When 30,000 Search Marketers Talk, We Listen

This past February 3000+ search marketers answered 52 questions about themselves, their work and the search industry via a survey on SEOmoz. You are welcome to read the full report, but here are the things we found important.

• Agency/corporate SEO is different from self-employed SEO. Specifically, agency/corporate tend to learn more with on-site training, while consultants mainly learn through trial and error.
• Few SEO practitioners learn from formal classes. SEO is simply too new, and evolves too quickly for any classroom.
• Agencies have a higher likelihood of using tools such as wordtracker and keyword discovery. I'm not sure what non-agency folks are using -- Ouija boards?
• If you want a fat paycheck (75k-$100k), work at a publicly traded non-agency. We pity the self-employed non-consultant (less than $30k).
• If you want a fat paycheck, work in the US. Americans receive the most income from their SEO work while those from India and Italy (60%) make less than $30k.