Aleyda Solis recently published the results of her SEOFOMO survey that revealed actionable facts about where SEOs are getting their clients, what kinds of clients they’re getting and how they’re promoting themselves to get more clients.
Aleyda Solis (LinkedIn) is a popular digital marketer specializing in International SEO. She publishes the SEOFOMO + MarketingFOMO Newsletters, is well known for promoting best practices in SEO and speaking at search conferences around the world.
This survey, conducted with a self-selected group of 337 respondents, offers a view of how SEO businesses get more business, who their clients are and what they do for them in 2024. The data offers valuable insights for digital marketers who want to grow their businesses.
For example, most of the respondents indicated that their area of specialization is Technical SEO. That makes sense because fixing website issues that make it easy for search engines to crawl, index and understand content is at the hear of what it means to optimize a site for search engines.
This is the kind of work SEOs specialize in:
64% Technical SEO
60% Content Focused SEO
54% SEO Generalist
51% SEO Management
14% Link Builder
8% Other
Only 14% of respondents answered that they build links for clients. That doesn’t mean that link building is not a priority but rather it may reflect that link building continues to be a difficult area to specialize in because of its complexity.
Who Answered The Survey
Aleyda’s survey consists of a sample of 337 respondents who self-identify as SEO specialists.
44% of respondents are Full-Time Agency SEO consultant
32 % are freelance and independent SEO consultants
24% are part-time SEO consultants
6% identified simply as Other
Data About SEO Clients
The results of the survey indicated that most of the respondents work with small and medium sized clients, with 49% working with sites less than 100K URLs and 33% working with client sites containing between 100k to 1 million URLs.
Local search SEO is perhaps the largest segment of small to medium businesses. This market, once challenging to scale with quality service at a reasonable price, has evolved. Today, agencies can partner with platforms like Wix or Duda, which both offer a high-performance website building platform that integrate marketing and SEO tools and also streamline client management and billing. These new technologies enables SEO agencies of any size to more easily scale, allowing them to focus on marketing and SEO rather than the underlying platform technology.
SEOs who self-identified as working with larger clients represented a total of 18% of the respondents. I’ve worked with large multinational B2B companies and there’s good money in it but it’s also can be frustratingly limited to how much influence you can have with the SEO. You just have to take your wins where you can get them and accept that you’ll never get your wish list fulfilled.
This Is Where SEOs Get Their Business
There is a great diversity in where SEOs get their business, which perhaps reflects individual priorities and strengths. Not everyone has the time to be a social media influencer nor the ability to get up and speak in front of audiences at industry events, right?
Referrals
The most highly cited source of clients is referrals from other companies and clients, accounting for 77% of responses. Putting in the hard work to cultivate happy clients and to promote an SEO business pays off in referrals.