What You Should Know about Search Engine Optimization

By Nick Fountain:

Many companies and business who solely rely on Google as a main source of traffic have faced the consequences of the ever-changing landscape that is SEO. It is nearly impossible to pinpoint what exactly enables your page to rank higher on search engine results pages unless you are an absolute monster when it comes to optimization. Not having a clear solution to your low ranking problems can leave you banging your head against your keyboard. Or turn to more destructive actions, like the guy below.

Whether you are a newbie in the SEO game or a salty SEO veteran who has been flexing optimization muscles for years, it is hard to keep up with Google’s updates and search engine trends. So, the SEO Tribunal created an infographic with 72 statistics about search engine optimization! Keep this handy so you can dominate the SERPs the next time you look to optimize your website!

Here’s what you can learn from this helpful tool:

A Brief History of Search Engines & Updates

In 1993, the search engine, Archie, was created. Since then, even more search engines have been introduced. You might know names such as Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and, obviously, Google. Google is by far the most popular search engine with 72.87% of all desktop and 92.59% of mobile searches.

Since the introduction of search engines, Google has continuously updated how it crawls sites to keep up with how users search for content. Some of the most important to note are:

• Google Panda affected 12% of searches. The Panda update was meant to filter out poor quality websites or websites that were thin on content. I like to imagine this is how SEOs reacted to it in 2011.

• Google Penguin impacted 3% of search queries. The Penguin update was aimed to eliminate sites that seemed spammy. This is how Penguin introduced itself to the search world.

• Rankbrain, which now provides users with the most relevant search results. To be the best, you have to beat the rest.

All of Google’s animal-based updates revolve around improving the user’s experience for searchers. It is up to the SEO or e-commerce guru to keep up with the implications of their secretive updates.

Search Engine Trends & Why You Should Care

Search engines account for 39% of global e-commerce traffic. That can be further broken into where that traffic comes from: 35% of global traffic from organic searches and the remaining 4% from paid ads. However, 70-80% of searchers generally ignore and disregard the paid ads.

As an SEO professional or a website owner, you must ensure you have a healthy organic search campaign full of quality keywords, adequate interlinking and strategic backlinks to your site so you can build authority. The best part of it is that organic search is free!

The mobile era is already underway. In 2015, mobile-friendliness became a ranking factor and they have just recently rolled out another update that relates to mobile content. The shift to a mobile-dominated landscape is imminent. 58% of searches come from mobile platforms. Additionally, 40% of users only use their smartphones. In order to rank higher, you must optimize for mobile devices.

Why care about where you rank in search engines? If your site is within the top 10 results, you have a better chance at leads and traffic. A few ways to generate a higher ranking are to improve your site speed, produce quality content and reduce your bounce rate.

It is also important to pay attention to local SEO as well. In fact, 46% of all searches are local, therefore optimizing for local searches generate higher traffic conversions. To prove this tidbit, 18% of local smartphone searches have led to purchases within a day compared to 7% of non-local searches.

Key Takeaways

First and foremost, up your mobile game. As we stated before, 58% of searches come from mobile platforms and Google accounts for nearly 93% of mobile searches. So, a strong presence on mobile devices will generate more traffic. Not to mention it’ll help you get noticed from local traffic (in other words, local searchers), too.

Additionally, have a strategy that addresses all prominent search engines, especially Bing and Yahoo, who holds 21.3% of the US market share. While Google dominates the search engine market, Bing and Yahoo use a similar method to crawl and index pages, so it’s easy to add them to a correctly implemented strategy. And with all three in your toolbox, you will reap the benefits of less competition and a potentially better conversion rate!

If this summary has not fulfilled your search queries, have no fear! Check out all this and more in the full infographic from SEO Tribunal below!

The Branchers

We build the best damn marketing campaigns on the planet. And we do it for industries and companies you might not identify as easy to market (right away). Working here takes a very special kind of person.