Earlier this year we asked the community to take our SEO Industry Survey. We had originally hoped to get at least 3,000 responses and were completely blown away when over 10,000 people ended up taking the survey! Of course, it never hurts to have an iPad as the grand prize, but I'm still very excited about the extent of this report. As a comparison, another excellent survey in our industry earlier this year from eConsultancy and SEMPO generated ~1,500 responses (results are detailed in this SELand article).
Our survey's goal was to gather information about SEO in 2010 and share it publicly. We asked questions around:
- Who are the people in the SEO community?
- How do they learn about SEO and sharpen their skills?
- How are companies embracing search marketing?
- Which tools and tactics do people in the industry use to support their SEO and social media efforts?
After some detailed number crunching by our good friend Will Critchlow from Distilled, we're happy to present to you the results from the data.
Get the 2010 Industry Results Here
Some of the cool things you'll see include:
- What percent of SEOs say they buy links, report spam and how many overlap?
- Salary ranges across countries, experience levels and job descriptions
- Demographics of SEO - we might need to work on our male/female ratio
- and lots more - just go read it!
We've also created a spiffy infographic to help visualize the survey results:
For those who'd like to delve into the data more deeply, and extract new views on the information from the 10K+ respones, we've made the full data dump available in CSV form: download here. We'd love to see any interesting/unique analyses on this information, and we hope it's useful to those organizations and companies seeking to learn more about the SEO market.
Winners!
We can't forget to mention the people who won gifts for participating in the survey. The winners were notified back in June and they've all received their prizes. Here are the winners:
Grand Prize: 32GB Wi-Fi iPad:
Sam Ilowitz
First Prize: 120min Flip Mino HD Camera with custom SEOmoz artwork:
Jared Reed
Jay Estis
J. Smeekens
Second Prize: $35 gift certificates to the SEOmoz Zazzle Store:
Gareth Allen
Jody Lonergan
Anton Korzhuk
Jason Tan
Robert Palmer
Sebastien Mégraud
Lindsay Copeland
Joakim Eriksson
Nicholas Foo
Brian Hutchison
It's been a tremendous pleasure and honor to be part of such a powerful and growing industry, and this survey highlights the depth, breadth and uniqueness of those who do SEO professionally. Thanks so much for participating - we hope to make this a biennial (or possibly even annual) tradition.
p.s. We've also got the questions in individual results format on this detail page. Feel free to use any of the images and data in your reports, presentations, analyses, slide decks, etc. but if you use them online, we'd appreciate a link (nofollow is fine, but remember it leaks PageRank) ;-)
I am really impressed by both the number of respondents and Will's analysis of the data. Nice job!
The salaries across the US are much lower than I expected to see. As a whole, SEOs need to get better at salary negotiation. Common people! Do you have any idea what you're worth?!
Once Avinash Kaushik suggested to use Analytics as a way to count monetary benefits, especially in the case of In House SEOs: for instance, giving a value to any new visit generated by Organic from the beginning of an SEO campaign or leads/conversion generated by Organic.
I was also surprised to see such low numbers as SEOmoz, Simply Hired, and Indeed point to much higher rates. Anyone know of a reliable site giving current readings on salary? SEO Specialst?
Simply Hired - SEO Specialist New York, NY Average $81,000
Indeed - SEO Specialst New York, NY Average $69,000
That is a huge difference in average salaries :)
For those of you interested to know the top 20 countries represented but too lazy to filter it through excel here is the list:
How come Israel is so well represented ??
Maybe Israel has very strong ties with the US?
Really interesting to see South Africa on the map with 90. One of my main reasons for not returning home is that there just doesn't seem to be enough internet penetration to sustain a SEO industry. I suspect most of the SA seo/marketing types are into mobile rather than web specifically (and Id love to see some comments from them on that topic)
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Would love to post more, but the new box doesnt allow me to re scan the posts and image. Please go back to the old comments style, which was far more useful. Think of the children with ADD.
No wonder Israel at number four - we are the start-up nation and an SEO empire! Shalom SEOMOZ!
Salary data - the most interesting one.
Great point Lindsay. Perhaps SEOmoz could set up a 'SEO Salary Negotiation Guide'?
Awesome report, thanks again for spending so much time making your reports and guides really POP! The infographic is killer.
I feel pretty average, which I guess is a good thing. Its great to see so many respondents. Hopefully most of the people who took the survey were actually connected to SEO/internet marketing and not hanging out hoping for a free iPad. Did you see any spikes of traffic from free stuff type referrers?
Good to publicly share the results! I bit surprised by the high amount of canucks in there, good to see we still seems to be top in international seo :)
I imagine it is because of your own linguistic situation, being Google.ca both in English and French. And this probably makes you Canadians more ready to international SEO.
But beware of all us from continental Europe (or other Continents, also Antarctica), because we have to deal daily with international SEO (english, spanish, italian, french, german...) in order to simply compete in the Union European Market ;).
We did a bit on analysis on the data in the csv file. There's quite a gap between the salaries for men and women. Some scary figures when it's in an industry this close to home.
For example women with 10 years experience are earning only 77% of what men at the same level do. Even grads at less than one year still have a wage gap. All this despite SEO women generally beating the men in the education stats.
https://wearemba.com/2010/11/03/backwards-and-in-high-heels-is-seo-sexist/
I'd be interested in your thoughts!
I don't think that SEO is sexist... I think that the salary gap between men and women is something general. Infact, I don't see a big difference between the "SEO gap" and the general salary gap existing in any other industry (that is around 25%).
