The percentage of in-house SEOs who work on websites with 1m+ pages has grown from 18% to 23% in the span of a year. This signals a positive shift towards valuing in-depth SEO for large-scale sites.

This aligns with my experience and it's great to see companies with slightly smaller websites taking SEO seriously.

I'd love to compare a day-in-the-life of an SEO managing a 1-10k page website with someone managing 1m+ pages!

In-house SEOs tend to be often tech-savvy, and due to the nature of tech SEO, it makes sense to do majority of this work in-house. We're of course talking generally here, perhaps the figures would be different for specific project types, for example a migration.

With economic conditions prompting businesses to review budgets, I'm not surprised to see the number of SEOs outsourcing work decrease.

I'm curious about where that work sits now, though. Does it mean that we're not able to do as much technical SEO as we were, or does it mean that in-house SEOs are upskilling and plugging those gaps in addition to their existing work?

Economic uncertainty means that, like most businesses, we've seen added scrutiny when it comes to approving and maintaining budgets. However, scrutiny doesn't mean that these are automatically reduced, it just means that you need to validate that they're worthwhile. It can even mean revisiting relationships with developers and other vendors to ensure the tasks you're sharing are making the most effective use of their time, and yours.

I'm extremely surprised that 20% haven't changed their planning and roadmap at all. I personally use AI incorporated into my role most days, and a result have become much more conscious of competitors in the space and whether they use AI in their content production process.

Incorporating AI into existing can, in many cases streamline your roadmap and speed things up, particularly in the case of research, briefing content, writing meta and more.

Like the majority of respondents, I'm not hugely worried about AI developments impacting my job security. It's reassuring to know that so many SEOs feel the same way!

However, AI developments do create uncertainty, and we've seen that a lot with SGE and the dilution of the SERPs with AI content.

If you are concerned, the best advice I've heard is to find opportunities to diversify your traffic sources and skill set according to these changes.

It's really nice to see the positive sentiment here in general, as I think the common consensus is that AI is there to support, not replace. I'm yet to see an AI tool that could act as a full-time technical SEO, so I agree with this sentiment.

With all the scaremongering that's happened in the industry for the past 12 months, it's great to see that SEOs are confident in their abilities compared to AI.

It's not a surprise to see outsourcing of link building & off-site SEO becoming more and more popular - it can be challenging to find the resources to do this in-house. And I think the value of content marketing and digital PR is much better understood now in many industries, so many brands will want to tap into this approach.

It's particularly interesting that link building and off-page SEO has become more outsourced, but this is not a surprise.

With a whole host of Google changes over the past 12 months, from EEAT to the rush of AI produced content, in-house marketers are looking for a way to stand out. Marketers are beginning to understand the importance of building trust signals to their wider SEO strategy.

It's more than just "building links", but showing that your site is the more authoritative source in the space.

As someone with a content background, I'm not too surprised that content production sits at the bottom of this list.

I think content production is often dismissed as 'writing' and therefore easy to outsource. However, great content requires an in-depth understanding of the business, offering and objectives. Multi-media content is also growing in value, and this requires teams to collaborate effectively with internal stakeholders.

As content becomes increasingly sophisticated and nuanced, it will naturally become harder to outsource predictably and affordably.

This links to the other results we've seen.

Marketers have to wear many hats, so investing in agencies and freelancers allow the team to acquire specialist knowledge to support technical SEO implementation.

Accountability for technical SEO sits with the marketing team, in particular, the content and SEO team.

However, I believe that different stakeholders play different roles in maintaining technical SEO, so we encourage best practices proactively across the wider marketing team.

If, like me, your time is split between content and technical tasks, ongoing maintenance and awareness is important to ensure both parts of the role remain manageable.

For larger, more complex websites, or websites with a lot of technical SEO debt, you'll probably need to invest more heavily in the tech and engineering side instead.

Although it can be a lonely existence, being the sole SEO can also bring benefits: honing on soft skills (like presentation, negotiation, communication skills) becomes ever more important and inevitable when you're the sole person responsible for results, SEO tools, budgets and roadmap. It's a big job, but in my experience can also teach a lot!

