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:
  1. Resource constraints (61%)
  2. Difficulty in proving value (34%)
• Most-used SEO tools:
  1. Google Analytics 100%
  2. Google Search Console 83%
  3. Microsoft Excel 65%
  4. SEMrush 56%
  5. Screaming Frog 54%
  6. ahrefs 38%
• 47% of marketers say they have "expert-level" SEO knowledge, 40% "know a bit"
• Where marketers get their SEO news:
  1. MOZ 65%
  2. Google Webmasters Blog 55%
  3. Search Engine Land 52%
  4. Search Engine Journal 51%
  5. Search Engine Watch 37%
  6. 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:
  1. Creation of new content 82%
  2. Optimization of old content 55%
  3. Link building 45%
  4. Internal architecture 44%
  5. CTR optimization 44%
• Most important objectives of SEO identified by respondents:
  1. Traffic 40% - up from 20% in 2018
  2. Conversions/sales 31%
  3. Rankings 12%
  4. Brand awareness 9% - down from 19% in 2018
  5. Revenue 4% - down from 16% in 2018
• Less effective SEO practices (top 5):
  1. Keyword saturation 38%
  2. Exact match anchor text 38%
  3. TITLE optimization 21%
  4. Link building 20%
  5. 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.