Local search industry optimistic about 2018 -- but less likely to hire
The local search landscape is a constantly evolving beast, regularly
changing at the whim of Google My Business and, more and more these
days, reliant on consumer reviews. As such, the folks working in this
niche of the wider SEO industry have had to
be quick on their feet to adapt to changes.
It’s no surprise, then, that the recent Local Search Industry Survey performed by my employer, BrightLocal, saw some significant changes occurring. The results of the survey, in which we polled 1,121 US-based local SEO professionals on everything from personal earnings and annual revenue to client pay and in-demand services, will be interesting reading for anyone looking to benchmark their services against competitors, and even those selling products and services to SEOs. In this column,
I’ll be picking out some of the most revealing results from the survey (some of which are actually more in-depth than those found in the original study) and explaining what these could potentially mean for the local SEO industry. I think it’s fair to say we’d be surprised if agency SEOs didn’t earn more than freelancers per year, but what does come as a surprise is how much more they earn.
Obviously, the agency model can work better at scale, and larger clients bring in larger payments, but it would be interesting to see whether clients of agencies feel they’re necessarily seeing more value than clients of freelancers. The higher salary could also be due to how much agencies bill per hour (this is covered below) compared to freelancer rates. To calculate these figures, we looked at the medians of typical hourly rates for agencies and freelancers.
From this, we can see that agencies certainly consider their time worth a significant amount more than freelancers’. The amount charged can obviously be somewhat dependent on the size of the client (and as mentioned previously, the agency model tends to suit larger businesses with multiple locations), but if freelancers are confident they can deliver the same results as agencies, they might consider upping their rates to increase perceived value and earn more along the way. Sticking with the ever-popular topic of payments, we learned that local SEO agencies are paid far, far more than freelancers per client per month. This is admittedly expected, considering the results reported above, but there are some other interesting nuggets here worth exploring further.
A massive 71 percent of local SEO freelancers get less than $1,000 per month from each client. This is especially notable as, elsewhere in our results analysis, we found that the average local SEO freelancer personally manages nine clients. That’s a significant proportion of freelancers bringing in $9,000 or more per month (not including overheads).
Moving away from the comparison of local SEO agencies and freelancers, we wanted to know what some of the most requested local SEO services were in 2017. Even with the growth in importance of Google My Business and reputation management, local businesses still see traditional on-site SEO as their number one priority.
Source: Local search industry optimistic about 2018 -- but less likely to hire
It’s no surprise, then, that the recent Local Search Industry Survey performed by my employer, BrightLocal, saw some significant changes occurring. The results of the survey, in which we polled 1,121 US-based local SEO professionals on everything from personal earnings and annual revenue to client pay and in-demand services, will be interesting reading for anyone looking to benchmark their services against competitors, and even those selling products and services to SEOs. In this column,
I’ll be picking out some of the most revealing results from the survey (some of which are actually more in-depth than those found in the original study) and explaining what these could potentially mean for the local SEO industry. I think it’s fair to say we’d be surprised if agency SEOs didn’t earn more than freelancers per year, but what does come as a surprise is how much more they earn.
Obviously, the agency model can work better at scale, and larger clients bring in larger payments, but it would be interesting to see whether clients of agencies feel they’re necessarily seeing more value than clients of freelancers. The higher salary could also be due to how much agencies bill per hour (this is covered below) compared to freelancer rates. To calculate these figures, we looked at the medians of typical hourly rates for agencies and freelancers.
From this, we can see that agencies certainly consider their time worth a significant amount more than freelancers’. The amount charged can obviously be somewhat dependent on the size of the client (and as mentioned previously, the agency model tends to suit larger businesses with multiple locations), but if freelancers are confident they can deliver the same results as agencies, they might consider upping their rates to increase perceived value and earn more along the way. Sticking with the ever-popular topic of payments, we learned that local SEO agencies are paid far, far more than freelancers per client per month. This is admittedly expected, considering the results reported above, but there are some other interesting nuggets here worth exploring further.
A massive 71 percent of local SEO freelancers get less than $1,000 per month from each client. This is especially notable as, elsewhere in our results analysis, we found that the average local SEO freelancer personally manages nine clients. That’s a significant proportion of freelancers bringing in $9,000 or more per month (not including overheads).
Moving away from the comparison of local SEO agencies and freelancers, we wanted to know what some of the most requested local SEO services were in 2017. Even with the growth in importance of Google My Business and reputation management, local businesses still see traditional on-site SEO as their number one priority.
Source: Local search industry optimistic about 2018 -- but less likely to hire
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