Having some kind of development resource is essential for many reasons. To ensuring you have a team onside incase things go wrong, to having the resources for a regular maintenance budget that can help tackle technical SEO issues.

Many senior leaders do not understand that SEOs aren't developers, we can support and advise on fixes, but most SEOs do not have the coding skills required to complete fixes in their entirety.

Given the significant number of SEO professionals who work closely with development teams, it's essential that they acquire the ability to articulate technical issues through the lens of engineering as well as SEO.

The collaboration and mutual understanding between SEOs and engineers, each contributing their unique expertise toward a unified objective, leads to true innovation.

It's great to see that 31% of in-house technical SEOs have instant access to developers.

Although requesting time can add an element of unpredictability to your workflows, I also think it encourages agility, depending on your briefing and development process.

This works well for us because it enables us to move quickly, largely because we have so much flexibility with our roadmap of fixes and optimizations.

That isn't always possible when you have an allocated amount of time with developers, or when you have to wait for certain dates and milestones to request fixes.

The ad hoc approach to dev time is very common, and can work well within the type of work that tech SEOs need to do. Not every month is the same, so having flexible developers can make a huge difference.

The beauty of being in-house is that you can get technical SEO changes actioned on your own terms (most of the time).

The speed at which we get a technical SEO change implemented usually depends on the urgency of the fix and how we communicate that.

Generally, you can get your requests prioritized by communicating the advantages of that particular fix well or, in most cases, the risks of not doing so.

Giving that context and quantifying the value of the change in terms that resonate with other stakeholders is extremely valuable when it comes to receiving buy-in and progressing these asks.

I'm optimistic that businesses will eventually consider the positive impact that SEO tasks have on non-SEO development tasks, and vice versa.

If we're striving for overall website health and hygiene, we should see the lines blur more often, which is a good thing!

It's time to start presenting our technical SEO tasks as broader website maintenance tasks instead, and to put the user at the heart of our requests for developers' time.

The Pareto principle works! It can also be helpful when justifying the value of SEO. It goes hand in hand with KPI impact too.

It's a relief to see that so many of the technical SEO changes are staged first.

Even with the best communication between SEOs and developers, there's still no guarantee that the deployment will be perfect first time.

It's much easier (and lower risk) to roll back changes from staging environments than it is production.

In my opinion, the hardest part of the job is staying in the loop with developments and new skills. This kind of work is rarely allocated time in your calendar, meaning most of the learning happens outside of work hours.

To solve this, I've started marking out time in my calendar and knowledge-sharing with the wider marketing team to lighten the load.

I've also started to be more selective about the content I engage with and the actions I take based on it. It's easy to find yourself overwhelmed with the commentary and theories being shared at scale. You won't be able to test or do everything, so keep that in mind when consuming this content.

It's a vicious cycle, trying to get recommendations implemented without having "proof" of the value of the SEO work. How can the value be shown if things aren't implemented? This demonstrates the importance of constant education and communication with stakeholders, and the use of the correct language. For example, devs will expect very different conversation that you would have with c-suite. Understanding what makes people tick is key to getting the right message across.

The gap between the intricacies of technical SEO and its tangible impact on business metrics often makes it challenging for SEOs to demonstrate the true value of their proposals. Much of what SEO professionals do centers around risk management, which typically doesn't reveal its worth until an issue arises—at which point, the cost of inaction becomes starkly apparent. Naturally, no one wants to reach that critical juncture.

Luckily enough, the SEO community is increasingly sharing insights on this topic, providing a wealth of resources to help connect technical SEO to concrete business outcomes, all we have to do is be willing to learn.

Showing value for technical SEO changes can be extremely difficult, especially when it comes to securing budget and continued investment in technical SEO.

If possible, use the click through rate and revenue from analytics data to get an understanding of potential revenue lost if this fix isn't implemented. Even if this is broad, it helps other stakeholders understand the impact of a technical fix.