviour of users making queries on the web—and they show just how important consistent SEO efforts are in 2017. Here are the three most important ones we found:
15% of searchers perform more than one search per day
At first glance, there isn’t much to this stat at all….or is there? Out of all the searches on Google each day (there are 40-60 billion each month), only 15% belong to people making more than one query.
What does that tell us? That the vast majority of searchers (85%) go onto Google with a purpose. Not only that, they take the results that are shown to them and they don’t feel like searching again. Although many in the marketing realm would be scared of living in a world where we don’t rely on Google for every little piece of information we need, the majority of people still use the search engine of all search engines to find just tidbits of info that they’re looking for, usually just for goods and services.
25% of all search volume happens outside the top 100 million keywords
Statistics are all about relevancy. One hundred million might seem like a big number, but when tens of billions of searches per month are at stake, the number shrinks pretty quickly. About half of all traffic happens outside of the top 10 million keywords and 25% happens outside of the top 100 million.
What does this mean for SEO?
This means that of the 40-60 billion searches per month, half are going to long-tailed keywords outside of the most popular competitive terms. For your business, that means there’s plenty of keyword real estate to be taken where there isn’t high competition.
21% of searches lead to more than one click
Only 21% of all searches lead to more than one click. This tells us that Google is getting pretty good at its goal of showing the most relevant answers to searchers’ queries. 79% of the time, a user clicks on the results and seems to be satisfied with what they clicked. For SEO, this means you’ve got to fight hard for the top real estate. The vast majority of clicks go to the top three results, and, from there, the vast majority of those clicks are final. The real estate at the top is invaluable.
Ultimately, the value of appearing high in the SERP only matters as much as the value users put to it. In case you haven’t noticed, that value is still high. These three search behaviour statistics prove the value of SEO in 2017 by demonstrating how users make queries and value the results that they see. We always look forward to analyzing new search trends as we discover them.
