In a recent study carried out between September 12 and October 11, 2024, among 282 SEO specialists, SEOFOMO gives us a snapshot of technical SEO in 2024. What is the typical profile of these specialists? What are their practices and which tools do they use in their work? Here are some answers!
Technical SEO profile and expertise
In thestudy conducted by SEOFOMO, we learn that 38% of respondents are In-House SEOs and 32% work within an agency. Freelancers account for 26% of the SEOs surveyed.
Across all professionals, 40% describe themselves as "generalists" and 37% as "technical." Note that 14% consider themselves specialized in "management" and 9% in "content management."
Finally, the majority of SEOs surveyed (30%) have been involved in technical SEO activities for 5 to 10 years. 24% have worked in the field for 10 to 15 years, while 14% have been practicing for more than 15 years.
Project sizes and types of sites managed
A majority of professionals (45%) usually manage small-scale sites, that is to say fewer than 100,000 URLs. Medium-sized sites (up to 1 million URLs) account for 31% of projects, followed by large sites (13%) and very large sites (11%, with more than 5 million URLs).
To carry out their technical audits, SEOs rely on crawling toolstools. The vast majority (67%) use two to three tools and 27% make do with a single tool. 40% of respondents use only desktop-installed tools and 15% use cloud-based tools. But the majority (45%) use a mix of both.
Implementation and timelines for technical SEO recommendations
Recommending technical SEO actions is one thing, putting them into practice is another. 29% of respondents believe that 40 to 60% of their recommendations end up being implemented, and 27% between 60 and 80%. If for 19% of professionals more than 80% of recommendations are applied, a quarter considers that less than 40% of their recommendations are implemented.
As for the average time before a recommendation is implemented, it most often falls between 4 and 6 weeks (24%) or between 2 and 4 weeks (21%). Only 17% of respondents said this implementation took less than 2 weeks, while for 20% it takes at least 8 weeks.
What explains such delays? SEOs point to several problems:
- A lack of developer resources or availability
- Prioritization that favors other tasks deemed more important
- A lack of understanding or buy-in from stakeholders
- Budget constraints
- Technical complexity
- An internal communication or workflow problem
Tools and technologies used for technical SEO
The study shows that 32% of SEOs use Google Search Console, Analytics or other third-party tools in most of their crawls. However, 11% of respondents use these tools very rarely (less than 10% of crawls). Unsurprisingly, the most used tools are Google Search Console (24.6%), Screaming Frog (24.2%), Ahrefs (12.8%) and Semrush (12.6%).
In addition to market-available tools, 36% of SEOs surveyed have developed their own tool to meet their needs. 23% of these tools are dedicated to analysis or audits; 18% to SEO reporting; 6% to implementation and 6% to communication.
Finally, which plugins, add-on modules and other CDN-based solutions are used by the SEOs surveyed? According to SEOFOMO, the leading technologies and techniques are load speed optimization (53%), structured data (52%), XML sitemaps (48%), redirects & rewrites (46%) and canonical tags (39%). Rather surprisingly: 27% of SEOs do not use any of these techniques.
Automation and optimization of technical SEO processes
42% of SEOs plan the crawl to automate validation of site configurations, 30% do it only when the nature of the project requires it.
Furthermore, 47% of respondents state use alerting tools to notify when a parameter has changed. By comparison, 5% don’t do it because they don’t see the point.
During crawling, 23% of respondents enable JavaScript rendering almost systematicallyBy comparison, 20% almost never do it.
And the use of AI in all of that 30% of SEOs surveyed use AI or LLMs for their audits and analyses, 13% for implementations, 15% for communications, and 20% for their reports. Conversely, a little over half (51%) do not use this technology.
Analysis and validation of technical implementations
Regarding the role of log file analysis in technical analysis, 37% of SEOs report relying on these files when the nature of the project requires it, and 34% would like to use this data but cannot access it.
When implementations are planned, 44% of respondents first test changes before publishing them onlineFor 29%, it depends primarily on the nature of the project.
For measure the results of their effortss, SEOs use various metrics such as page load speed, Core Web Vitals, indexing rate, organic traffic, error reports, engagement, KPI tracking, A/B testing, and log analysis.
Challenges and outlook in technical SEO
Finally, respondents shared the biggest challenges they currently face in their projects:
- Constraints related to development and resources
- Issues inherent to JavaScript and rendering
- Core Web Vitals and performance optimization
- Client communication and buy-in
- Site structure, its indexing, and crawl budget
- Algorithm updates and SEO trends
- Specific technical issues (Hreflang, structured data, redirects…)
The article "State of technical SEO in 2024" was published on the site Abondance.
