The State of SEO Quality Assurance in 2021

Importance of SEO in current job function

The vast marjority of the respondents (92%) indicated that SEO is at least “a very important part of their jobs”.

Areas of SEO that apply to their job

This question allowed multiple responses.

Most of the respondents are involved in multiple areas of SEO; nearly ⅔ have management responsibilities.

Years of professional experience in SEO

The vast majority (85%) of the respondents had been working in SEO for at least 3 years.

Number of sites responsible for

76% of the respondents are responsible for more than 2 websites, with nearly ⅓ of the respondents being responsible for more than 10 sites.

Note: if the same site is accessible on different domains, for example in a multi-domain setup, it was counted as one site.

Number of sites responsible for (In-house vs. Agency)

Over ⅓ of in-house respondents are responsible for only 1 site, whereas most agency respondents are responsible for 6 sites or more.

Ownership of sites responsible for (Own vs. Client vs Both)

Nearly ⅓ of the respondents were responsible for both in-house and client sites.

Company location

The vast majority (89%) of the respondents work for companies located in Europe, the United States or Canada.

Importance of site to overall business / revenue

According to ⅔ of the in-house respondents, the most important site that they are responsible for is “extremely important” to the company’s overall business/revenue generation.

Respondents' industry

Most respondents (65%) work in agencies. Among in-house respondents' industries, eCommerce and Software were the most common.

Company size

Nearly ⅔ of the respondents works at a company that employs more than 10 people.

Company size (Agencies)

Nearly ⅓ of the agency respondents work for agency employing 10 or less staff.

Company size (In-house)

Nearly ⅔ of the in-house respondents work for a company that employs more than 50 staff.

Size of SEO teams

Note: both people who implement SEO changes and people who advise and oversee SEO are included.

Role of people who can push changes to the most important site

This question allowed multiple responses.

Most respondents indicated that people with various roles can push changes to their site.

Number of people who can push changes to the most important site

Most respondents indicated that 2-10 people can push changes to the most important site.

Number of people who can push changes to the most important site (in-house vs agency)

When an organic traffic drop is considered a significant SEO incident

The respondents were told that “SEO incidents” means unintended changes such as pages being removed, key meta-data being changed, robots.txt preventing access to crawlers, or anything else that negatively affects your SEO performance.

Note:

• A traffic drop of 10% or less is considered a “significant incident” by just over half (54%) of these respondents.

Number of SEO incidents in past 12 months

85% of the respondents had at least one moderate-to-high SEO incident in the past 12 months, and 34% of the respondents had experienced 3 or more serious incidents in the past year.

Change in frequency of SEO incidents occurring compared to 1 year ago

Most (58%) indicated that the frequency of incidents is unchanged vs. 1 year ago. About equal numbers said that incident frequency has been increasing or decreasing.

Below, you can see the responses split between ContentKing users and non-ContentKing users:

When the worst recent SEO incident occurred

For nearly ⅓ of the respondents, their worst recent SEO incident occured within the last 3 months.

Issues involved in this incident

This question allowed multiple responses.

Oftentimes, when SEO incidents happen they are caused by more than one issue. In nearly half the SEO incidents, crawlability and indexability issues play a role.

Time from introduction of the problem to its detection

Interesting findings:

• 80% of the SEO incidents took at least 1 day to detect
• For nearly 50% of the SEO incidents, detection takes 4-7 days or more.

Length of entire incident, from introduction of the problem to the final fix

Interesting findings:

• 58% of the SEO incidents last longer than 7 days.
• 28% of the SEO incidents even lasted longer than 30 days.

Think about this: if an SEO incident costs a portion of your site's traffic each day that it's live, how much would that amount to?

Estimated impact on company's revenue of the worst recent SEO incident

Estimated impact on company's revenue of the worst recent SEO incident, had it lasted for 4 weeks

When respondents were asked to estimate the revenue impact had their issue lasted 4 weeks, more than ⅓ indicated that the impact would’ve been more than $50K.

Methods of detecting SEO issues

This question allowed multiple responses.

Interesting findings:

• Teams consisting of more than 10 people are more likely to also rely on reports from other teams and custom solutions.
• Large sites (> 1M pages) are almost 50% more likely to use manual/QA testing as one of their detection methods compared to smaller sites.

