SEO
78 SEO Statistics for 2023
![78 SEO Statistics for 2023 78 SEO Statistics for 2023](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668488712_78-SEO-Statistics-for-2023.png)
Are you curious about the state of SEO in 2023? Then look no further.
We’ve curated, vetted, and categorized a list of up-to-date stats below.
Click to jump to a category or keep reading for our top SEO statistics.
These are the most interesting SEO stats we think you should know:
- 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (BrightEdge)
- 0.63% of Google searchers click on results from the second page. (Backlinko)
- 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. (BrightEdge)
- 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps. (SparkToro)
- SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media. (BrightEdge)
- 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc.) is their highest quality source of leads. (HubSpot)
- SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate. (HubSpot)
These stats about ranking on Google may surprise you.
- 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google. (Ahrefs)
- The top-ranking page gets the most search traffic only 49% of the time. (Ahrefs)
- Only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication. (Ahrefs)
- 7.4% of top-ranking pages don’t have a title tag. (Ahrefs)
- Google rewrites title tags 33.4% of the time. (Ahrefs)
- Google is now 33% more likely to rewrite title tags. (Ahrefs)
- When Google ignores the title tag, it uses the H1 tag 50.76% of the time instead. (Ahrefs)
- Google is 57% more likely to rewrite title tags that are too long. (Ahrefs)
- 25.02% of top-ranking pages don’t have meta descriptions. (Ahrefs)
- 40.61% of pages have meta descriptions that truncate. (Ahrefs)
- Google shows meta descriptions in search results only 37.22% of the time. That rises to 40.35% for fat-head keywords and drops to 34.38% for long-tails. (Ahrefs)
- The average top-ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords. (Ahrefs)
- The average page in the top 10 is 2+ years old. (Ahrefs)
- 33% of websites pass the Core Web Vitals threshold. (Ahrefs)
![78 SEO Statistics for 2023 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/78-SEO-Statistics-for-2023.png)
![78 SEO Statistics for 2023 7.4% of top-ranking pages don't have a title tag](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668488710_306_78-SEO-Statistics-for-2023.png)
![78 SEO Statistics for 2023 Google more likely to rewrite meta descriptions for long-tail than fat-head keywords](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668488710_229_78-SEO-Statistics-for-2023.png)
Google says that backlinks are one of its top three ranking factors. Check out these link-related stats.
- 66.31% of pages have no backlinks. (Ahrefs)
- Most top-ranking pages get “followed” backlinks from new websites at a pace of +5%-14.5% per month. (Ahrefs)
- Generally speaking, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google. (Ahrefs)
- The average cost of buying a link is $361.44. (Ahrefs)
- The average cost of publishing a paid guest post is $77.80. (Ahrefs)
- 73.6% of domains have reciprocal links, meaning that some of the sites they link to also link to them. (Ahrefs)
- 43.7% of the top-ranking pages have some reciprocal links. (Ahrefs)
- 66.5% of links to sites in the last nine years are dead. (Ahrefs)
- 10.6% of all backlinks to the top 110,000 sites are nofollow. (Ahrefs)
- 0.44% of links use “rel=ugc” and 0.01% use rel=“sponsored”. (Ahrefs)
Most SEO campaigns begin with keyword research. Here are some stats about how people are searching on Google.
- 94.74% of keywords get 10 monthly searches or fewer. (Ahrefs)
- 0.0008% of keywords get more than 100,000 monthly searches. (Ahrefs)
- Around 8% of search queries are phrased as questions. (Moz)
- 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before. (Google)
- 91.45% of search volumes in Google Ads Keyword Planner are overestimates. (Ahrefs)
- Google Ads Keyword Planner overestimates search volumes 54.28% of the time and is roughly accurate 45.22% of the time. (Ahrefs)
- 46.08% of clicks in Google Search Console go to hidden terms. (Ahrefs)
![78 SEO Statistics for 2023 Search volume distribution of 4 billion keywords](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668488710_306_78-SEO-Statistics-for-2023.png)
How much do SEO professionals charge for their services? Are you charging higher or lower than the average? Let’s look at the stats.
