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?
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?
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:
If we could get this information for the entire dataset, we could answer the following questions:
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.
The number of SEO agencies in different countries is shown in the plot below.
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.
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.
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.
SEO agencies are small in common.
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.
The distribution of SEO agencies by their share of SEO services is shown in the table below.
The best country for SEO specialists is definitely the United Kingdom for the following reasons:
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.
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.
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I focus on creating high-quality, valuable content that addresses the needs and queries of the target audience while naturally incorporating relevant keywords and internal links.
How does the tool handle clustering for similar terms?
The system uses a multi-stage NLP normalization engine. By applying tokenization and lemmatization, the tool strips away grammatical noise and reduces keywords to their core semantic base. This ensures that phrases like "running shoes" and "shoes for running" are grouped into a single cluster, preventing content cannibalization.
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Most SEO platforms provide estimated metrics based on clickstream data. My tool bypasses third-party guesswork by integrating directly with the Google Ads Data API. This ensures you receive first-party, real-time metrics for search volume and competition levels straight from the source.
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