New data has revealed that the budget for SEO in the average marketing team has dropped by 5% in 2019 compared to those in 2018, with 60% of marketers admitting that resource and a lack of available spend are the main reasons for a lack of investment in organic search activity.
The research published in Zazzle Media’s second annual State of SEO Survey revealed that just 22% of marketing budgets were spent on SEO activity in 2019, compared to 27% in 2018.
So why are marketers struggling to secure investment in what is a crucial segment of the majority of business’ marketing plans?
Proving value
Just over 30% of marketers still find proving the value of SEO to be a critical factor in securing funds or resources. According to the survey, those who felt they were ‘naive’ about SEO has grown by 8%, and those who consider themselves experts has fallen by nearly 30% since 2018.
This lack of confidence in understanding SEO could be having a negative impact on budget discussions with managers, and hence lead to reduced investment in a practice which 97% of marketers agree is important to their overall marketing strategy.
The survey also found…
– A quarter of SEO’s surveyed calling for “clearer guidelines on best practice” from Google Webmasters.
– 51% of marketers find it varying degrees of difficult to keep up with changes in SEO.
– Traffic has doubled in importance in terms of a KPI since 2018, to 40% – making it the most important objective in this year’s survey.
Zazzle Media’s Head of Search & Strategy, Stuart Shaw, said of the results;
“Knowledge has always been power in this industry. Keeping up with updates, marketing news and best practice guidelines across Google can be the difference in hitting KPIs which marketers need in order to secure that extra budget.
As an industry, we’ve needed to educate, educate, educate – at almost every level of client infrastructure. With data led objectives, proving ROI and results should be much simpler to secure that necessary investment.”
View the results of The State of SEO survey here