- 74.71% of SEOs charge a monthly retainer fee for their clients. (Ahrefs)
- For monthly retainers, $501–$1,000 per month is the most popular pricing tier. (Ahrefs)
- For hourly pricing, $100–$150 per hour is the most popular pricing tier. (Ahrefs)
- For per-project pricing, $501–$1,000 is the most popular pricing tier. (Ahrefs)
- 88.28% of SEOs charge $150/hour or less for their services. (Ahrefs)
- On average, SEOs who’ve been in business for over two years charge 39.4% more per hour, 102.41% more for monthly retainers, and 275% more for one-off projects than those who’ve been in business for less than two years. (Ahrefs)
- On average, SEOs serving the worldwide market charge 130.74% more than those serving the local market for monthly retainers. (Ahrefs)
- The mean salary for a U.S.-based SEO professional is $60,548 per year. (Backlinko)
As SEOs, it is important to understand where search engines are right now—and where they’re going.
- 12.29% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results. (Ahrefs)
- The #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 27.6%. (Backlinko)
- The top three Google search results get 54.4% of all clicks. (Backlinko)
- There are an estimated 3.5 billion searches on Google each day. (Internet Live Stats)
- 39% of purchasers are influenced by a relevant search. (Think With Google)
- 61.5% of desktop searches and 34.4% of mobile searches result in no-clicks. (SparkToro)
- Google accounts for around 83% of the global search market. (Statista)
If you serve customers locally, you should focus on improving your local search presence so more people can find you. These stats show the importance of good local SEO.
- 30% of all mobile searches are related to location. (Think With Google)
- 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. (Think With Google)
- 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (Think With Google)
- Yelp appears in the top five search results for 92% of Google web queries that include a city and business category. (Fresh Chalk)
- 54% of smartphone users search for business hours, and 53% search for directions to local stores. (Think With Google)
- About 45% of global shoppers buy online and then pick up in-store. (Think With Google)
- “Where to buy” + “near me” mobile queries have grown by over 200% from 2017 to 2019. (Think With Google)
- Mobile searches for “store open near me” (e.g., “grocery store open near me”) have grown by over 250% from 2017 to 2019. (Think With Google)
- Mobile searches for “on sale” + “near me” (e.g., “tires on sale near me”) have grown by over 250% YOY from 2017 to 2019. (Think With Google)
We’ve had great success driving customers using video marketing. Are you doing it too? If not, these stats may surprise you.
- The number of comments, views, shares, and “likes” have a strong correlation with higher YouTube rankings. (Backlinko)
- 68.2% of first-page YouTube results are HD videos. (Backlinko)
- The average length of a first-page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds. (Backlinko)
![78 SEO Statistics for 2023 Line graph showing relationship of video length to YouTube ranking](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668488710_339_78-SEO-Statistics-for-2023.png)
Google has moved to mobile-first indexing, and more people are using mobile search. No doubt, mobile SEO is incredibly important.
- 58.99% of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones. (Statista)
- 72.6% of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025. (CNBC)
- There are more searches on mobile than on desktop. (Think With Google)
- 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphones. (Think With Google)
- 18% of local searches on smartphones lead to a purchase within a day vs. 7% of non-local searches. (Think With Google)
- On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 6.74% of the clicks, whereas ranking in position #1 on desktop gets you 8.17% of the clicks. (SEOClarity)
- 56% of in-store shoppers used their smartphones to shop or research items while they were in-store. (Think With Google)
“Hey, Google. What’s the current state of voice search?”
- 40.7% of all voice search answers come from a featured snippet. (Backlinko)
- The typical voice search result is only 29 words in length. (Backlinko)
- Approximately 75% of voice search results rank in the top three for their corresponding queries. (Backlinko)
- The average voice search result has a ninth-grade reading level. (Backlinko)
- Websites with strong “link authority” tend to rank well in voice search. In fact, the average Domain Rating of a Google Home result is 76.8. (Backlinko)
- 48% of consumers are using voice for “general web searches.” (Search Engine Land)
Learn more
Check out these resources to learn more about SEO:
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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