Salary benchmarks for 24 markets
What SEO pays country by country and city by city, on one comparable scale.
Editorial Standards
How content on this site is researched, verified, reviewed and corrected — including an explicit statement about where AI tooling is and is not used.
The short answer
- Every statistic is cited to a primary source; every opinion is labelled as one.
- Salary figures are published as ranges with sources, never as a single confident number.
- AI tools assist production; every factual claim is verified by a human against a primary source before publishing.
- No paid placement, no sponsored advice. Corrections are made promptly and noted where material.
Four principles
- Show the range, not a number. Salary data is genuinely uncertain. Publishing a single confident figure would be easier to read and less honest, so every pay figure here is a band with its sources attached.
- Separate fact from judgement. Statistics are cited to a primary source. Opinions are written as opinions, with the reasoning visible so you can disagree with the argument rather than the conclusion.
- Say what we do not know. Several topics on this site — the exact size of the AI click decline, which skills will matter in three years — do not have reliable answers yet. Pages that touch them say so.
- Commercial arrangements never move a recommendation. No paid placement, no sponsored advice, no exceptions. Details on the disclosure page.
How claims are sourced
Every substantive claim falls into one of three categories, and each is handled differently.
| Claim type | Standard applied |
|---|---|
| Official statistics | Cited to the primary source with the reference period stated — most often the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Never cited via a secondary summary. |
| Salary and market figures | Compiled from several public trackers and live job-advertisement ranges, published as bands, with the sources listed at the foot of the page. Method: salary data methodology. |
| Interpretation and advice | Written explicitly as judgement, with the reasoning shown. Where the evidence is thin, the page says the evidence is thin. |
Where sources disagree — which, for SEO salary data, is most of the time — we show the disagreement rather than picking the number that reads best.
The publishing process
- Research. Primary documentation first: Google Search Central, schema.org, the quality rater guidelines, BLS occupational data. Commercial trackers and job-advertisement ranges second, read in plurality rather than singly.
- Drafting. Written by a practising SEO professional. Structure is decided by what the reader needs to decide, not by a keyword outline.
- Verification. Every figure is checked against its source before publication, and the source is linked so you can check it too.
- Review. Pages are reviewed against their sources on a rolling basis. Salary and market data ages fastest and is prioritised.
Our policy on AI tooling
Being explicit about this matters more than it used to, and vagueness here would be hypocritical on a site that writes about AI search.
- AI tools are used in production of this site — for drafting assistance, structuring, and generating the site's build system.
- Every factual claim and every figure is verified against a primary source by a human before publication. That is the line that matters, and it is not negotiable.
- Judgements and recommendations are ours, based on working experience in the field, not synthesised from what other pages say.
- No content is published unread.
The reason to state this openly is simple: a site that told you AI-generated content without human verification is a quality problem, while quietly doing exactly that, would not deserve your trust on anything else.
Corrections
We will get things wrong. Salary data moves, job boards close, certifications change their terms, and a figure that was accurate at publication drifts.
Report anything wrong to [email protected]. Factual errors are corrected promptly. Where a correction materially changes a conclusion, it is noted on the page rather than made silently.
We do not re-date pages that have not substantively changed. A 'last updated' stamp on unmodified content is a small dishonesty and a common one.
Editorial independence
This site is funded by affiliate links on some outbound references to software and courses. Three rules keep that separate from what gets published:
- Recommendations are decided on merit before any commercial arrangement is considered. Where the right answer has no affiliate programme, it is still the answer.
- No company can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to be described more favourably. Offers to do so are declined.
- Negative conclusions are published as negative conclusions. The certification ROI calculator exists specifically to tell people when not to buy something.
Full detail on the advertising and affiliate disclosure page.
What we cannot claim
Three honest limits worth stating plainly:
- We do not own proprietary salary data. Everything here is compiled from public sources. Anyone claiming a private dataset for SEO salaries should be asked how it was collected.
- One editorial perspective is a constraint. Market observations are informed by experience in specific markets and may generalise imperfectly to yours.
- Career advice is not a prediction. Nothing here guarantees an outcome, and any guide that implies otherwise is selling something.