2021 SEO Stats & Insights

There's a lot of good stuff in this roundup from Startup Bonsai. I pulled the ones I found most interesting. Some are obvious, others less so.

Some are obvious, others less so.

• 67.6% of all clicks go to the first five organic results.

• Over 50% of product searches start on Amazon.

• SEO leads have a close rate of 14.6%. Outbound-sourced leads have only a 1.7% close rate.

• Paid backlinks cost $361.44, on average

• Paid guest posts cost $77.80, on average.

• Long-tail keywords have click-through rates 3-5% greater than regular keywords.

• The most important ranking factor is direct website visits, followed by time on site, pages per session, bounce rate, and referring domains.

• The average bounce rate for top-ranking pages is around 50%

• #1 ranking pages have 3.8x more backlinks than those in positions 2-10.

• Just 5.7% of pages rank in the top 10 search results rank within the first year

• YouTube processes 3 billion searches a month, which is more than Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask combined.

• Recommendations are more important than search results. 70% of all videos watched on YouTube are driven by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.

To note: I didn’t like #6 because it’s a compelling prediction whose actual results we don’t have.