So much to fit into one blog post (and technically, I'm still on vacation). Technically, this is three separate subjects, so I'll segment :)
Industry Numbers
For the outside investment we're seeking, I've had to dig around a bit for industry data to help predict the total number of people in the world conducting search marketing professionally - here's what I've got:
Members at major industry forums:
- SEOmoz has ~45,000 (non-premium) members
- Sitepoint has ~190,000 members
- DigitalPoint has ~88,000 members
- SEOChat has ~37,000 members
- SEW Forums has ~15,000 members
- Cre8asite Forums has ~12,000 members
- I estimate WebmasterWorld has ~6,000 paying members (someone smart emailed me with an estimate of 3,000)
- SEMPO has 500 members
Conference attendees (these are all estimates or hearsay)
- SMX Seattle was filled to capacity ~1200 people
- SES San Jose 2007 had ~6000 people
- SES New York 2007 had ~5000 people
- SEMPDX (a smaller, local event) had ~500 people
- Pubcon Las Vegas 2006 had ~2000 people (my smart friend says ~2250)
Industry data sources on search marketing expenditures/size:
- SEMPO estimated that $9.4 billion was on SEM in 2006
- The following image from Metrics 2.0 provides a great aggregate of data:
- This next one, from MarketingSherpa, shows the percentage of spend on SEO vs. SEM for the last 3 years (warning PDF!)
If you've got more industry data that you think is valuable, relevant or revealing, I'd love to list it here, so feel free to suggest it in the comments.
SEOmoz Stats
Since member Derek Dunne asked about where SEOmoz's visitors come from, I figured it would be a good time to provide an update to our last stats dump back in January.
- We're averaging around 10,000 visits per weekday, and 6-8000 on weekends
- Top referrers (in order)
- Direct access or bookmark
- https://www.google.com
- https://moz.com
- https://digg.com
- https://www.stumbleupon.com
- https://www.digg.com
- https://www.google.co.uk
- https://images.google.com
- https://del.icio.us
- https://search.yahoo.com
- https://www.lulu.com
- https://www.google.ca
- https://www.bloglines.com
- https://www.netvibes.com
- https://www.google.co.in
- https://www.google.com.au
- https://www.e-veryweb.com
- https://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp
- https://forums.digitalpoint.com
- https://gigazine.net
- https://www.cssremix.com
- https://searchengineland.com
- Top countries of origin
- United States 44.67%
- United Kingdom 8.32%
- Canada 5.49%
- Germany 3.35%
- France 2.80%
- India 2.58%
- Australia 2.55%
- Spain 2.39%
- Italy 2.15%
- Japan 1.90%
- Netherlands 1.64%
- China 1.32%
- Brazil 1.22%
- Sweden 0.96%
- Romania 0.83%
- Turkey 0.81%
- First time vs. Returning Visits by Month (first number is first time, second is returning)
- January 126,477 | 76,145
- February 217,357 | 92,567
- March 187,203 | 96,214
- April 180,790 | 99,494
- May 205,438 | 110,347
- June 162,244 | 92,360
- July 165,652 | 97,622
- August 163,195 | 100,100
We're still planning to do our usual end-of-year wrap up with even more complete data :)
SMX Social Media in New York City
We're pretty excited about this one, and since there's only a few days left to register at the early bird rate, I'd highly urge folks to run over to SEL, read the 9 reasons why you should go, and get booking. Social media marketing & linkbaiting are critical components of search marketing, and if you want to hone your skills and network with some of the best in the business (there's only seats for 200 attendees), I highly recommend it. I'll be speaking there on a couple topics, and Rebecca may also be there (hopefully we'll hear back from Danny soon).
Cool topics include specialized sessions on social news sites, social bookmarking & tagging, leveraging social networking & Wikipedia spamming, err... optimization. The full agenda's online, and the cost is $1,095 until September 7.
I'll be back in Seattle tomorrow night, and should be returning emails, calls, etc. by Wednesday.
p.s. If you ever find yourself in St. George, Utah, don't miss the Painted Pony restaurant - the prices are closer to Vegas, but the food was even better than the meal we had at Keller's Bouchon.
Rand didn't specifically mention it so I will...
If you register you get free SEOmoz premium membership for three months...
(from the SMX blog)
"Register for SMX Social Media now and you get 3 free months of SEOmoz Premium Membership — a $147 value. SEOmoz Premium Membership features the best tools and techniques to improve your search rankings."
Great post - as always we love these stats posts. Us SEOmoz junkies must get our fix!
I find it interesting to note that one of your top referrers is google images - when really you don't have that many images on the site.. Is that perhaps a direct result of the fact you've been implementing more graphics in your posts over the last few months (in particular the wonderful google bot pics)?
I'd love to know if getting more traffic from google images was either a predicted result of that or if you actively went after it. Or maybe it's just something that happened!
Like Tom says, you can't beat a few stats to start the day with.
Anyway, I'm happy to see us Brits come second in the readership. Makes up for our usual poor World Athletics performance! Well, kind of...
Once again, thanks for the transparency; it's great information for anyone interested in the future of the SEO/SEM industry.
For what it's worth, SEOmoz is one of my top 10 referrers.
What happened to 44000 of those 45000 seomoz members? With 13 mozpoints I rank on the top 400. Do this people forget about it or they just don't comment very much? I know I don't participate very much and still keep on coming but if you were to purge that list for people who haven't logged in in the last (2) months how many members would you be left with?
Sorry if I am being nosy :-)
Great data with this kind of continued growth we're all going to be rich!!!
Hi My name is Bob Rains and I'm an alcoholic.
Great seeing you in San Jose Rand. See you in NYC.
Natural search is only 10% of paid search? This would explain the huge presence of PPC managers at SES.
