5 Insane SEO Stats

1. 72% OF CONSUMERS WHO DID A LOCAL SEARCH VISITED A STORE WITHIN 5 MILES

To capitalise on this stat there are a number of things you need to be doing.

Firstly, ensure you have your Google My Business set up correctly, this will give you the chance to appear in local map packs like below.

The good news about this is that is completely free, this map pack appear in around 93% of local search results so you can see the importance of having this set up.

Local SEO will become more and more important, the chart below shows the growth of “near me” searches in the United Kingdom over the last 5 years.

• If you wish to drive instant traffic to your website, or footfall consider PPC advertising with radius targeting, add location and call extensions to these as well.
• If you have local store pages ensure these have Local Schema Mark up correctly implemented on them.
• Depending on your industry you could look at Yelp, TripAdvisor etc. Your customers will look to other websites apart from Google to get a good idea of your business and products.

2. 51% OF SMARTPHONE USERS HAVE DISCOVERED A NEW COMPANY OR PRODUCT WHEN CONDUCTING A SEARCH ON THEIR SMARTPHONE.

If you’re not aware of the importance of mobile already your most likely behind your competition.

Google is taking steps to take into account the growth of mobile and how it’s users are using the search engine. On April 21, 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.

More recently they announced a “Mobile first” index which highlights the importance of mobile to Google. Google said it would notify Webmasters via Google Search Console when their site has moved to mobile first indexing, so you may want to quickly check yours now.

What you need to do right now:

• Check If Google views your website as mobile friendly – you can do this in bulk using Expetes useful tool – https://www.experte.com/mobile-friendly
• Ensure your website is fast to load – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Based on the findings in those two reports you may have a lot of work to do!

3. 47% OF BUYERS VIEWED 3-5 PIECES OF CONTENT BEFORE ENGAGING WITH A SALES REP

You may have heard the phrase “content is king” over the past couple of years, and for the most part that is true.

The growth of social media and mobile phone usage have seen our eyeballs consume a tremendous amount of content, be it videos, snapchats, ebooks, podcasts whatever it may be the amount of content out there is mind-blowing.

Because of this mind-blowing amount of content, to put it simply, there is a lot of sh*t content out there and you need a way to cut through this and provide true value. If you don’t have a content strategy, its not going to work.

What you need to do:

• Find out and answer customers problems – use tools like AnswerThePublic to find questions that are searched related to a particular topic. Finds questions on Quora and top threads on Reddit to give you inspiration.
• Find out what’s being shared and talked about on Social –  you can use tools like BuzzSumo to see the most shared content around a particular topic.
• Showcase how your business or product solves customer problems – case studies are a great way to do this but need to be engaging. Video testimonials could be another way to do this.

4. 90% OF ALL MARKETERS INDICATED THAT THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA EFFORTS HAVE GENERATED MORE EXPOSURE FOR THEIR BUSINESSES.

Statistically Social Media is too big to ignore. Worldwide, there are over 2.13 billion monthly active Facebook users for Q4 2017 (Facebook MAUs) which is a 14 percent increase year over year.

Your customers and potential customers are most likely to have a mobile phone and social media profiles they check -10 times a day without even thinking about it.

The targeting options you have within these social channels is quite scary, so you can be sure you will be able to get in front of a relevant audience if you want to pay for it.

There are many brand that have grown their business through social media, Gymshark is one example of this. Using social media influencers such as Lex Griffen and Steve Cook they successfully got in front of their target market in a non-intrusive way and now they are one of the fastest growing companies in the UK with a growing world-wide brand reputation.

  What you need to do:

• Find influencers who match your brand vision and values to promote your business or products. Famebit is a great way to do this.
• Truly invest in social media, don’t treat it as an after though, create social media strategy that is integrated into your overall digital marketing strategy.
• Consider using a social media management tool such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
• Use social remarketing to target website visitors. Software such as AdRoll make this extremely easy, or you can do this via Facebook itself and implement its Pixel

5. 71% OF CONSUMERS MAKE THEIR PURCHASE WITHIN A WEEK OF AWARENESS OR DESIRE

The standard customer journey has changed a lot over the past years, there are so many different touchpoints a consumer can have and will have as part of their path to purchase. For the majority of customers, you have a week to convince them. If you don’t have a full digital strategy you may lose them during this week of active searching.

The chart below details the customer journey and how digital channels can ensure that you stay in front of mind and in a positive way.

A full digital strategy will work in holistic harmony and ensure a positive brand image whilst your potential customers goes through all the necessary steps they need to in order to feel comfortable enough to purchase from your brand. 

There may be some that we have missed off that list but you can see there is a lot of digital aspects that can influence the customers path to purchase.

Let us know in the comments below if we have missed any out!