The State of SEO Jobs: A 2022 Report

The current search landscape has rewarded the world with a continuous stream of SEO jobs. So if you’re looking to change careers this year and have the right combination of skills to succeed in SEO, you’re in luck. SEO jobs trends are on the uptick, and depending on your skill mix, you can probably land the best positions in the market that offer excellent benefits and worthy compensation.

SEO Jobs Highlights

1. The mean salary for SEO professionals is over $60,000 annually.
2. Employers from NJ, NY, CT, and CA offer the highest compensation for SEO jobs. These states offer a mean salary of over $70,000 annually. Conversely, IL, PA, and UT pay the lowest, with a mean salary of just $48,000 per year.
3. SEO professionals who know how to code tend to get paid more. These professionals may be offered up to 7.3% more than their counterparts who do not know how to code.
4. The current trend for SEO jobs keywords shows that the following have the highest demand:

– SEO digital marketing

– Marketing manager SEO

– SEO account manager

– SEO content writer

– Head of SEO

– Senior SEO manager

5. Only a small percentage of total SEO positions are technical (22.9%). The more significant chunk of job offerings is looking for non-technical SEO professionals like SEO managers (77.1%).
6. The cities that hire the most significant number of SEO professionals are LA, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, and New York.
7. The most popular skillset includes the following terms: tools, data, analytics, search, content, and marketing.
8. Certain industries offer more SEO jobs than others: enterprise software, publishing, IT, internet, staffing and outsourcing, advertising, and marketing.
9. Almost 30% of all SEO positions require a bachelor’s degree. Additionally, 7% of the top-paying positions require an MA, and 64.3% of all available SEO jobs don’t have educational requirements.
10. The most popular coding languages required when hiring SEO professionals are PHP, SQL, Go, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
11. The pandemic did not dent the demand for candidates to fill SEO jobs. On the contrary, experts noticed a slight uptick in demand for such professionals at the height of COVID-19.
12. 63.4% of all SEO jobs required familiarity or mastery with specific industry-recognized tools such as Screaming Frog, Moz, Google Search Console, Semrush, and Google Analytics.

 

A Deeper Look at SEO Jobs Trends

If you’re interested in shifting to an SEO career this year, you must always keep abreast of the latest trends in the industry. For example, knowing that terms like “SEO copywriter” are trending will give you a good idea of what skills employers are looking for. First, SEO job seekers can enhance their LinkedIn profiles for the terms that recruiters are looking for. This will not only aid in their discovery. However, if their LinkedIn profile is a 1:1 match for the job title they’re seeking, prospective employers will likely consider them a better fit for the role.

Second, these terms and phrases can assist SEO professionals in determining where they need to improve. Knowing that the term “manager” appears in numerous SEO titles, for example, can assist you in concentrating on honing your managerial skills.

Is SEO a highly technical job requiring crawling, indexing, and a thorough understanding of canonical tags? Is it a soft talent that focuses on content, copywriting, and social media? Of course, it’s a hybrid of the two. And knowing how to position yourself to catch the best SEO positions is crucial if you want your career shift to pay off well this year.

Does having a college diploma help you get a competitive SEO job?

Not necessarily, according to the current statistics. However, a large percentage of SEO job advertisements (29.8%) demanded a bachelor’s degree. Unfortunately, few employers searched for people with advanced degrees.

This is a moderately well-paid management position. A BA or BS degree is not required for many SEO management roles. A bachelor’s or master’s degree, on the other hand, won’t hinder you if you’re seeking a job in SEO.

However, search engine optimization is a dynamic subject. Therefore, most employers aren’t enthusiastic about candidates who have studied SEO at a college or university. Instead, companies and enterprises favored candidates with a lot of real-world expertise in optimizing websites.

As we previously mentioned, only 22.9% of SEO job posts are for technical SEO positions. And that SEO jobs with a technical focus pay better.

Given that CSS and HTML are the essential foundations of websites and web apps, it’s only natural that comptenecy in these languages should be at the top of the list. It’s also understandable that firms would seek technical SEO workers familiar with JavaScript, given that 96.2% of all websites online use it.

Many important SEO positions necessitate between two and five years of experience.

This is most likely related to SEO being a young field. Therefore, there aren’t many applicants with over a decade of professional SEO experience.

In SEO, there’s also the question of how valuable a specific number of years of experience is. SEO is a performance-based function, like coding.

Years of experience are advantageous. On the other hand, most employers are looking for SEO experts who can help them rank better on Google. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter to most employers whether that talent comes from one year or ten years of experience.

There are so many possibilities in SEO. Unfortunately, there are also confluences between other marketing channels and SEO. For example, a professional who dabbles in social media marketing can perform vital SEO functions, too.

Entry-level professionals who have already gained the core competencies to run campaigns for smaller websites can already apply for SEO specialist positions, especially if the position’s focus is to optimize pages, do keyword research, and work with in-house copywriters to create better content for organic traffic.

Professionals who have digital marketing experiences and managerial experience combined are in an excellent position to become SEO strategists. They already know the tech landscape of online marketing, and it’s only a matter of applying what you already know to SEO campaigns. Note that advertising experience also lends well to SEO campaigns because SEO is a marketing channel.