An increasingly vast and complex field, SEO can be overwhelming for everyone but experts. What should you do first? Why? How? Answering these questions will be easier if you discover a few critical SEO statics because they reflect the trends and can help you sort your priorities.
93% of online sessions begin with a search engine.
You have to strive to reach the highest SEO ranking for your site and to maintain it in the long term. If you succeed, your website and the products and services you offer will be easy to discover online, and you will receive a steady stream of traffic every day.
To rank well in search engines you need to optimize your site, using keywords, compelling headlines, and engaging content, as well as build authority and reputation through backlinking and guest blog posting, among others.
70% of the links search users click on are organic.
You know what helps you constantly generate organic search results? Good quality content posted not only on your main site, but also on your blog and social profiles. People will like it and share it across the web, and those links will exceed in value any links that you can possibly buy or acquire by using black hat SEO.
70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing on the organic results.
While paid ads can help you get a traffic boost when you need it, you cannot rely on it as your main source of traffic. Your site will be more visited, more popular, more trustworthy, more shared if you use off-site SEO strategies that aim to increase the visibility of your site by spreading links to it throughout the web, through guest blogging, article publishing, or social media marketing.
75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
The first page of search results presents not only the most relevant results, but also tends to feature the best companies or organizations in that niche. Ranking on the second page means you’ll be regarded as a second-rate company or organization. You don’t have any excuse not to rank on the first page, even if you’re in a highly competitive market.
When the competition in your field cannot be beaten for general keywords, you can still appear on the first page of the results for local searches, by adding the name of your town or city to all your keywords.
Businesses that blog have 434% more indexed pages.
You probably know already that search engines like Google and Bing use crawlers that quickly analyze your web pages, determining what they are about and indexing them, so that they appear in the search results. A constantly updated blog that’s hosted on the same domain as your site adds many new pages to your site and, when the content is keyword-optimized, it considerably increases your online visibility.
Blog posts can contain, apart from text, one or more images, videos, photo galleries, infographics, and more, all of which, if optimized for search engines, can bring you extra traffic. Having a blog on your site isn’t an option – it’s a must.
Image Credit: [Flickr/Leo Reynolds]
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