A recent Search Engine Journal survey sought to discover what some of the world’s SEO experts are up to. What’s going on in SEO land?
Where do SEOs spend most of their time?
SEO experts were asked where most of their time was spent: on-site, off-site, technical or other. Over 25% of SEO experts said most of their time is spent doing onsite SEO and technical SEO activities.
Most time-consuming SEO tasks?
It was found that marketers spent their days:
- Building backlinks
- Writing and creating content
- Optimising for mobile
- Navigation and UX
- Google Analytics and Search Console Data
- Researching keywords
- Metadata editing
- Other
Overall, 72% of marketers said writing and creating good quality content was their most time-consuming daily task.
Biggest SEO challenges at the moment?
The same as the tasks listed previously, these topics all were said to be marketers biggest current SEO challenges. Other additional challenges were: time management of optimisations, scalable processes, hiring the right people. 28% of SEO marketers said that their largest challenge was building good backlinks.
From the SEO experts themselves
Current SEO aspirations?
We’ve lost rankings on many of our most important keywords, and while traffic overall has grown, we’re missing many potential customers we used to capture. – Rand Fishkin, Moz
Our goal is to teach people you can’t SEO a website. SEO is a culture you build into your business. It’s not a task. It’s how you operate.- Dan R Morris, Blogging Concentrated
While there are priorities that are unique to both SEO and content, a lot of the major qualifications for success in these two realms overlap. Today, you cannot be successful at one without the other. It is my hope that businesses will understand the interconnectedness of SEO and content marketing and build a strategy to support it.” – Katy Katz, Inturact
Future SEO aspirations?
Crazy-high organic click-through rates! – Larry Kim, WordStream
The future of my SEO efforts will be all about adapting to change but not reacting. Reactions, to new feature releases or statements, from Google, can leave SEOs wasting resources chasing their tale. But waiting for releases or statements to prove themselves worthy, and then adapting, is what the future is about. Otherwise, trend chasers and newcomers may be shooting themselves in the foot.- Jordan Kasteler, Digital Marketing Consultant
Understanding user intent and building content that matches the intent behind the queries. – Eli Schwartz, Survey Monkey
Biggest SEO project you’re involved in at the moment?
We are doing an audit of the 1,000+ blog posts to understand how visitors share, engage and read our content. We are utilizing this data to better understand what articles our visitors want to read. – Chris Campbell, ReviewTrackers
Guiding content initiatives for companies that have established brands in Europe and are expanding into the US.- Markelle Harden, Avista PR
Right now we are investigating our entire navigation suite and organizing our content in a meaningful manner. – Garth O’Brien, GoDaddy
Hopefully this has given you an insight into what some of the top SEO pros are doing!