What’s Changed (and What Hasn’t): The 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey Results

You’re tired of hearing it and I’m tired of saying it, but 2020 really has been a year like no other. SEOs and marketers around the world had to deal with their day-to-day work moving home, alongside a host of natural disasters, civil rights issues, and a pandemic that will alter our industry and global economy for years to come.

We could have held off on launching this year’s reader survey, but we decided to move forward anyway because we know your work and your interests have been impacted, and we wanted to know how much.

I’m excited to share with you the results from that survey in this post. We’ll go through what’s changed — and what hasn’t — for our readership since our last survey in 2017, and detail what those insights mean for the Moz Blog in 2021.

Methodology

We published this survey in July 2020, with questions asking for details on the professional occupations of our readers, how those readers interact with the blog, and what those readers like to see from the blog. We also included COVID-19-specific questions to gauge the pandemic’s impact on our readers. The survey was shared on the blog, through email blasts, and on our social media accounts.

The percentages shared in the sections below are part of a total of 388 responses we received over four months. This is actually our first data point, showing that engagement with surveys has shifted drastically since our 2017 survey, which got nearly 600 responses in just one month. Given the interruptive nature of 2020’s events, we won’t let that difference discourage us from utilizing surveys in the future. Where able, I’ve compared 2020’s results to those of the 2017 survey, to better visualize the differences.

Answers were not required for all questions, so if something did not apply to a respondent, they could leave the answer blank or choose a variety of “no opinion” or “N/A” options.

We don’t typically include demographic or geographic questions in our reader surveys, but given the overwhelmingly positive response to the Gender Gap in SEO and Diversity and Inclusion in SEO surveys published this year, we will do so moving forward. Understanding the struggles SEOs and marketers face in the industry due to race, gender, and sexual orientation is imperative to understanding how to best work with and for everyone, and we acknowledge that shortcoming in this year’s survey.

Who our readers are

Let’s dive in. First up: the questions asking readers to tell us more about themselves.

What is your job title?

The word cloud below is an amalgamation of the top-used words in response to this question, and the size of the word correlates to the number of mentions that word received.

No surprises here: number one (by far) was “SEO”. Our readership remains heavily SEO-focused in their occupations, with content marketers coming in close second.