SEO constantly evolves, and staying ahead of the curve can feel like a never-ending race.

To help you keep up, we’ve rounded up the top SEO statistics for 2024. These insights highlight the latest trends and provide actionable data to refine your strategies and outperform the competition. 

From shifting trends in search behavior to data-backed insights on ranking factors, here are 50 SEO stats that show just how powerful organic search can be for your business.

1. Google is the most used search engine in the world, with a mobile market share of 95.32% and a desktop market share of 81.95%. (Statista)

2. There are an estimated 3.5 billion searches on Google each day. (Internet Live Stats)

3. 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before. (Google)

4. Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites. (Backlinko)

5. The #1 result in Google gets approximately 27.6% of all clicks. (Backlinko)

6. Organic search results that rank on page 1 of Google contain an average of 1,447 words. (Backlinko)

7. The average top-ranking result has a CTR of 9.28%, followed by 5.82 and 3.11% for positions two and three. (ResearchGate)

8. A staggering 98% of people read online reviews for local businesses. (BrightLocal)

9. 88% of consumers would use a business that replies to all of its reviews, compared to just 47% who would use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews at all. (BrightLocal)

10. Over 70% of shoppers use their phones to buy online. (Semrush)

11. Some 88% of marketers who already invest in SEO plan to allocate more or maintain the same amount in 2023. (HubSpot)

12. Less than 1% of searchers click on the second page of Google results. (Backlinko)

13. 53% of people in the U.S. say that they research products on search engines before purchasing to ensure they are making the best decision possible. (Google)

14. Moving up a single position in Google search results leads to a relative click-through rate (CTR) increase of 32.3%. (Backlinko)

15. The pages in the top 10 positions are on average 2+ years old. (Ahrefs)

16. Google uses title elements around 87% of the time. (Google Search Central)

17. 78% of local mobile searches lead to offline purchases. (Go-Globe)

18. People are 70% more likely to visit local businesses with complete Business Profiles. (Google)

19. Customers are 2.7x more likely to consider your business “reputable” if they see a complete Business Profile when browsing Search and Google Maps (Google)

20. Nearly 60% of the pages ranking in the top 10 Google results are 3 or more years old (Ahrefs)

21. High-quality content, page experience and links ranked as the top 3 ranking factors of Google’s search results. (Search Engine Journal)

22. 40.61% of pages have meta descriptions that truncate. (Ahrefs)

23. The average top-ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords. (Ahrefs)

24. 89.1% of link builders say nofollow links have an impact on rankings. (Authority Hacker)

25. It takes an average of 3.1 months to see the impact of a link on search ranking. (Authority Hacker)

26. 50-65% of all number one spots are dominated by featured snippets. (Authority Hacker)

27. In a 13-month Semrush study, nearly all (92.3%) of the 100 top-ranking domains had at least one backlink. (Semrush)

28. The top organic search result receives an average of 19x more clicks than the top paid search result. (First Page Sage)

29. All the clicks from the third to tenth results combined are less than those that go to the top organic search result. (First Page Sage)

30. Sites that received a large number of valid removal notices saw their Google search traffic drop by 89% on average. (Google)

31. Posts that contain target keywords or similar terms in the URL have a 45% higher click-through rate compared to those that don’t. (Backlinko)

32. For short-tail searches (high search volume terms with one or two keywords), the top-ranking results have shifted from transactional to informational. (Conductor)

33. Long-tail keywords make up the vast majority of all Google searches. (Semrush)

34. Half of US consumers use voice search every day. (UpCity)

35. The number of keywords has risen for transactional and commercial searches but dropped for navigational and informational. (Semrush)

36. Over 50% of consumers say they find new brands using Google. (Google)

37. B2B companies generate double the revenue from organic search than any other channel. (BrightEdge)

38. B2B buyers spend the highest percentage of their buying journey (27%) researching online independently. (Gartner)

39. SEO is the third most-implemented marketing tactic for B2B businesses after social media and email marketing. (Sagefrog)

40. Around 94% of B2B buyers are “somewhat” or” fully informed” about what they’re going to purchase before reaching out to sales reps. (Google)

41. You can see a 5-10% increase in B2B revenue from increasing the relevance and engagement of your content. (McKinsey)

42. 59.5% of websites are reported to lack H1 tags, while 51.3% of websites have more than one H1 tag, with both aspects harming a site’s page structure. (Ahrefs)

43. As Google’s John Mueller has confirmed on X (formerly Twitter), notifying Google that your XML sitemap has been updated can help sites get fresh content indexed more quickly. (Search Engine Land)

44. 75% of clients feel more positive about using a local business after reading a positive review about it. (Brightlocal)

45. Top pages in Google have approximately 3.8 times more backlinks than lower-ranked ones. (Backlinko)

46. 96% of websites in Google’s top 10 have more than 1,000 links from unique domains. (Searchengineland)

47. Almost 95% of pages have no backlinks at all. (Backlinko)

48. 67% of small businesses have already started using AI to improve their content and SEO. (Semrush)

49. 79% of companies have improved their content quality due to artificial intelligence. (Semrush)

50. Businesses experience an increase in content marketing ROI after the implementation of AI tools. (Semrush)

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These stats give you the insights you need to sharpen your strategy and make smarter content marketing decisions in 2024.

Use this data to guide your efforts, experiment with new ideas, and focus on what drives the best results.

Here’s to making this year your most successful yet!