What I miss - as I didn't see it in your post - are the different datas of In House women SEOs and In Agency women SEO (the Consultant women SEOs have not to be counted, as they tailor their salary). With those datas we could answer better to your question (Is SEO sexist?), because we could understand if it is a conseguence of the bad general costume (if the gap is more relevant in In House SEOs) or if it is something that affect the SEO industry especially (if the % gap is similar both In House and Agency level).
That's a really interesting point, I might go and have another look at the data and see if there is a difference between in-house and agency gaps. I'd imagine it's more likely to be higher in house than agency side, purely due to the general culture difference between agencies and client companies. But that's just a hunch.
I'll reply here if I find anything for you :-)
The income gender gap is greatest for in-house women, and smallest for independent consultants.
Great infographic here and a big thanks for the csv dump so we can play around with the data as well.
Yea, that's a nice touch. One that's so often forgotten, too.
Thanks a ton for sharing the data in such great detail.
We have selected a few questions from the survey , the data related to these questions should according to us help the people who want to take up search marketing as a full time career.
We have published a blogpost based on the data offered by the survey https://blog.webpro.in/2010/11/answers-to-queries-you-might-have.html
We conduct SEO training also and many times people want to know the exact numbers and data related to their specific queries related to a career in the field of search marketing which can give them an idea about the emerging trends. This shall surely be of great help to them.
Thanks again for sharing the survey details .
I hope you do not have any objection in the way we have presented it.
Noooooooo! I wanted an SEOmoz T-Shirt sooooo bad!!!
Hope you'll make another survey (on a different topic) next year, so this time I can win something... :)
Great survey - I have been waiting for the results! Apart from the "big 3" (US, UK, CAN) you even gave us the detailed datas so the smaller countries can dive into their numbers - I like that.
I LOVE that amazing infographic!
Definitely - these are all available in the CSV dump, so feel free to open up Excel and filter based on those responses to see how folks in specific regions answered. With 1-200+ responses from so many countries, there's a lot of data to play with.
It is always nice to see the information processed and presented in an easy to read manner, thanks.
terrrific survey results, Rand!
a big Congrats from canuckland...and we're gonna print out that infographic andmount same on a board for reception...
spot-spot-on!!!
:-)
Jim
Mmmmmmmm. Data. Just as excited about this now as when we first saw how many people responded to it. I encourage anyone in the industry to check out the results.
Am I the only one here worried about MOZbot? Can he be fixed?
More seriously it would be very interesting to compare the demographics of seo’s with those working in paid search.
Ciao Rand! Please share my compliments with your amazing designers for the great infographics (are we going to see more in the future?).
I've just start digging into the stats and - as when I read the newspaper - I started from the end (Social Media). I think it is relevant the fact that the over the 50% answered to use Social Media in their Internet Marketing Strategy, but that more of the 50% of them affirm is not using any Tools to monitor/check/analyse the impact of the use of Social Media themselves.
I think that means that there's still an empiric use of them, and that people like Hubspot are doing well - especially lately - in trying to give a more reliable "scientific" background to the Social Media discipline.
P.S.: The "interior" vision of Roger is quite creepy ;)
As always Rand your contribution is priceless. Thank you for going to all of this effort and despite the consensus view - and to an extent yours - on the content is king mantra - this would be Exhibit A for the prosecution if SEOMoz were ever charged with "reaping the rewards of brilliant, unique content that added to the public pool of knowledge and understanding".
Matthew Hamilton
I couldnot believe that 24% of people do not use Social Media in their SEO strategy!
Come On People!!!
Don't be so naive, a company may not have a budget or the sign-off to work on social media campaigns. Many people may have very specific remits, particularly those working in-house, or an SEO might be a separate job role to a specialist Social Media expert so the SEO themselves might not do any social media... it doesn't mean they are living in a cave ignoring it!
This is great data, but comments like this prove you have to interpret with care (as the guys at Distilled to their credit point out). A nice infographic too (although last time I checked Antarctica isn't a country, it's a continent!)
Bludge,
3 things...
1) The beauty of social media is that it does not necessarily require a budget (It's fiscally free in most cases). I know many companies that SPEND nothing on their social media efforts and have tremendous success. So If you do not have a budget that just means you have to be that much more creative.
2) Last time I checked an SEO does not have to physically do the social media for it to be a part of their strategy. The infograph specifically says "...Do you use social media as part of your SEO strategy?.." Again it can be part of your strategy even if you yourself are not physically doing it. I agree completely with you "...Comments like this prove you need to have care with interpreting..."
3) Lastly I do not want to argue or feel offended with my first comment. I understand some SEO's simply do not have the authority in the company to use the social media. So let me clear up the confusion...
If you are ignoring social media or waiting for the right time then COME ON PEOPLE!
I hope this clears this up.
Thanks to you for reading my comment and thank you to the great folks at the SEOmoz company for giving us a place to gather and have these duscussions.
-Ian
wow, great report. Lots to look over. I especial like the poster idea - great presentation.
What do you mean Antarctica didn't make the cut?! I could have swore there were some pretty experienced SEOs over there.
Kidding aside, this was a really great infographic!
Roger Takes Center Stage - Reveals All in this Shocking Infograph
I thought Roger needed a bit of drama :)
Great stuff. Thank you everyone for all the effort!
Fantastic infographic! I just love this type of data. I try to avoid puting too much wait into the salaries as its hard to keep in consideration cost of living. Someone making 40K in Michigan may be better off then someone making 60K in California. I also really like the stats on the filing a spam report, but to see its mainly the "experts" when these are the people who supposedly say not to waste your time with this technique.
Typo -> Who files SPAM resports?
Wow this is great! It's very interesting to see all of this information in a great infographic! Thanks!