Time spent on detecting and solving newly introduced issues

Time spent on detecting and solving newly introduced issues (in relation to number of incidents per year)

Respondents that spend 33% or more of their time on detecting and solving newly introduced issues are much more likely to deal with SEO incidents, than those that spend 10% or less of their time on this.

How easy it is to detect incidents

Below, you can see the responses split between ContentKing users and non-ContentKing users:

Interesting findings:

• 40% indicated that it is at least “somewhat difficult” to detect newly-introduced SEO issues.
• Technical SEOs were more likely to say it's very easy to detect SEO incidents vs content or link building roles.
• In-house teams were almost twice as likely to say that detecting SEO incidents is very difficult vs. agency professionals.
• SEO professionals with more than 10 years of experience were around twice as likely to respond that detecting SEO incidents is very easy.

How easy it is to detect incidents compared to 1 year ago

Below, you can see the responses split between ContentKing users and non-ContentKing users:

Interesting findings:

• Half of surveyed SEO professionals said that issue detection is becoming easier vs. only 6% who believe it is getting more difficult.
• Conversely, users who reported "becoming somewhat more difficult" were nearly twice more likely to use manual QA and SERPs as one of their detection methods.
• Those who use Manual QA testing were significantly more likely than ContentKing users to say it’s getting more difficult to find errors.
• About one in five that indicated it’s become more difficult attribute this to too much workload.
• About one in three that indicated it’s become more difficult attribute this to constant changes, and changes becoming more complex in general.

Relative concern about SEO issues

For this question, respondents were asked to allocate 100% of their concern across several issues.

SEO professionals are particularly concerned about preventing issues from going live. When they do go live, they're concerned about their rapid detection and repair.

Futhermore, technical SEO issues are much more concerning than unwanted content/meta-content changes.

Confidence in ability to detect underlying cause of traffic drops

Interesting findings:

• One in four (23%) are “very confident” that they have the ability to quickly identify the underlying causes of drops in site traffic.
• Those who use a custom solution as one of their detection methods are most confident in their ability to find the underlying cause of drops in organic traffic quickly enough.
• Agency SEO professionals are more likely to be very confident than in-house SEO professionals.
• As expected, longer experience in SEO correlates with higher likelihood confidence to identify underlying causes of drops in site traffic.

Confidence in ability to identify technical SEO issues that have been rolled out

Below, you can see the responses split between ContentKing users and non-ContentKing users:

Interesting findings:

• Respondents are more likely to feel “very confident” that they can identify technical SEO issues (39%) than identifying causes of drops in organic traffic (23%).
• Those who use reports from teams as one of their detection methods are more likely than others to not feel confident about their ability to detect technical issues quickly enough.
• ContentKing users are significantly more likely to feel confident about this ability.

Confidence in ability to identify unwanted content/meta-content changes

Interesting findings:

• 31% of the respondents are "very confident" that they can quickly identify unwanted content/meta-content changes.
• ContentKing users were significantly more likely to feel “very confident” about detecting unwanted content/meta-content changes that have been rolled out.
• Respondents with a technical role are more likely to feel "very confident" about identifying these changes than those that are charged with website content.

Types of content on the most important site they manage

This question allowed multiple responses.

For more than half of the respondents, their most important site contains a product catelog.

Amount of pages on the most important site

⅔ of these sites contain more than 1,000 pages.

Features on the most important site

This question allowed multiple responses.

More than half (61%) of these sites support on-site search, and nearly half (48%) enable purchases or financial transactions.

Usage of client-side rendering on the most important site

About half (48%) rely on client-side rendering, while 29% uses server-side rendering or a pre-rendering solution.

Technologies used on the most important site

This question allowed multiple responses.

Interesting findings:

• Half (51%) use an off-the-shelf, self-hosted web platform such as WordPress.
• Nearly half (48%) use a custom-built platform.
• Just over 1 in four (28%) use off-the-shelf managed platforms such as Adobe Commerce Cloud.

Off-the-shelf platforms used on the most important site

This question allowed multiple responses.

Those who use an off-the-shelf platform were asked to indicate which one(s) they use. Three in four of these respondents (74%) use Wordpress.