Market Appeal

Archive for September, 2008

With all of the talk of redundancies and economic depression I thought that I’d focus on the career prospects in the search marketing sector as they’ve never looked better.

Here are a few reasons, as I shall explain below:

1. Existing skills shortage
2. Growing market
3. Good salaries
4. Strong career prospects
5. Easy to learn (e.g. from information on the internet)

Pre-existing skills shortage

It’s all well and good talking about the future, however, the present is just as important. As it happens there are currently plenty of vacancies in natural and paid search at every level from eager trainees to Agency Directors. A quick search of sites such as http://www.jobsinsearch.com/ as well as Google searches for “SEO jobs” confirms this to be the case.

Growing market

Reports suggest that internet advertising will rise by around 8% over the next year, at the same time as spending on every other advertising channel (print, tv, radio) is set to fall.

Some reasons for the internet’s ongoing advertising popularity include the fact that many major brands don’t yet have decent web presence and that the total number of surfers (fixed and mobile) is still rapidly increasing. The total number of blogs has apparently doubled in the past year, for example.

Good salaries

Salaries range from under £20k to over £60k with plenty of roles, both in house and agency side advertised at every level. Not all companies pay the same wither there typically being a £5-10K variation in salary for roles at a similar level.

Trainee SEO Salaries

Trainee SEO roles are frequently advertised in Gumtree and similar community job sites, paying around £15,000 pa. While that’s not amazing money, it’s not a bad training salary in order to help you get your foot in the door in an entirely new industry.

Junior SEO Consultant Salaries

Junior roles for those with a few months experience are typically in the region of £20-25,000 pa.

Mid level SEO Consultant Salaries

Mid level appointment generally advertise £30-40,000

Senior SEO Consultant, Search Manager and Search Director Salaries

Senior SEO roles offer from £40,000 up to £60,000 and beyond depending on the role’s level of specialism, seniority and the value that each company places on SEO.

Strong career prospects

SEO is a new, effective and fast evolving form of internet marketing, meaning that there are relatively few people out the with strong subject knowledge, as compared to other marketing disciplines. There are not as yet any formal courses teaching it or defined career path into it, beyond one day crash courses, unlike for more traditional marketing. Also, due the search industries fast moving nature and Google’s ongoing innovation (among others) it’s a full time job keeping up with the latest advances and soon to be outdated techniques (which worked fine last year). This means that senior managers, even if once conversant in the finer points of SEO, will find that their own knowledge dates very quickly, further shrinking the pool of those “in the know”.

Easy to learn (e.g. from information on the internet)

Despite all of these challenges keep the number of good consultants down, it’s actually very easy to learn, not being as technical as programming or as arty as design or copywriting. Further, speaking as a now senior, but originally self-taught SEO professional, I can confirm that it’s more than possible to learn everything you need to know from the web, although it can take some time to learn which sources are authoritative, as there’s a lot of nonsense out there too.

Several clients that I’ve consulted for have made great use of widgets to help boost their search engine rankings, as well as to drive additional traffic and get some free advertising too.

The social-local review directory TrustedPlaces, for example, have had an excellent map widget out for while now and off that back of its success have now launched a personalised widget for their reviewers too.

Unlike the map widget this one is more exclusive, only being on offer to their trusted reviewers (it’s free to join, so you can become one too), so to demonstrate their widget I’ve pasted a copy of it on both its forms below:

If you look closely you’ll notice that the upper widget has several links to “recommended” locations embedded in it. This is clever use of widget personalisation to present user generated content on a scalable basis. By doing so they offer “real” content that provides an incentive for bloggers who wish to publicise their reviews to employ the widget and by offering something of value, make it far less likely that anybody will complain about the fact that there are half a dozen backlinks embedded in it (which point to place pages and so are great for SEO).

Given that some of their competitors have resorted to buy links on occasion, I consider content based widgets a much “higher value” technique as far as user perception is concerned, as it appeals to their reviewers’ desire for self publicity rather than reducing linkbuilding to a series of clandestine commercial exchanges, which the company with the biggest backers could expect to win.

Additionally, both html iFrame and JavaScipt versions of the widget are offered to provide maximum flexibility. I found that the iFrame version worked best on my WordPress based blog, however, others may differ.