Having great content and a solid web design are two of the best ways to get your business noticed in the wide world of the internet. It’s important to remember that SEO is not an exact science, but looking at the right statistics can push you in the right direction and help to improve how your business is ranked online.

SEO can be made a lot easier to understand when you consider the following facts, provided by an SEO company, about how potential customers find their way to your website.

Which Search Engine?

131 billion searches are made around the world every month, but not all search engines are equal. Google search takes the biggest share with 65.2% of the search volume, and this is followed by Baidu with 8.2%, Yahoo with 4.9%, Yandex with 2.8% and Microsoft sites, such as Bing, taking 2.5%.

Concentrating your SEO on one search engine may be the best thing to do, as each one uses different pieces of software to catalogue and rank pages. Consider your business and which search engine is most appropriate: an American-based business may be foolish to avoid Google, while one who trades in China should consider the importance of Baidu. Ensure your SEO company can optimize your website for the search engines you need.

You Need a High Rank

Studies have shown that 75% of users will click on one of the first 5 links on a search results page, with the page in the number one spot getting nearly 33% of clicks. Also, 75% of all searchers never go past the first page of results. These are huge numbers and ones that can’t be ignored.

Make sure your SEO is primed to get you to the first page of search results. This might mean focusing on fewer keywords, but you will be better off having a few results in the top spots, than more in later pages of search. While this kind of optimization can sound complicated, an SEO service has the skills to do this effectively so you don’t need to worry about it.

Paid or Organic?

There’s an ongoing debate about whether it’s better to pay for adverts or focus on organic traffic. Studies have shown that 70% – 80% of users ignore paid ads completely and only focus on their organic results. While this still leaves 20% – 30% of users willing to click on your ad, the cost of paying for an ad is far higher than the cost of focusing on organic traffic.

If you’re unsure where to put your focus, your SEO company will be able to advise on the best plan of action.

Utilize a Blog

Blogs are a lot of work. However, SEO companies can usually manage all the posts for you, which are already optimized for search engines. 81% of businesses say that their blogs are an important asset to them, and this is backed up by the fact that companies who blog have 434% more indexed pages than those who don’t. The higher the number of indexed pages a business has, the more likely they are to get leads and sales.

A lot of companies try to focus their attention on social media because they feel like this generates larger volumes of traffic. This may or may not be a good strategy depending on your business niche.

There is a lot to understand about SEO, which is why you may find a lot of benefits to hiring a company to provide specialized SEO services, rather than taking on the challenge yourself. What business wouldn’t want to see their traffic and leads improve dramatically with little effort?

Sources:

24 Eye Popping SEO Statistics, SearchEngineJournal.com
21 Spectacular SEO and Search Marketing Stats and Facts, Business2Community.com