Why SEMs Feel Overworked
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Never mind white hat and black hat SEO! According to a recent survey by iProspect, search engine marketers are wearing too many hats – an average of five, in fact. No wonder you’ve been feeling so tired lately!
Okay, that might seem pretty funny, and it certainly isn’t news to most of us. But iProspect found some serious implications from this information. I certainly don’t agree with all of them, but they’re worth thinking about, so I’m going to take you through it step by step.
iProspect partnered with Jupiter Research a couple of months ago to do a formal survey of search marketers. You can read the study here (http://www.iprospect.com/premiumPDFs/
WhitePaper_2006_SearchEngineMarketerJobFunction.pdf). They included in their definition of “search engine marketing” anyone who does natural search engine optimization and/or paid search advertising. They qualified 276 respondents to participate in the survey, so while it wasn’t a big sample, it could be considered representative of the field.
I’ll give you what iProspect considered to be the key findings first. As I mentioned in the intro, they found that search engine marketers, on average, performed five job functions in addition to search engine marketing. The two most frequently cited additional functions were website design and email marketing. The majority of search engine marketers did not seem to be heavily involved with other (offline) marketing media that could be used to drive traffic to websites. And more than a quarter of search engine marketers also performed IT functions.
What does this mean? Well, according to iProspect, it means that the SEM industry is not as mature as many of us like to believe. To some extent, that’s true; as far as I know, you can’t get a college degree in search engine marketing as you can in business administration or regular marketing. But to be good at search engine marketing, you need to combine skills from more than one discipline, which is something I think iProspect only partially appreciates.
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