We’re huge fans of search engine marketing, both search engine optimization and paid search marketing. But with behavior changing so quickly, it’s vital to keep on top of search engine marketing statistics to inform your strategy.

We have a wide range of tools and templates for marketers looking to make data-driven marketing decisions. Whether you’re looking for channel excellence or marketing strategy advice, we’ve got resources to support your digital marketing optimization journey.

Search marketing data for 2022

This summary of search engine marketing statistics is aimed at helping you make better-informed decisions about the running of your search marketing.

If you’re looking to make the business case for investment in search, we recommend you start by modeling search engine marketing return via a search gap analysis to put a quantitative estimate to the returns.

We’ll start by reviewing how many people search, then look at the top search engines and finish with the growing popularity of voice search.

How many searches are made each day?

As of 26 January 2022, Google processes over 3.5 billion searches every day, or, 1.2 trillion searches per year.

The importance of search in influencing product purchase is suggested by Global Web Index via Datareportal. This shows that

“58.4% of consumers purchased a product or service online each week“

Moreover, mobile shopping now has a 60% market share, you can find more stats via the 300+ page report on Datareportal.

Who has the biggest search engine market share worldwide?

Google continues to dominate search engine use, with a 86.19% percent market share of desktop searches as of December 2021.

Clearly, Google is still the market leader, which needs to be taken into account for your digital strategy. This isn’t to say that you should discount other search engines though, especially as Bing which took 7.2% of searches in the same month.

It’s a slightly different story on mobile, however, as Google currently holds 94.88% of the mobile search market share. This is likely due to Google’s continued focus on the importance of mobile UX factors for SEO.

Desktop vs mobile vs tablet searches

Up until mid-2019, mobile and desktop searches were mostly neck and neck, with mobile just edging into the lead every few months. However, the most recent stats put mobile ahead with 54.86% of searches, while desktop falls to 42.65%, and desktop 2.49%.desk

This shows that as more people remained connected 24/7 due to the high mobile phone penetration across the globe, desktop searches are likely to continue to decline.

As we can see, there have been changes in behavior at key points this year – notably April 2020 which saw a huge number of technological, economic and social changes as Coronavirus was declared a national pandemic.

Regarding audience device type, it seems to have been accompanied by an increase in mobile search. Read more about the changes in mobile phone usage during the pandemic.

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The impact of mobile search on SEO

What does this change in search habits mean for SERPs? At the moment, only 13% of websites are able to retain the same position for a particular search across all devices.

So, you may be ranking well on desktop but not even appear on the first page of results on mobile. In fact, 30% of pages that show on the first page of desktop search results do not appear in the top 10 results on mobile.

According to SEMRush, only 11% of URLs kept the same position on mobile as desktop.

Marketers in 2022 need to build omnichannel and mobile marketing strategies into their marketing business as usual. Defend your mobile rankings by regularly checking that your site is optimized for mobile, and keep an eye on mobile rankings rather than simply keeping tracking of desktop rankings.

How much trackable web traffic comes from organic vs paid search?

In 2020, the combination of organic (40%) and paid search (28%) is still as powerful as ever, with 68% of all trackable website traffic coming from a combination of the two tactics. This means that they are both more beneficial for websites than other traffics.

Naturally, marketers will want to know where this direct traffic is coming from. This phenomenon is not new, and was summed up in a traffic analytics blog by Dave Chaffey.

“Direct in theory is the people who have typed in the URL directly to their browser, but in reality, it means anyone who arrives at the site from a source that cannot be tracked. The source of this traffic is generally links that have been sent to friends/colleagues and then copied and pasted into web browsers. Traffic of this kind is generally referred to as ‘dark social’. A general rule of thumb is that for every three people reaching your site via social, a further 7 will be arriving from ‘dark social’, which will appear as direct.”

Organic search’s dominance is fairly impressive considering the changes that have been made to the layout of search engine results pages (SERPs), which have pushed organic results further down the page, giving more dominant positions to paid results. However, users seem to put more trust in the results that rank highly organically.

How many clicks do organic search results generate?

While we already know that the place to be in the search results is on the first page, it looks as though where you really want to be is within results one to three. As shown below, the first three organic positions for non-branded search earn more than 50% of the total click-throughs. For branded search, the numbers are even higher.

This is not surprising, as branded search demonstrates that the user is lower down the funnel. Plus, generally, non-branded terms will have more competition with paid ads, which show up first on the SERP, explaining the lower organic CTR for non-branded.

This chart from Advanced Web Ranking January 2022 demonstrates the steep decline in click-throughs for keywords in 1st position down to 20th.

How many Google searches result in a click?

Ranking highly on the first page or organic results doesn’t necessarily guarantee a click, though. Zero-click searches on Google have seen a steady increase over the last few years.

Between January and December 2020, nearly 65% of Google searches ended without a click to another web property — up from 50% in June 2019.

As SERP features increase, this trend is set to continue. SEO marketers must evaluate their keywords to decide when to optimize for rankings (ie structured data for the answer box) and when to focus on driving clicks. This decision tree by SparkToro is a good place to start.

Search engine marketing statistics for voice search popularity

The increased use of smartphones and smart speakers has greatly increased the potential for voice searches and means we now have to think about the relevance of SEO for voice.

This is now a common behavior as the latest data from Global Web Index via Datareportal shows, with an average of 214.1% using voice commands or voice search (unfortunately the research does not isolate voice search only).

Voice searching behaviour is higher in younger age groups, but only declines markedly in the 55+ age group.

Your omnichannel marketing strategy in 2022

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Our popular marketing planning template is structured across the Smart Insights RACE Framework. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member to download our digital marketing plan template today

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