SEOmoz has come out with its SEO Industry Survey – 2012 results. There were 6,491 SEO professionals from over a 100 countries who were questioned about their search engine practices. The 47.3% of the total respondents were from the United States among other countries around the world. The survey results include many interesting insights on their spending and budgets, annual salaries, tactics and content, conferences and other industry practices.
What do SEOs work on?
Here is the amount of time SEOs delegate to these tasks:
- 76% Social – Set up/ran a Facebook business page
- 74% Analytics – Analyzed/tracked site speed and page-load times
- 69% Competitive – Analyzed competitors' back-links for opportunities
- 64% Competitive – Analyzed competitors' content for inspiration/opportunities
- 64% Social – Set up a Google+ business profile
- 63% Analytics – Analyzed [not provided] data in Google Analytics
- 59% Content – Started a new blog or invested heavily in blogging
- 58% On-page – Used rel="canonical" to control duplicate content
- 57% Analytics – Employed conversion tracking to improve ROI
- 55% SEO – Focused on Local SEO: Google Places, local keyword targeting, etc.
SEOs are working on content and when it comes to fresh content, blogs are clearly in the lead.
How much do SEOs make?
As per the survey results, search professionals running their own business are the ones raking in the money. The salary range as per the functions of consultants, agents, freelancers, owners and more us as follows:
SEO Client Budget is still low:
One third of the SEOs spend $1,000 every month on outsourcing. Here is the budgeting detail:
Individual time spent on SEO tasks
SEOs have 5 top work tasks that they spend their individual time on:
- 24% SEO
- 11% On-page Optimization
- 10% Link Building
- 8% Social Media Marketing
- 6% Copywriting/Blogging/Writing
Google Free SEO Tools top the SEO’s Preference
The search industry professionals named their SEO tools preferences as well and here the tools provided by Google took the lead. Here is the table indicating tool preferences:
The results showed that:
- Google Analytics is the top analytics tool (universally)
- Google Webmaster Tools is the leading SEO tool (5 of 6 respondents)
- Google AdWords is the most preferred keyword research tool (universally)
- Google Website Optimizer is the leading optimizer tool (3 of 4 respondents)
Ironically, this result reminds you of the ‘war’ SEOs seem to be with Google search after Panda or Penguin updates, and the fact that they rely on Google tools for their search needs. Such is the dependence on Google’s tools that SEOs may find it difficult to function in case Google shuts down any of these. Do you also rely on these free tools? Do share your views.
Navneet Kaushal
@navneetkaushal
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