Where in the World is the SEO Talent?

Posted on July 16, 2008 10:03 by Reilly O'Donnell

A couple weeks ago I used Indeed's tools to look at SEO Job Growth and the Top 30 Cities to Work in SEO according to salary numbers.  Knowing that the search marketing industry is currently talent constrained, I wanted to take a look at where the search marketing talent was located.  To get a feel for this I chose to use SEMPO's member roster as a baseline to assess where search marketing professionals and companies are located throughout the United States and the World.

As you might expect, New York and California have the largest concentrations of both search marketing invididuals and search marketing corporations.  Below I have listed the top five states in each group, individuals, corporations, as well as a total of the two.

Beyond the top five, here is a break down by percentage of the top twenty states where SEMPO members are located.

If you are looking for something a little more colorful, I uploaded all my data into a heatmap to give a visual representation of where search marketing professional and organizations are located throughout the country.

I also used SEMPO's member list to take a look at where search marketing professionals and organizations are internationally.  Based on their information, the top five countries (excluding the US) with the most search marketing professionals and organizations are:

By looking at the heat map you can see that the majority of search marketing professionals and organizations (outside the United States) are located in the UK and Canada.

This correlates with the fact that Canada and the UK are among the countries with the highest figures for total internet users and internet penetration (Canada - 22 million 65.9%, UK 40 million, 66.4%).  Since our research is also based on SEMPO's data, it also make sense that English speaking countries would be at the top of the list.

As SEO continues to grow it will be interesting to watch how each area of the world responds.  Only time will tell whether in a year's time this list will be identical, hopefully with more color across the board, or if there will be a major shake up in the distribution of SEOs.  Either way for the industry to maintain its growth, it is going to need more quality professionals which means better training, and hopefully the introduction of the SEO college diploma.

Let me know if this data corresponds to what you are seeing in your part of the world, I'm interested to know which areas really have a good concentration of search marketers, and which are hurting for quality talent.

Posted on July 16, 2008 10:03 by Reilly O'Donnell