The SEO tools you need – and the pro’s you don’t trust

We started building Plug in SEO because we're convinced that there is a need for a better integrated, more complete suite of tools to help web professionals optimize sites for search and conversion. But in order to build a good product you have to understand the problems your users are facing, and you only do that by communicating with them. We've just completed our first piece of user research - a survey - and we thought it would be nice to share some highlights.

As well as exploring the tools people use and the problems they encounter, we also wanted to investigate people's attitudes to the SEO community - and we had some disturbing responses.

• A massive 91% agree that there are too many self-proclaimed SEO experts on the internet, and 45% don't trust others in the industry.
• We asked people to tell us the first three words they think of when considering the SEO industry. "Snake oil", "cowboy", and "ridiculously expensive" were not uncommon sentiments! (Our view is, let's get analytical about proving results through hard data. If you can demonstrate better sales or better conversions through SEO activities, then its value is clear.)
• There is demand for more communication within the community - 80% agreed they would like more opportunities to exchange ideas with SEO professionals, and only 44% said there are plenty of local events for the industry. Maybe more communication would help build trust? In fact, we're thinking about the options for another SEO-oriented meetup in London - what are your views?

Now thinking about the more pragmatic elements of what SEO professionals get up to on a daily basis...

• It's not a surprise that over 85% spend time tuning keywords and content to optimize organic search results.
• A hefty 93% spend time on URL rewriting, so it seems the power of descriptive URLs is well understood in the SEO community. (Plug in SEO provides ready-built code to enable this, so if you're planning to develop URL-rewriting in house, why not have a chat with us first?)
• Only 60% spend time on inbound link management. Perhaps that's because 63% haven't yet found an effective tool to help them with this?
• 100% of our professional SEO respondents know how well they rank on Google.com, and 77% know their rankings on country-specific Google searches such as Google UK. (96% of our respondents are based outside the US.)
• Knowing how well they rank drops to 50% for Yahoo and 33% for Live search, but 64% would be interested in a better tool for integrating search results across different search engines.
• Mobile search isn't that important (yet?) to our sample - 54% said they don't care about their rankings on Google mobile, rising to 77% on other mobile search engines.

Congratulations to Stephen B., who is the lucky winner of the Amazon voucher draw amongst our survey respondents.

We're using these and other results to help us prioritize new features that are coming to Plug in SEO over the next few months, but that's by no means the end of user input - we'd love to hear your comments. If you're part of our beta trial (and if you're not already, why not register here?) you'll find a Leave feedback link on every page. These links open a widget (powered by CrowdSound) that you can use to post suggestions, report bugs or ask questions. We'd love to hear what you think, so we can build the product you need.