It’s quite a stat isn’t it: 26% fall in demand in the UK SEO labour market since Q4 of 2009 – but does it stand-up?
From the looks of the following chart, we’re seeing a downturn in demand for SEO – but in reality, there is likely to be a whole host of other reasons for this.
My experience of the SEO labour market lately doesn’t support what we see in the following diagram, but that said it’s interesting all the same as it’s the first time that we have seen this fall in the number of instances of SEO being referenced as part of IT sector job descriptions.
We can quite clearly see that since September 2009, the number of instances of ‘SEO’ being quoted by in job descriptions has reduced from almost 3% of IT sector roles to 2.2%.
Naturally, this is just the IT sector that is reporting on this metric, so it would naturally be missing a whole host of other foundational sectors that feed in to the SEO community, but learning more about this drop after such an impressive incline seems quite interesting.
What might have caused this drop?
- Seasonal drops in recruitment?
- People taking SEO skills for granted?
- The chart is not reporting on the whole labour market – just IT job descriptions that reference SEO. Maybe we’ll see SEO referenced more as a marketing specification rather than IT – where it’s foundations lie.
- We know little about the dataset – a 26% fall on 3% can be easily influenced on a relatively small dataset.
Looking in more detail, we can see that the professions noting SEO as a criteria are heavily IT-led, but in reality people may well be investing more heavily in online PR, manual link-building, social media folk, etc etc – all with the view to influence organic visibility:
- 925 (35.91 %) – Developer
- 527 (20.46 %) – Web Developer
- 200 (7.764 %) – PHP Developer
- 199 (7.725 %) – Designer
- 181 (7.026 %) – Web Designer
- 162 (6.289 %) – SEO Specialist
- 156 (6.056 %) – Senior Developer
- 155 (6.017 %) – Front-End Developer
- 150 (5.823 %) – Analyst
- 134 (5.202 %) – Marketing Manager
- 111 (4.309 %) – Consultant
- 105 (4.076 %) – SEO Manager
- 101 (3.921 %) – .NET Developer
- 87 (3.377 %) – Web Manager
- 78 (3.028 %) – Account Manager
- 77 (2.989 %) – Online Marketing Manager
- 68 (2.640 %) – Front-End Web Developer
- 62 (2.407 %) – C# Developer
- 61 (2.368 %) – Web Analyst
- 59 (2.290 %) – Project Manager
Interesting to monitor the sector evolve in this way. I wonder what the next quarter will bring. My understanding of the market in Manchester is that almost all SEO’s that I know are part of SEO teams that are recruiting. And whilst I’m at it, if you’re in the North West and looking for a new role, get in touch: Ben McKay on LinkedIn or Ben McKay Twitter.
Source: data provided by ITJobsWatch.






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