Which country is the best for SEO work?

If you are a SEO freelancer like me, you will sooner or later decide to try to leave your internal market and to work remotely for clients from developed countries with large economies and wealthy clients. So, you will likely come across with the questions like “Which country to choose”, and “Which country is the best for SEO work”?

Why do you have to make a choice at all?

• If you use job boards for job hunting abroad, you should set up the desired location first, even for the remote work. Some job boards have separate domain for each country, so you will have to make a decision about country you’d like to work in first, before typing your job title into the search bar.
• If you would like to subscribe to the jobs feed on LinkedIn, you have to choose the desired country as well, otherwise you will get jobs from your home region.
• And it would also be great to simply understand where you can get more for the same work.

Sources on the Internet state that the best countries for the remote SEO freelancers are the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, in different orders. I considered only English-speaking countries.

The only reason behind considering these countries the best for the SEO work was comparison of sizes of their economies. The bigger economy, the better the country for SEO. I think this argument is debatable, but anyway.

It would be great to support these ideas with some convincing arguments. Is it possible to make a decision based on reliable data?

Where to get data about the SEO salaries?

Since I am interested in working at an SEO agency, I went on Clutch.co, probably the biggest worldwide source of SEO agencies.

Every agency’s card on this website has the following useful information:

• Agency’s name
• Website URL
• Agency’s location
• Minimal project size in USD
• Average hour rate
• Number of employees
• SEO share in percents
• Number of reviews and rating in stars

If we could get this information for the entire dataset, we could answer the following questions:

• What is distribution of the SEO agencies across the world look like?
• What are SEO agencies’ prices in different countries?
• How big are SEO agencies in common and what agency to send your CV to?
• What is a common share of SEO in the agencies’ portfolios?

Collecting and Analyzing Data

The dataset was collected in the summer 2023. It contains data about agencies on the category “SEO Firms”.

There are a total of 44 229 SEO agencies in the initial dataset, 43 709 of which have the complete data.

The sample of dataset is here.

By the way, the current number of the registered SEO agencies on Clutch.co is above 60K that gives us 25% more opportunities.

Now that we have a dataset and we can find answers to our questions.

What is distribution of the SEO agencies across the world look like?

The number of SEO agencies in different countries is shown in the plot below.

• You can see, that the first two positions are occupied by India and the United Kingdom with more than double gap over its closest competitor
• In this plot, the United States is broken down into individual states.
• This is the top of the countries represented in the dataset.

Let’s unite the United States and add the rest of the countries to the plot.

The worldwide distribution of the SEO agencies according to Clutch.co data is shown in the plot above.

• USA takes 40.2% of the SEO agencies in the dataset
• USA and India and UK together take 63.4% of the SEO agencies
• The Netherlands didn’t even get into top-20

What are SEO agencies’ prices in different countries?

There is no data on how much SEO agencies pay their staff, but we can assume that agencies that charge more from their clients pay more to their SEO specialists because they can afford to do so.

The heatmap with the price distribution is below.

• The majority of the Indian SEO agencies work at the hour rate below $25
• The majority of the UK SEO agencies (almost the same amount as Indians, by the way) work at the hour rate $150 – $199.
• All other countries have maximal number of SEO agencies in the hour rate category of $100 – $159 /hour but there are not too many of them in each country.

At this point, the United Kingdom seems to be the most beneficial country for the SEO jobhunting because:

• It has more than enough agencies that will likely be interested in a remote SEO specialist
• There are enough agencies in the category with the high hour rates
• Its time zone is close to European and Middle Eastern time zones. Freelancers from there could stick to the UK business hours.

 

How big are SEO agencies in common?

SEO agencies are small in common.

• More than half of SEO agencies in the world have fewer than 10 employees on staff.
• 85% of SEO agencies have fewer than 50 employees (or even 92% if we exclude freelancers)

So, if you find out that the agency that wants to hire you has only five people on staff, that’s ok for this market (at least for the part represented on Clutch)

What this distribution looks like for the UK SEO agencies?

Literally the same.

What is a common share of SEO in the agencies’ portfolios?

The distribution of SEO agencies by their share of SEO services is shown in the table below.

• 85% of SEO agencies estimate the share of SEO in their portfolio as 30% and less. Actually, they look like not SEO agencies as such, but marketing agencies that offer SEO as an additional service.
• The SEO agencies that have at least 50% of SEO share makes only 9.3% of the market.

So, which country is the best for the remote SEO work?

The best country for SEO specialists is definitely the United Kingdom for the following reasons:

• It has the 3^rd number of SEO agencies according to the Clutch data after the US and India.
• The share of agencies with the high hour rates of $150 – $199 / hour is the biggest and is more than the total number of agencies in the all the other countries.

If you want to join the agency that is focused on SEO, you can choose from about 10% agencies on the market. The rest are marketing agencies that do SEO as an additional service, which is also not bad.

The overwhelming majority of agencies have below 10 employees in staff (60.1%) or 10 – 50 employees (32.4%) that totally makes 92.5%. If you succeed in getting offer to the large company, you are lucky.

You should keep in mind that this dataset is not the entire market, that can be different. But I hope that at least the main dependencies are the same.

High hour rates do not guarantee high salaries for employees. But low rates do guarantee that you won’t be paid well.

If you succeed in finding a direct client, you know agencies’ pricing.

What about the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands?

The United States is too large and too diverse so it may require another research. It could be a good choice if you live close to it and don’t have a huge time gap, but it is not a good fit for me.

As it concerns the rest of the countries, their metrics are below.

Actually, all these countries are on top by number of agencies, but they don’t seem as good for employment as the UK.