Back in 1996, a couple of nerds named Sergey Brin and Larry Page started working on a project to create a search engine, which they called BackRub (later renamed Google).
Search engines were nothing new; the first one was Archie created back in 1990, and there had been more than a few created between then & when Google launched (most notably Yahoo!)
But as you know today, Google is the most widely used
search engine. 5 or 6 years after launch, it crept past Yahoo!
at the top of the charts and never looked back.
Meanwhile...
Back in the 90’s, people started to create the first websites on the World Wide Web, and they quickly realized they could make money off them. But they needed people to visit their websites in order for them to earn anything.
As you can see in this modern search results page, there are two different types of results. The first is ads; they're located in the yellow highlighted box and in the right hand sidebar. Below the top ads, though, there are organic search results. These are the results deemed by Google to be the most relative, trustworthy, and authoritative websites or web pages on the subject.
Let’s take an example.
Let’s look at the phrase “party supplies”. It gets searched over 110,000 times a month! Seeing that most studies estimate that the first organic result in Google gets around 20% of the clicks, that’s 22,000 visitors to your website each month if you show up at the top.
But let’s quantify that – how much are those visitors worth?
Seeing that the average advertiser for that search phrase spends $1.43 per click, that web traffic of 22,000 visitors is worth roughly $31,460 a month! And that’s just for that search phrase.
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auto insurance price quotes
In other industries, like real estate or insurance, the cost of web traffic for ranking at the top for one of a few big keywords equates to millions of dollars. For example, advertisers are paying over $50 per click on the search phrase “auto insurance price quotes!” That means showing up at the top in the organic results would make a lot of advertisement budget headaches go away.
On page SEO
This deals with making sure Google can find your web pages so they can show them in the search results, as well as making sure you have relevant, detailed, and helpful content to the search phrases you’re trying to show up for.
Off page SEO
This deals with trying to get other websites to tell Google what your website is about as well as that it’s an authority in the industry and a website that they can trust to show in their results. This is done through acquiring backlinks from other websites (known as “
link building”).
Google owns roughly 70% of the search engine market share
70% of clicks on search engine results pages are on organic results
Outside of search engines, email is the biggest driver of web traffic
75% of users never view the second page of search results
There are over 1.4 billion searches conducted every hour
More than 80% of internet users use search
Moms use search engines twice as much as non-moms