For more than 20 years, SEO – both in its present form and previous incarnations- has played a huge role in driving traffic to most websites on the internet. While one easy to convince search engines to list your pages prominently, today’s SEO is rigid and sometimes unforgiving, making it all too easy to make one mistake and lose your progress.

One startling statistic is that more than 90% of all webpages on the internet receive absolutely no traffic from search engines. There are multiple reasons for this – some voluntary, some not – but knowing exactly why this is such a huge phenomenon is important if you’re planning to pursue SEO endeavors.

Let’s look at why the vast majority of pages get absolutely no traffic from search engines.

Pursuing Traffic from Other Sources

In past years, it could be considered brand suicide not to compete in various search engine results for traffic. After all, how else could people find information – and how could brands reach audiences – without the use of search engines like Google?

Today, however, a major change in how we absorb information – and from where – is leading to more brands abstaining from SEO altogether. How (and more importantly, why)? Social media plays a huge role in this: through a combination of paid and organic traffic, brands can reach millions of people an d have their content circulated without ever competing for search engine traffic.

With more people using social media on a daily basis than search engines, pinging links via social media is a smart decision.

Poor Optimizations

Another huge reason why many pages are not receiving traffic is due to a lack of search engine optimization at the most basic level. If a website or page is designed without technical considerations such as backlinks, keywords and other information, then search engines may find it worthless or not know how to classify it.

The result is that these pages are never ranked in search results, or are ranked so low that nobody ever stumbles across them in search. This, arguably, is the single biggest reason why most pages do not receive any traffic from search engines.

Irrelevant Descriptions

While search engines do their best to rank content in search results based on what users will find relevant, there are sometimes disconnects. Particularly in small niches, a page may actually be a valuable source of information – both to those who visit and in the eyes of search algorithms.

However, if the description, title and other elements of the page visible from search do not effectively convey the right information or sentiment to those browsing the results, then nobody will bother to click on it. This is especially relevant for pages that may be at the bottom of the first page of search results.

With more than 9 out of every 10 pages generating no search engine traffic, understanding just what may cause this is good for your brand’s future prospects. While some voluntarily choose to forgo search engine optimization and competition in this arena, many simply lack visibility due a lack of customization in how they’re pinging links to search engines. Now that you’re aware of what causes this situation, you can choose to do what’s best for your brand’s online presence.