137 SEO Statistics for 2023 (Current State & Trends)

If you wish to grab the eyeballs and want your website seen on the top of the SERPs, SEO is the answer along with powerful content that helps!

We are in 2023 and 75% of people will never go past the first page of the Google search results page as per the latest findings.

Obviously, curating content that provides value to users is the utmost priority, but optimizing it for search engines is the next important step.

We have put together over 130 facts and figures which will guide you in taking decisions while designing a SEO strategy in 2023! Let us take you right to it.

SEO Statistics 2023 (Editor’s Picks)

Here are our top picks from the complete article that every SEO should be aware of:

Organic traffic is responsible for 53% of a website’s traffic.
93% of web experiences begin on a search engine (mainly Google searches, images, and maps).
75% of people will never go past the first page of the Google search results page.
The first organic search result on Google gets 31.24% clicks on average.
SEO-generated leads have a 15% closing rate.
88.28% of SEOs charge $150/hour or less for their services
Google has 85.55% of the global search engine market.
Google has over 200 ranking factors.
92.1% of internet users access the internet through a mobile phone.
49% of digital marketers claim that organic search has the best ROI.
The worth of the SEO industry is over $50 billion in 2023.
54.4% of global website traffic comes from mobile phones.

Sources: Statista, Backlinko, Google, DemandSage, Think With Google, Hubspot, Intergrowth, exploding topics, LinkedIn.

Google Search Statistics

Google has 85.55% of the global search engine market. Almost all search engine SEO campaigns are crafted keeping Google in mind. In this section, I will take you through some of Google’s top statistics that will help you rank your website on Google’s first page.

Google is the world’s most popular search engine.
Google was visited 80.2 billion times in the month of February 2023 alone.
An internet user will search on google 3 to 4 times a day.
16.3% of Google’s organic traffic in the U.S.A. comes from users searching for the term “Google.”
8.2 billion searches are processed by Google every day.
Google processes 99,000 searches every second.
More than 1 billion questions have been asked via Google Lens to date. Google lens supports over 100 languages.
63% of Google’s organic search traffic in the U.S.A. is generated via mobile devices.
11 minutes and 14 seconds is the average time spent on Google per visit
A user visits 8.79 pages on every Google visit.
28.23% of users view just one page before leaving Google.
Facebook and Youtube are the two most searched terms on Google.
According to Andrey Lipattsev (Ex Search Quality Senior Strategist of Google) Content, Backlinks, and Rank Brain are the top three factors that rank a page on Google.
Most of Google’s traffic (26.56%) comes from the United States.

Here are the top 5 countries that send the most traffic to Google:

Country	Share of the Traffic
United States	26.49%
India	4.52%
Brazil	4.37%
United Kingdom	3.86%
Japan	3.83%
Rest Of The World	56.92%

58.79% of Google users are Males and 41.21% are Females.
54.89% of Google’s audience is aged between 18 to 34.

Here is the distribution of Google’s audience:

Age Group	Share of Users
18-24	24.90%
25-34	29.99%
35-44	19.07%
45-54	12.55%
55-64	8.23%
Over 65	5.25%

Google receives 95.53% of its traffic directly while 1.88% of the traffic comes via social media platforms.

Here is the breakdown of Google’s traffic

Source of Google Traffic	Share of Traffic
Direct	95.53%
Social Media	1.88%
Referrals	1.83%
Organic Search	0.49%
Emails	0.17%
Display Advertising	0.06%

Sources: Similarweb, Statista.

Voice Search Statistics

Voice search on mobile devices is used by 27% of the global population.
A study by Search Engine Watch reveals that Voice searches on mobile devices are three times more likely than text searches to be related to something local.
39.4% of internet users in the U.S.A. use a voice assistant at least once every month.
Voice searches account for 20% of all online searches.
Voice search was utilized by 58% of consumers to find local company information.
According to BacklinkO, a featured snippet is responsible for 40.7% of all voice search replies.
70.4% of voice search results come from HTTP websites.
Voice search is used by 40% of adults on a daily basis.
A healthy backlink profile boosts a website’s ranking in voice search.
Each month, 1 billion voice searches are conducted.
One in every four people aged 16 to 24 utilizes mobile voice search.
By 2025, 75% of US families will own a smart speaker.
Alexa is the most popular virtual assistant in the United States, accounting for over 38% of the market.
The number of voice assistants will reach 8 billion by 2023.
As per June 2021 Statista report, Amazon has the biggest share of smart speakers in the U.S.A. with 69%.
After conducting a voice search, 28% of people call the company.
51% of people use voice search to find restaurants.
A Geomarketing survey revealed that 65% of Google Home and Amazon Echo owners do not want to return to keyboard searches.
The typical result page of the Google Voice search has 2,312 words.
A quarter of people aged 16-24 use voice search on their smartphone
Smart speakers are most popular among people aged 26 to 35.
There are Nearly 91 million smart speakers in the US. the number is estimated to grow to 95 million in 2023.

