facts, stats and case studies
For when you’re looking for that last bit of information to get your business case over the line. If you have a stat or case study to add, email me at amanda @ floq .co
Site Speed / Core Web Vitals
As page load time goes from 1 second to 10, the probability of bounce increases 123% ↗
Feb 2018, ThinkWithGoogle
A one second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20% ↗
Feb 2019, ThinkWithGoogle [Data: SOASTA, Apr 2017]
Content Quality & Keywords
Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines( QEG) ↗
Dec 2022, Google
Consolidating parameterised content increased organic traffic by 800%+ ↗
Nov 2017, Search Engine Land
~15% of searches are new. ↗
May 2013, CNET, reconfirmed by Google, 2022.
Removing existing category “SEO text” can reduce organic traffic by 3.8% [travel] ↗
Feb 2020, SearchPilot
QEG now includes “experience” for E-E-A-T ↗
Dec 2022, Google
Google rewrites title tags 63% of the time ↗
Feb 2022, Portent
There isn’t a penalty for duplicate content (but it does confuse Google) ↗
Sep 2022, Shaun Anderson (Hobo Web)
Algorithm News
Google replaced Panda in the algorithm with “Coati” sometime after 2016 ↗
Nov 2022, Search Engine Journal
Google still uses a variation of PageRank internally ↗
Feb 2020, John Mueller
Ecommerce SEO
Adding more “Related articles” links increased organic traffic by 11% [90% confidence] ↗
Jun 2021, Brainlab [formerly Distilled]
Google tends to prefer a hierarchical site structure to a flat one ↗
Feb 2016, Search Engine Land [via Google Webmaster Hangouts]
53% of holiday shoppers in the U.S. said they check online to make sure a product is in stock before going to the store to buy it. ↗
April 2022, Google.
Bringing content out of tabs increased organic traffic by 12% ↗
Jul 2020, Brainlab [formerly Distilled]
September is too late to start doing SEO for Black Friday ↗
Seo 2019, iPullRank (Mike King)
General
Google owns 92.2% of global market share in search engines ↗
Nov 2022, Statcounter
People Also Ask appear 10x more frequently than Featured Snippets ↗
Jan 2022, Kevin Indig
Googlebot can crawl the first 15MB of an HTML file or supported text-based file ↗
Jun 2022, Google, h/t Barry Schwartz @ Search Engine Land
When there’s consensus, MUM is used to create featured snippets ↗
Aug 2022, Google
0.63% of searchers clicked on a 2nd page result ↗
Oct 2022, Backlinko
Google published it’s current and retired ranking systems ↗
Nov 2022, Google
25.6% of searches on desktop are zero click ↗
Oct 2022, SEMRush
53% of trackable web traffic is attributed to organic search ↗
2019, Brigtedge
Google will rarely index 100% of a website, and 20% of pages being out of the index is within tolerance / “completely normal” ↗
Aug 2021, Google SEO office hours, John Mueller (~29:30 mark)
Google released a search status monitor ↗
Dec 2022, Google
Google made over 5,000 changes to it’s search engine in 2021 ↗
Mar 2022, Google