Survey Says: SEO Pros Love Google Tools
The statistical results of the SEOmoz industry-wide survey were published just a couple of days ago, making perfectly clear that Google provides and supports the most popular and useful SEO tools and services on the planet.
The survey was performed by SEOmoz and conducted from March through May of this year. Nearly 6,500 SEO pros from over 100 countries responded; 77% were male; 47% were based in the U.S.; 46% were between the ages of 26 and 34; and 23% had between 3 and 5 years of real world internet marketing experience.
The respondents overwhelmingly voted in favor of Google-made tools when it came to analytics and keyword research, though the “Big G” fell behind in the category of social media tools.
Google Analytics, AdWords Dominate Competition
One of the most glaring statistics in the study was the dominance of Google Analytics over other analytics tools. A whopping 93% of respondents said they use Google Analytics, compared to 16% for WordPress Stats; 13% for Omniture; 9% for CrazyEgg; and 7% for Compete.
Google AdWords was similarly dominant in the keyword research tools category, garnering 88.3% of respondents, followed by 58.6% for Google Insights; 20.2% for SEMRush; 16.7% for Wordtracker; and 13.9% for Raven.
The trend continued for conversion rate optimization and usability tools, with 73% for Google Website Optimizer; 18% for CrazyEgg; 16% for Pingdom; 11% for ClickTale; and 8% for KISSmetrics.
Google+ Still not Ready for Primetime?
Despite Google’s dominance in the SEO tools categories, Google+ still isn’t attracting as much attention from SEO professionals as are more established services like Facebook and Twitter. The percentages of respondents who said they used the following social media services for business looked like this:
- Facebook – 88%
- Twitter – 83%
- Google+ – 55%
- YouTube – 49%
- LinkedIn – 47%
- Blogging – 47%
- Pinterest – 21%
- StumbleUpon – 9%
- Tumblr – 5%
- Flickr – 5%
With Pinterest dominating SEO news in recent months it’s a bit surprising that they came in so low. One explanation could be that many SEO professionals simply don’t deal in content that makes sense to share on Pinterest, which favors eye-catching photos that are largely self-explanatory.