Sources: Backlinko, FirstSiteGuide, SEO clarity, Gartner, 99firms, social media today, Statista, Think With Google, Hubspot, Semrush.

Local SEO Statistics

The monthly number of Google local searches is 97 billion. That’s 37k local searches each second.
Almost one-third of all mobile searches are related to location.
One-quarter of small business websites lack an H1 tag.
28% of searches with local intent result in a purchase.
72% of Google searchers went to a store within 8 kilometers of where they were looking.
76% of consumers who look for anything local on their smartphone visit the shop within one day.
After Googling, 78% of people want to shop locally.
For 92% of web searches that include a city and business category, a Yelp page appears in the top 5 results.
A whopping 56% of local businesses have yet to claim their business on the Google My Business listing.
In 2020, “Near Me” searches climbed over 130%.
Over 50% of all “Near Me” searches lead to offline conversions.
Approximately 45% of customers globally will make a purchase online and subsequently pick up the item in-store.
Local search intent is present in 46% of Google queries.

Sources: Statista, Hubspot, Semrush, Ahrefs, Webfx, Backlino, Search Engine Roundtable, Google.

Mobile SEO Statistics

Mobile devices account for roughly 55% of global website traffic.
80% of top-ranked websites are optimized for mobile phones.
Mobile will surpass desktop in internet sales by 2023.
In terms of overall search engine market share globally, smartphones account for 59.77%, with tablets accounting for 2.27% (a total of 59.77% for mobile devices). Desktops account for 37.96%.
Location-based searches account for 30% of all mobile searches.
20% of marketing email campaigns are not mobile-optimized.
When searching on mobile, 51% of smartphone users discovered a new company or product.
Over 30% of all mobile searches are conducted prior to entering a store.
When in a store, 43% of users will conduct an internet search on their mobile phones.
69% of mobile phone users believe they are much more likely to purchase from a website that answers their questions quickly.
Every day, 87% of mobile phone users utilize a search engine.
90% of smartphone users are unsure about which brand to purchase.
1/3rd of email clicks are attributed to a mobile device.
The first organic listing on mobile devices generates 27.7% of clicks, compared to 19.3% on desktops.
Voice searches currently account for 20% of all mobile phone queries.
The second most popular method employed by email marketers to improve their performance is optimizing emails for mobile phones.
57% of users will not suggest a company with a badly optimized mobile website.

Read our take on the best SEO tools in the market.

Sources: Statista, Terakeet, Think With Google, Backlinko, Hubspot, WordStream, Hitwise, SEO clarity, Search Engine Land, 99 firms.

Backlink SEO Statistics

On Google, high-quality link building makes for 30% of your entire page score.
A single link from a high-quality domain will be valued more than several links from low-quality domains.
Over 65% of web pages have no backlinks linking to them.
Long-form content receives 77.2% more backlinks than short-form content.
Businesses with blogs obtain 97% more backlinks to their website.
With 404 billion web pages in its index. Ahrefs is the most powerful backlink-building tool in the market.
The number of URLs connecting to a page was the factor with the highest association with Google ranks.
Every month, the top-ranking page in SERP receives an additional 5% to 15% additional do-follow backlinks from new domains.
The average cost of a backlink from a low-authority website is $150, whereas a backlink from a website with higher domain authority costs $1,000.

Video SEO Statistics

videos appear in 62% of Google’s worldwide searches.
According to 49% of marketers, employing video in their digital marketing campaign leads to faster revenue growth.
Including a video on the landing page enhances the chances of ranking on Google’s #1 page by 53%.
Blogs featuring videos receive 3x the number of inbound links compared to simple text posts.
In the United States of America, 85% of all internet users engage with video material at least once a month and 86% of customers say they want to see more videos from the businesses they support.
Posts containing videos receive more backlinks and receive a 157% increase in traffic.
According to 51% of marketers surveyed on WordStream, videos are the best sort of content for ROI.
Every day, people watch over one billion hours of video content on YouTube.
Videos that help gain new subscribers typically rank better on YouTube.
Short-form videos are growing in popularity.
Mobile devices account for 75% of all video plays globally.
2 billion people interact with Instagram’s reel feature every month.
Watching a brand’s feedback video impacted 77% of people’s purchasing decisions.
After seeing promotional videos on social media, 64% of customers completed a purchase.
YouTube’s first-page videos have an average length of 15 minutes.

