No matter how big or small a business is, it should be using SEO, content marketing experts say.

A study involving thousands of website domains found that 53 percent of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search, or unpaid search results based on keyword relevance.

This statistic leads the top arguments for the push of search engine optimization by marketing experts.

Experts believe that everyone from huge enterprises to start-up companies should be using SEO to be found online.

According to StatCounter, Google currently holds 91.75 percent of the total worldwide search engine market share. To compare, Bing holds 2.75 percent.

As a result, the majority of marketing experts focus on Google rankings.

The average organic click-through rate the first Google desktop search result gets is 32 percent, according to Advanced Web Ranking. For context, anything over 2 percent is considered an above-average CTR.

However, just over 90 percent of pages get no organic search traffic from Google, according to Ahrefs.

While Google considers more than 200 SEO factors for its rankings, the top factors are high-quality content, backlinks, and search intent.

High-quality content for SEO purposes includes written content that is regularly published and original, meaning it’s not too similar to other webpages.

Statistics show the companies that publish blogs get 55 percent more traffic, and have 434 percent more pages indexed by search engines.

In addition to Google’s preference for content that is high-quality and fresh, first-page word count averages hit at around 1,890 words.

The same Ahrefs study that tracked the number of web pages with no organic search traffic found that 55.24 percent of these pages lacked backlinks.

Experts say backlinks are important because they represent the value and confidence in a business’s content and website.

But first, experts say the key to earning backlinks is to build a solid SEO strategy that shows off a business’s expertise within their field. In other words, their content must be link-worthy.

Experts say an effective SEO strategy starts with understanding the target audience and their struggles. This can begin with keyword research.

Based on this research, a company’s marketing team can effectively build the types of content their audience is seeking, experts say, and position themselves as an expert on the topics.

Some companies have the ability to start this research among their own team, while others decide to hire an agency to help build an effective SEO strategy.

When it comes to paid ads vs. organic results, the organic results get 94 percent more clicks than paid ads in search results.

Experts say the most effective content marketing strategies allow companies to maintain a steady stream of high-quality content that can live online forever, unlike their paid counterparts.

Photo by George Morina