Up, Up, and Away… A Look at SEO Job Growth

Over the past three years the search marketing industry has grown exponentially, and despite the general economic climate, it is forecasted to continue its aggressive growth over the next several years. According to SEMPO’s Annual State of Search Survey, search marketing doubled from $5.8 billion in 2005 to $12.1 billion in 2007, and will double again to $25.2 billion in 2011.  This industry growth is obviously going to fuel the creation of SEO jobs, but I thought it would be interesting to try to quantify the SEO job growth by using indeed's job trend tool.

The first area I looked at was how SEO jobs compare to traditional marketing and IT.  As you can see in this graph, the growth rate for SEO has been blowing away both segments.  Over the past three years the number of SEO jobs has grown more than 500%, compared to marketing and IT which have only shown slight growth and remain fairly steady with the economy.  What was most interesting to me is the recent jump in SEO jobs, which have nearly doubled in the last four months.  I’m not claiming it, but this might just be the evidence that SEO is recession proof.

The next thing I did was to examine some of the segments within search.  Each area has shown solid growth over the past three years, and also shows similar spikes in demand starting at the end of 2007.  Despite all the bad economic news that has been circulating over the past couple months, it is great to see that all areas of SEO are still showing tremendous growth.

Finally, I looked at some of the more specialized areas of search marketing: social media and web analytics.  Professionals with skills in these areas are among the most requested at Onward Search.  Indeed shows that since 2005 demand for web analytics and social media professionals has grown over 150% and 250% respectively.

While I’m sure we can probably come up with a more sophisticated model to examine job growth in our industry, I thought this was a great exercise to illustrate the macro-level factors at play.  Search continues to be an excellent area for career growth, and as the industry continues to grow we are going to continue to see a lot of new SEO jobs.  All in all, I’d say search marketing is a great place to be and search marketers should have very good career security for the near term.