Sources: Forrester Research, BacklinkO, eMarketer, Charitable, WordStream, Insivia, Search Engine People, PR Newswire.

Keywords and Ranking Statistics

Search engines prioritize high-quality relevant content for ranking any webpage. Google, being the world’s most used and trusted search engine, also has over 200 ranking factors. Let us give you the top 10 parameters that you should check if you wish to rank your content higher.

Here is a table showing the top 10 ranking parameters for Google:

Google’s Top Ranking Factors

High-Quality Relevant Content

Mobile Friendliness

User’s Experience

Loading Speed of Webpage

On-Page Optimization

Domain’s Age/Authority

Internal Linking

External Linking Pointing To your Page

Social Signals

Secure and Accessible Website

Over half of Google search inquiries contain four or more words.
There are 4 types of featured snippets.

Paragraph
Lists
Videos
Tables

For ranking web pages, Google’s search algorithm considers around 200 ranking factors. Content’s relevancy and quality are a couple of the top most parameters that are considered.
A meta description is missing on 25.02% of the top-ranking pages.
97% of webpages appearing on the #1 page of Google have at least 1 image on them.
Over 29% of search terms with over 10,000 monthly searches have three or more words.
The first five organic Search Engine Result Page results account for over 67% of total clicks.
Approximately 8% of queries are framed as a question.
Approximately 60% of web pages on Google that rank on the first page is 3 or more years old.
On Google, Lower bounce rates lead to a higher ranking. Avoid bounce rates by investing in a good hosting provider.
Updating a blog or article on your website can lead to as much as 146% growth in search traffic.
75% of people will never go past the first page of google.
The #1 organic result on google has around 1400-1500 words in it on average.
92% of keywords have a search volume of fewer than 10s searches per month. Semrush (Offers Guru Plan 14 Day Trial) is a great tool to sort and track important keywords for your projects.

Sources: Semrush, Ahrefs, Baclinko, Demandsage, Think With Google, Zero Web Limit, SEO Tribunal, 99signals.

Challenges In SEO

SEO professionals face a number of challenges in their mission to rank websites high in search engine results pages (SERPs). Statista carried out a survey of 3,623 SEO professionals globally to find out 14.9% of them see “lack of resources” as their biggest problem.

Here is a table showing the top most challenges faced by SEO Professionals globally:

Challenge	Share of Respondents
Lack Of Resources	14.9%
Strategy Issues	12.3%
Scaling Processes	11.9%
Alignment With Other Departments	10.7%
Budget Cuts	10.5%
Management Approval	10.2%
Client Relationship Issue	8.6%
Legal Approval	5.9%
None	2.5%

We at Demandsage also deal with SEO every day. We continuously refine our website’s architecture for seamless crawling and implement structured data for enhanced visibility. However, we do encounter challenges such as evolving search engine algorithms and increasing competition, compelling us to stay agile in our tactics.

Here are some challenges that we face at Demandsage while doing SEO:

Finding the right anchor texts for internal linking.
Keeping up with the ever-changing Google algorithm.

AI in SEO Statistics

AI has made it to our lives in different ways to make things easier. The most common example can be the usage of voice assistants like Google Assistant and Siri in our day-to-day activities. Even using Grammarly for proofreading your content is a very common example of AI in SEO.

AI for SEO works to increase performance and, to some extent, making large-scale and complex data analysis accessible to everyone. Many people are already using ChatGPT and Google Bard for SEO in the current times.

Here is a list of some amazing facts about AI in the SEO Sector!

58% of marketers plan to use AI for content and SEO in 2023.
40% of marketers witnessed a 6-10% increase in revenue after implementing AI in their SEO practice.
The majority of people are using ChatGPT for SEO. Here are the top ways in which marketers are using this chatbot:

Content Generation
Keyword Research
Generating emails for acquiring backlinks
Generating Schema Markup

Google Bard is also being used for improving SEO. Here are the top ways in which marketers are using Google’s own chatbot for SEO

Finding Content Gap
Creating Anchor text variations
content planning and ideation

Sources: Search Engine Land, LinkedIn, Medium, Meetanshi.

