UK-based content marketers Zazzle Media have released a new report entitled The State of SEO 2019 based on survey returns from several thousand marketers (70% in-house and 30% at agencies) at companies including Disney. RAC, Oxfam, British Gas.
Key findings:
- 69% of respondents said SEO was "extremely important" to their overall marketing strategy, 28% said it's "quite important".
- And 85% said SEO is effective, up from 79% in 2018.
- But on average, marketers spent only 22% of their budget on SEO, down from 27% last year because of:
- Resource constraints (61%)
- Difficulty in proving value (34%)
- Most-used SEO tools:
- Google Analytics 100%
- Google Search Console 83%
- Microsoft Excel 65%
- SEMrush 56%
- Screaming Frog 54%
- ahrefs 38%
- 47% of marketers say they have "expert-level" SEO knowledge, 40% "know a bit"
- Where marketers get their SEO news:
- MOZ 65%
- Google Webmasters Blog 55%
- Search Engine Land 52%
- Search Engine Journal 51%
- Search Engine Watch 37%
- Twitter 31%
- Marketers are split on whether or not they're spending enough time investigating competitors:
- Yes 49%
- No 50%
- Majority (52%) say competitors target their branded keywords.
- Top 5 effective SEO practices:
- Creation of new content 82%
- Optimization of old content 55%
- Link building 45%
- Internal architecture 44%
- CTR optimization 44%
- Most important objectives of SEO identified by respondents:
- Traffic 40% - up from 20% in 2018
- Conversions/sales 31%
- Rankings 12%
- Brand awareness 9% - down from 19% in 2018
- Revenue 4% - down from 16% in 2018
- Less effective SEO practices (top 5):
- Keyword saturation 38%
- Exact match anchor text 38%
- TITLE optimization 21%
- Link building 20%
- Brand mentions 15%
Comments:
- We have only a rough idea of sample size ("thousands") and sample is likely skewed toward UK.
- "Difficulty in proving value" stems from lack of positive attribution.
- Sample population identified "link building" as both effective" (45%) and "less effective" (20%). Perhaps quality of links built is different between these 2 camps.
- Re most important objectives of SEO: 40% saying "traffic" vs. only 4% saying "revenue" isn't good news for these marketers' companies. It's much easier - and a lot less valuable - to get traffic than it is to make more sales. Again, the problem is the difficulty of attribution. And people with bottom-line responsibility at these companies are judging marketing results by traffic stats, because those are the easiest hard numbers to get.. That needs to change.