Few days ago, I did a survey at LinkedIn. The survey was about the pay package of three different job roles of digital marketing. I asked that if all the other factors remain the same, then candidates with which job role will receive the highest salary?
My chosen job roles were:
1) PPC executive
2) Social media executive
3) SEO executive
Forty LinkedIn users had voted. Surprisingly, SEO received the highest number of votes. Yes, I was surprised!
Somehow, a thought came to my mind that LinkedIn participants have no idea about the real market situations. I have worked in a number of digital marketing agencies. I have seen that it is the PPC executives or paid media executives who get the highest level of salaries. Even, people with PPC experiences get better chance to go up in the career ladder. They easily become team lead or digital marketing head. On the other hand, SEO people work as their juniors.
Why are Paid media executives of so much demand?
If you look at the website traffic from an web analytics tool (like, Google Analytics 4), you'll notice that for a lot of brands, SEO traffic is maximum. Paid traffic, social traffic have quite a lesser percentage compared to SEO.
But, when a company comes to an agency for a service, they don't try to understand the value of SEO. They always want big return in a short period of time from the digital agency. Paid media marketing and social media marketing give them exactly that. So, the clients invest a lot of money on their paid media strategy. They don't seriously think about SEO and hence SEO loses its significance.
Not only the clients, even Google itself ignores the contribution of SEO people. I have noticed that big events are organized by Google India, where paid media people are only invited from chosen agencies and there Google employees talks about smart paid ad strategies. Why does not Google India organize a single event about the new SEO updates from Google and invites SEO people like me as participants? Why so much partiality?
Paid media people may be utilizing a lot of money through paid ads, but it is SEO people who do word-of-mouth marketing for Google. We give biggest brand mentions for Google, we love & care for Google, but it the paid media guys who receives goodies from Google and not us. Why?
Let there be eqality in the different job roles under digital marketing in terms of pay package, Google's attention and career growth.