SEO Trends

Before clicking on any of the results for their original search, 18% of searchers type a new query.
As a top technical SEO approach, 25% of businesses spend on mobile optimization.
In 2022, more than 50% of total searches were 1 to 2 words, while nearly 75% of Google advertising was 3 to 5 words. This is sure to make its way into 2023 as well.
Google’s core update in may 2022 led to growth in traffic on websites with AI-generated content.
If a product appears many times in SERPs, half of the users are more likely to click on it.
blog posts with seven or fewer words in their H1 tag obtain 36% higher organic traffic on average than those with fourteen or more words.
Voice search technology will be used weekly by 1.1 billion mobile phone users worldwide in the coming times.
Click-Through Rate from Google picture results is 0.21% on average. It’s also important to note that this rate changes greatly with industries.
Brand connection increases Click-Through Rates by 2 to 3 times.
Similar to Voice Search, Artificial intelligence will play a huge role in SEO.
Content in Long-form and Videos in Short form is the way for the future.
A recent study by the digital information world revealed that 2.5 million search terms showed that Google’s “People also ask” feature now shows up for nearly 49% of searches.
User Experience is equally important to keep users on your site. Make sure to make it more engaging and intuitive. Don’t forget to make your website mobile responsive.

Sources: Oberlo, Backlinko, Google, Internet Live Stats, StatCounter, Semrush, WordStrea, Search Engine Journal, Stan Ventures, Hubspot.

Future of SEO (2023 and Beyond)

Let us take a look at the forecasts for the world of SEO and everything related to it in this section. Read on to know more.

The SEO industry is forecasted to reach a valuation of $99.4 billion by the year 2027.
In a Statista survey, Machine learning and/or AI were voted first by 18.7% of respondents as the leading reasons for a shift in search engine optimization (SEO) in the coming times. 13.9% stated that the deprecation of third-party cookies would be the reason.
It is estimated that there will be 7.296 billion smartphone users worldwide by 2025. As we said earlier, making mobile-friendly websites should be one of the most important factors while optimizing them for search engines.
8 in 10 digital marketers are deploying AI and Machine Learning-enabled solutions for their marketing endeavors in 2023. This number will increase as we move ahead.

Although A.I. tools make it very convenient for marketers to generate content, there are many downsides to it. Let me tell you some of them!

The A.I. generated content is not original; it is copied from different sources on the internet and paraphrased. This type of content has a very high risk of being devalued by search engine algorithms.
The data on which the A.I. is trained is not real-time.
A.I. doesn’t show emotions, and solving the user intent on the web needs both emotions and skills.
A.I. generated content lacks personalization and creativity.
As the A.I. doesn’t have a brain itself, it will rely on the existing data in its library and will always fail to generate newer ideas.

Importance of Google Core Updates in SEO

Firstly, what are Google’s core updates? Well, in simple words, Google maintains its dominance in the field of search engines by continuously enhancing its ranking algorithm. The significant changes in its algorithm are known as “Core Updates.”

These core updates happen every two to three months. By rearranging the rankings of indexed websites, Google’s core updates aim to increase the relevancy and quality of its search results. Every time Google rolls a core update, it affects all the indexed web pages on the internet in both positive and negative ways. Why? simply because the pages that are well optimized and satisfy the updates perform well, and the ones that aren’t performing badly.

So, how do these updates affect SEO? Google SEO’s core idea is to modify your website and online presence to favor them in Google’s ranking algorithm. If you are able to adjust your website’s SEO as per the update, you are good to go. Now you may ask, how can one do it? Well, simply by looking at the core update’s information. You can do that by clicking HERE. We suggest you to not only check the most recent updates but also the ones of the past few months.

Once you go through the core update’s blog, you can find the loopholes in your website and fix them to rank better.

Related Read:

Conclusion: SEO Statistics (2023)

This is my take on the top SEO statistics as of 2023. I have covered all the important categories that need to be addressed if you want to rank higher in SERPs. I will keep on updating the blog with more figures as I get my hands on new reports and findings.

Remember, Content is king; make sure you post good quality content and then worry about ranking. Half of your work is done when you produce quality content. Take our SEO statistics into consideration when you decide to optimize your quality work. Nobody can stop you if you make informed decisions.

Plus, if you want assistance taking your SEO game to the next level, I have listed some of the top SEO small businesses in this article to make your work easier. See you in the next blog. Until then, keep creating!

139 SEO Statistics for 2023 (Current State & Trends)