How about a study on the long term ROI of paid vs. natural search? My personal expereice suggests natiral is about 100% more cost effective.
Further in the SEMPO report, you'll see "76% of respondents are taking part in organic SEO", and MarketingSherpa ranked it only 4% lower than paid search as 'best performing online advertising tactics of 2006'.
I think it's drastically less in the budget numbers because it's usually done in-house, much cheaper, and/or included in design/development.
I also wonder how many consider just writing meta tags or autosubmitting a site to be 'taking part in organic SEO'. SEO is harder to pin numbers on than paid search.
great idea!
I am famous :)
I love stats. I find the SEM and SEO spend interesting is this based on the amount people spend in total or the amount spend on experts? I suspect it is in total as ppc would is a daily spend where seo is more like a once off fee with a top up every now and again!
Now to convince my boss that i need a premium membership :)
Thanks Rand
One piece of data I find interesting from the last search marketing benchmark from MarketingSherpa is the conversion rate from Organic search results Vs. PPC ads.
On average PPC's conversion rate is higher with 4,19% comparing to SEO's 3,92%.
However, SEO's rate is higher than PPC's for ecommerce purchases... (PPC performs better for conversion goals like registration, specific pageviews & offline conversion).
Which makes sense I guess... I wonder how those figures will evolve in the future?
I love stats!
These stats teach me that for having 10000 visitors a day, you need 45000 members, blog everyday, shave your beard so now and then, add photo's of your ceo coming out of the shower, do heavy invest in google ranking and all the most famous social websites and much much more....
In that case, I think I must be happy that my mother, sister and some of my friends from the bar (for who I always pay the beers) visit my website.
This industry keeps going up...We have a nice future I hope. However, I wonder if all that money will keep ending up in Google's pockets.
Anyway, I am the part of "Italy 2.15%" :).
Nice post Rand.
Owning a business makes it hard to get the brain to go on vacation, huh?
It's also a good time to be in SEM: Small numbers of people working on steady amounts of large growth.
Stunning that UK is that far behind USA visitors. I'm surprised that Germany is 4th and Japan far behind. Hmm ...
Nice wrapup, although I'm slightly confused why you wouldn't list WMW overall numbers since that's what you've done with the rest, including SEOMOZ. Or you could compare your premium membership numbers to WMW's :)
Sounds like you've decided to go for outside investment then? Bank, investors or VC?
Wow all this information and you are still on vacation.
How much work do you get done when you are sleeping?
Thanks for the SEMpdx mention.
Can I get a number on Premium members? ...
- as a counter balance - you could use your hosting bill :)
- Also perhaps the number of time on site; pages/visit.
-.rb
There's ~1250 currently active premium members and around 2100 total signups have occurred. Oddly, almost half of the folks who cancelled their memberships have signed up again later - we're guessing some folks only need the services once every 3-4 months (or sign up for the new guides, tools, tips, Q+A, etc.)
That seems like the tricky part. Personally, I've bought a couple of articles and liked the tools during my free month, but not being a full-time SEO, have been waffling on whether or not to bite the bullet. Every time a new tool goes up, though, and now that you've got the ongoing content of the Q&A (a great idea, business-wise), the pressure keeps mounting. If you can get a penny-pinching, self-employed, non-SEM like me to seriously consider joining, you're doing something right.
Always love these posts, thanks!
Of course, getting a real bead on the industry numbers is challenging, since there is a lot of "duplicate content" across those sites; that is to say that most of us are probably members of at least 2 or 3 of those other sites, if not more. Also, the challenge is that some of those sites' numbers, take Sitepoint as a good example, probably cover a large portion of members who are not directly connected to SEM at all. Still interesting though.
Do you think we need to be a little cautious with the comaprisons between PPC and SEO spending? Some of the SEO spending might be covered under a greater "design" project or that those numbers may be harder to get a hold of because they are less reported or harder to back into?
I was also surprised in the gap between First time visitors and Returning visits... could that be in part due to reporting discrepencies and be over-stated?
Hey Rand,
While we're on the topic of raising money have you decided to go the VC route?
For what it's worth I'll repeat that raising the money from your members could be a great way to maintain control while getting some investors with a wide variety of experiences who can be of assistance if needed.
VCs can bring a lot of good things to the table, particularly around strategies for future financing and/or selling the company. My guess is many of the members here could do the same and would be huge "brand ambassadors" for the service (many probably already are) in ways that VCs will never be.
And what could be more true to the community you and your team have built than having your customers as owners?
I am certainly willing to put my money where my virtual mouth is and I am sure there are many Mozzers out there who feel the same.
And I don't think any of us will need a power point with industry data to convince our partners to cut the check.
What say ye?
I can't tell you how much I appreciate the vote of confidence. We've actually been swarmed with lots of great offers for outside capital and we're looking at all of them. It's a time-consuming, intensive process, but I'll try to keep up the reporting :)
As for getting investment from SEOmoz members - there's a lot of expense and problems that presents because it would technically be a "public offering" and the US government likes to regulate those pretty carefully. We haven't completely ruled it out, but in connecting with some attorneys and finance folks, it's certainly not a pain free route.
These numbers do look huge, and there's no question we are in a growth industry.
However, I'm a member of the majority of those forums too, and so are many readers here, I'd wager.
How many have gone to both went to SES, SMX and others this year, and will be at Pubcon too? I routinely see dozens if not hundresds of recognizable faces and friends.
There is a lot of overlap in all those groups and conferences, and it would be interesting to see how many "uniques" there are in these numbers.
(Rand, we appreciate you committing to <a href="https://www.sempdx.org/">Searchfest 2008</a>, and it sounds like Marshall Simmons may have as well - thank you)