In this YouTube presentation, Aleyda Solis reviews the SEO FOMO survey of over 300 SEO consultants to outline the current state of SEO consulting in 2024. She highlights that selling and delivering SEO services has become more difficult due to economic uncertainty and heightened competition. The primary source of new clients is referrals, underscoring the importance of trust. Remote consulting dominates, with video calls and messaging platforms used by most consultants, while in‑person meetings are limited. Deliverables are typically a mix of Google Sheets/Excel, Docs, and Slides to provide data, context, and actionable recommendations. Recommendations are prioritized by impact, effort‑reward ratio, and technical foundations, always tied to revenue and business goals. Projects achieve their targets 70‑89% of the time, but client implementation issues, budget constraints, and frequent Google algorithm updates hinder full success. Most consultants view recent Google updates as having a net positive effect, yet they also see them as a threat alongside Google’s own features and the rise of AI/LLMs. The most used tools are Screaming Frog, Semrush, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, GA4, and increasingly ChatGPT, with 81% of consultants already incorporating AI tools. Identified threats include Google favoring UGC or large brands, promoting its own SERP features, and the emergence of Google AI. To counter these, consultants focus on improving content quality, applying E‑A‑T principles, diversifying traffic sources, and staying up‑to‑date. The talk concludes with a call to action to view the full survey, share feedback, and subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter.
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What is the state of SEO consulting in 2024? The results are in and I got all the insights for you. Yes, SEO consulting is becoming more difficult to sell. It's also more difficult to achieve results. But what are we doing about all of this? What are the threats that we are identifying? I have all of the insights thanks to the SEO FOMO SEO consultant survey results. Gathered from the answers by more than 300 SEO specialists who have taken the survey. You can take a look at the results yourself in this address here. And I want to go through the major, most interesting insights that should allow us to better understand where we are, our shared challenges, and what steps should we take to succeed in the following years. The first interesting insight for me to see was that Most SEO consultants who took the survey mentioned that their biggest client source was not social media or events or outreach. It was clients or other company referrals. This is quite interesting, especially because of all of the effort that is put in more active promotional type of activities. While a lot of us rely on the good work that we have done in the past and former clients that refer us to new ones or other companies that collaborate and trust us. And I want to highlight here the criteria that I think plays a huge role here, trust. You will tend to go to the one that you have been referred to or that you already have experience with and know that works well. Regarding the level of difficulty of selling SEO today versus a couple of years ago, it's interesting to see how A very high share of SEO mentioned that it has increased. It is more difficult to sell SEO today, not only to achieve goals. And this might be explained as Anthony Baron from Studio Hack mentioned here in his commentary that a couple of years ago, we were still through the consequence of the digital boom during COVID and that has passed. There are a lot of economical factors happening at the moment, inflation, discretionary spending because of a lot of uncertainty that is not helping to sell as easily and fast as we did before. Then about the channels that we use to provide SEO consultancy, most of us use video conference calls, team messaging platforms, and only 35% of SEO consultants mentioned to do in-person meetings, which as a remote work advocate myself is quite positive to see. We shouldn't be tied or restricted to work with just local companies because we can provide SEO advice worldwide. So this is definitely great to see. Regarding the formats that we use to deliver our SEO research outcome, it's not surprising to see a form of Google Sheets or Excel, Google Docs and Words, and Google Slides and PPT. It seems that most of the respondents selected a combination of them rather than just a single format, which is understandable because we cannot just send data and that's it. We need to provide an explanation, context, and tie the findings and recommendations or any actions with those business-related goals that the company wants to achieve and they actually care about. Regarding the criteria that is used to prioritize SEO recommendations, it was great to see that most of us prioritize by impact, efforts versus rewards. And then there is this layer of technical SEO foundation that we know that needs to be set there too. Built upon anything else. But here I would like to highlight the importance that revenue and business goals and impact has been given. Then also it was refreshing to see that most of the SEO consultants mentioned that their SEO projects achieve the goals between 70% and 89% of the time, which I'll consider a very high number of the SEO projects and the reason why they don't achieve the goals all of the times is because of, surprise, surprise, client implementation issues, budget or resources limitations, client engagement and cooperation support provided to achieve what is expected. Then the high competition and Google updates or algorithm changes that can disrupt the SEO strategies that they are implementing many times. And of course, development or technical challenges. A very high share of SEOs also mentioned achieving the expected SEO goals have become certainly harder than a couple of years ago, 58% of them. And the reason for this is the increased competition, all of these Google updates and changes that are much more frequent lately, and the increased complexity of doing SEO versus what it was a few years ago. Then it was great to see that when asked about the impact of the Google updates in the projects that the SEO consultants have been working on, they mentioned that they have seen mostly a positive effect, which is also reasonable because at the end of the day, if there's an SEO consultant involved, it means that there might be a real business behind this, a real brand that will tend to align better to what Google is looking to provide more visibility to than When I asked about the top 3 SEO tools that SEO consultants use for their day-to-day tasks, not so shockingly, the most popular ones that were repeated many more times were Screaming Frog, Semrush, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics. Despite the hate of GA4, it's still here. Then Sitebulb, Sistrix, SE Ranking, and ChatGPT has become one of the tools That is very popularly used among SEO consultants. Most SEO consultants have also incorporated AI tools or related functionalities in their SEO consulting day-to-day. 81% said that they have versus only 13% saying that they haven't yet but plan to, and 6% that they don't and don't plan to do it. Finally, when I asked about the threats to SEO consulting and provided a few options, 52% said that they saw Google updates favoring certain type of sites like UGC or big brands in their SERPs, and Google favoring also their own features or services over external sites as the major threats, followed by Google AI overviews and the adoptions of LLMs instead of Google for search. When I asked about what SEOs were doing about these threats, they mentioned improving content quality, applying EAT. Principles into their work, traffic diversification, and staying updated to react to whatever trend they see. I hope that these insights allow you to identify additional opportunities, ideas, resources to show our clients that whatever you are going through, you are definitely not alone. And I would love to hear your thoughts, your comments, your feedback about the survey. Go and take a look at it. And expect many more. This is just the first SEO FOMO State of SEO Consulting that I will be doing. And remember, subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter to avoid missing out from the latest SEO updates, trends, resources, and insights just like this. Onto the next one. Bye-bye.
