{"id":21344,"date":"2023-12-01T10:18:12","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T15:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/?p=21344"},"modified":"2024-01-24T10:55:37","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T15:55:37","slug":"search-traffic-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/search-traffic-study\/","title":{"rendered":"96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here\u2019s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
It\u2019s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Our Content Explorer tool<\/a> discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The \u201cmain\u201d Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find out, we took the entire database<\/a> from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion<\/strong> pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How many web pages get organic search traffic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"96.55%<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it\u2019s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it\u2019s not the most accurate representation of the entire web.<\/strong> Even compared to the size of Site Explorer\u2019s index of 340.8 billion pages<\/a>, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the \u201cquality side of the web.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates.<\/strong> Even though our database of ~651 million keywords<\/a> in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn\u2019t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There\u2019s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords<\/a> that are not popular enough to make it into our database.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    That said, these two \u201cinaccuracies\u201d don\u2019t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Reason 1: The topic has no search demand<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    If nobody is searching for your topic, you won\u2019t get any search traffic\u2014even if you rank #1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For example, I recently Googled \u201cpull sitemap into google sheets\u201d and clicked the top-ranking page<\/a> (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs\u2019 Site Explorer<\/a>, you\u2019ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer<\/a> confirms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Keyword<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    This is why it\u2019s so important to do keyword research. You can\u2019t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer<\/a> can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    You\u2019ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Filtering<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Reason 2: The page has no backlinks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Backlinks are<\/a> one of Google\u2019s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there\u2019s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Pages<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Same goes for the correlation between a page\u2019s traffic and keyword rankings:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Pages<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    No, because correlation does not imply causation<\/a>. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it\u2019s almost impossible to rank on the first page<\/a> for competitive keywords without backlinks\u2014an observation that aligns with the data above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The key word there is \u201ccompetitive.\u201d Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Pages
    How much traffic pages with no backlinks get<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    \u2026 but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Example<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Some<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    It\u2019s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Some<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    You might have noticed two other things about these pages:<\/p>\n\n\n\n