With DEI initiatives and affirmative action under attack across the world, it's more important than ever to keep track on the state of gender disparities in the SEO industry. Without data, we would be blind.
You can care about gender equality because it's the right thing to do, or because it has been proven to drive innovation. Addressing our biases of what an SEO expert looks like will help us build a stronger industry. Maybe it will even keep SEO from dying like twice a year!
I have been running this report for 4 years now, but I want to acknowledge that knowledge-sharing in the SEO industry is changing. Fill out this survey to shape how I track the gender gap in the SEO industry in the future.
But now, let’s look at the numbers.
The key findings
In 2024, 64% of articles in SEO publications were written by men and 36% were written by women. This is the same figure as in 2023.
There are more female writers every year. We’ve grown from 31% in 2021 to 48% in 2024.
Semrush is the most female-friendly publication, with 67% articles written by women. Search Engine Journal is the least inclusive publication, at only 13%.
81% of articles about technical SEO are written by men, while women write 49% of all articles around content SEO.
45% of published authors in 2024 are new, and slightly over half of them are women.
To close the gap: diversify your author pool by reaching out to women's communities, connecting with women on social media and make your pitching process transparent.
64% of articles about SEO are written by men
64% of articles written in the last year on SEO publications were authored by men, as opposed to 36% written by women. This number has stayed the same since 2023.
When analysing published articles by both month and gender, we can a big spike of articles authored by women in March. During Women's History Month, the percentage of articles authored by women increases from 36% to 44%.
The pool of female writers has continued to grow, but it is slowing down versus previous years. In 2024, 48% of SEO authors were female, slightly up from 46% in 2023.
45% of the published authors this year are new to the tracked publications, which shows a beautifully growing author pool. Out of the new authors pool, 51% are women. This is a continuing trend and I see this as a sign that our industry is becoming more inclusive.
The gender gap by publication
The most female-friendly publication in 2024 was Semrush, with 67% of articles written by women.
The closest to a 50/50 split was Moz, with 61% of articles authored by women and 39% authored by men. Moz also welcomed the most new authors this year at 61%.
SEO news sites have some extremely prolific male authors, like Roger Montti (SEJ), Matt G. Southern (SEJ) and Barry Schwartz (SEL), which skews the data. The three of them have written 610 articles in 2024, which makes up 25% of all the articles written by the industry that year.
The least inclusive publication was Search Engine Journal, with only 13% of articles written by women (and I am one of them!). When removing the contributions from Roger Montti and Matt G. Southern from SEJ's numbers, their female authorship rises to 35%.
Ahrefs shows improvement for the first time since I started tracking the numbers, thanks to contributions from Louise Linehan and Despina Gavoyannis. 18% of articles were authored by women in 2024, up from 10% in 2023.
Ahrefs has the smallest author pool out of any other publication, with only 13 authors compared to an industry average of 80. This indicates they follow a different strategy to other most guest-driven publications, so it might not be fair to measure them in the same scale of gender inclusivity.
The gender divide in writing topics
There's a common trope that women write about content and men write about technical SEO. I set out to disprove this, but according to the data, it's true.
81% of articles about technical SEO are written by men, while women write 49% of all articles around content SEO and content marketing.
Last year, the industry loved writing about content SEO, but in 2024 our favourite topics by number of articles were technical SEO (23%), SEO strategy (19%), and AI (14%).
Is there a gender gap in the content’s performance?
I have been tracking the content performance of articles published by men and women since 2021 in terms of traffic, backlinks and social shares. What I have found is that this varies greatly year by year. Some years women are crushing it, others it's men who are the main traffic drivers.
The only constant in the data is that articles authored by men are likely to drive twice as many backlinks. However, this is skewed by content refreshes and the limitations in segmenting link acquisition to the year we're analysing.
My point is: the gender gap in SEO publishing is not driven by performance reasons. In other words, both women and men are roughly equally good at this.
Why does any of this matter?
Men in SEO earn 26% more than women in the same position. In senior positions this gap grows to 30%. This is worse than the global gender pay gap!
For every dollar/pound/euro men make in SEO, women make 0.79 cents. Effectively this means that women in SEO work for free for 3 months every year, starting from the second week of October.
We don't have any up to date numbers on the gender makeup of the SEO industry, so we don't actually know if the gender gap in SEO publishing represents the actual split in the industry.
What we do know is that featuring in SEO publications can be a catalyst for your career and position you as a thought leader. It puts you in front of the right people, gives you credibility and can help you build a strong network. This, in turn, gives you even more opportunities.
Let’s close the gap
For publishers
Reach out to marginalised communities to grow and diversify your author pool. Some excellent options are the Women in Tech SEO community of the FCDC.
Make your pitching process more transparent, so that SEOs from marginalised identities feel more welcomed to apply.
Start following and connecting with women in SEO to find new voices for your site.
For women
If you’re a woman in SEO looking to grow your brand, you can:
Join an online community like Women In Tech SEO, Traffic Think Tank or Mostly Marketing.
Look at the templates, how-tos, dashboards and strategies you’ve built over the last year and pitch them to your favourite publications.
No, I’m serious, pitch it right now. I don’t care that you think it’s not good enough yet.
Share other women’s content on social media.
Methodology
I’ve selected the publication list by how often these were cited as trusted sources of knowledge in the SEO industry.
I've crawled all the sites using ScreamingFrog. I've identified the pagination URLs belonging to 2024 and scraped the internal outlinks, then removed any content not published in 2024. In the case of SEJ and SEL, I've crawled only the articles tagged in the SEO category.
I've removed product announcements, articles without an author and sponsored posts.
Traffic and backlink data come from the Ahrefs API through ScreamingFrog.
Using last year's topic list, I've classified the articles using GPT for Sheets and ChatGPT.
Limitations
There are some limitations in the process that might yield inaccurate data.
Updates vs new content: This study scrapes the dates and authors of all the content that's live in my target publications at the time of analysis. There isn't a way to consistently and scalably distinguish between refreshes and new content, so all the pieces of content with a 2024 date at the time of analysis are included in the study.
Gender data: I have assigned each author a gender based on the pronouns they use for themselves, their photos and their names. This might have missed a good amount of non-binary people. I am sorry about this and I have not figured out a good way to address this issue yet.
Backlink data: Using Ahrefs’ API with ScreamingFrog I’ve found that not all the links it pulls are live. Also, this is the total number of links that a piece of content has, not the amount it got during 2024. This could be inaccurate if the content has been refreshed in 2024 but kept the same URL.
If you’re feeling curious, you can take a look at the reports for the Gender Gap in SEO Publishing from 2022, 2023 and 2024.
If you’re passionate about this topic, join the conversation. You can follow me or slide into my DMs on BlueSky or Linkedin.
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