Are More Women Doing SEO than Men?

Details

Wednesday, 27 April 2011 19:59

Published on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 20:07

Hits: 1121

Tweet

Share on Tumblr

Buffer

Pin It

A Washington Post piece detailing how for the first time in history more women than men got advanced degrees got me thinking about women and SEO.

There is no real hard data here but going by the number of emails I get, there may well be more women reading my book than men. To verify this I went back to the beginning of April to see just how many of the email respondents I spoke to were women and how many were men.

Barring a few cases where the ethnic nature of the name did not allow me to readily deduce this the numbers went a little like this: In the first 27 days of April I received a total of 892 emails concerning an SEO question, to say thanks for one of my books or to ask clarification about something I had written and (as the date of publication for Brilliant SEO got pushed a little further back than planned) to ask when Brilliant Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will finally come out  (it’s on 2nd June). Of those 8% were from people whose name (or nic) could be either male or female.

Of the remaining 48% were from men and 52% from women. Admittedly a single month, with a long holiday in the middle, does not the rule maketh. The statistics however are pretty compelling. Even if April happened to be an exception and I get more SEO emails from men than women, the very fact that the split is so close, backed by the many articles, like that of the Washington Post above, which have been emerging for the last twenty years, would indicate that there is a trend here.

There are probably more women than men running their own online business, there are more women entrepreneurs, there are more women optimizing and promoting their own websites and, it would be natural to assume, that there are more women than men reading SEO Help and putting its steps to use.

The demographics relating to the online population also show that SEO is not the only area where women dominate. Here are some facts about women and online demographics which you may need to know.

Twenty Facts About Women Online

1. Women make 80 percent of the buying choices in most U.S. homes.
2. 78% of all women in the US (vs 71% of all men) have been online this year.
3. 43% of women (vs 53% of men) visit Video websites such as YouTube.
4. Women aged 35 - 55 constitute the largest demographic group of online buyers.
5. 54% of women shopped online during the first half of 2010, buying mostly clothing, financial products, and groceries.
6. Wealthier women shop online more (68% of those with household incomes that break six figures versus 49% of those with incomes lower than $35,000).
7. Women make up 75% of casual game purchasers and women casual gamers match men in numbers.
8. According to Forrester Research, among young women (aged 25 to 34), nearly half have a college degree and are the most likely group, among women, to watch full-length TV shows and video clips online.
9. 84% of women turn to the Web for medical information versus 72% of men.
10. 43 million moms go online daily and spend an average of 85 minutes per day there.
11. High shipping costs are the single most often reported factor by women shoppers as a reason for abandoning a purchase at shopping cart level.
12. 15% of all women who visit blogs are mothers.
13. 52% of women look online for fitness information, diets and exercises.
14. Women in the 35-44 age group make up 18% of all UK Facebook members (versus 17% of men in the same demographic)
15. The 35 – 44 age band for women on Facebook seems to be the ‘magic’ band with women outstripping men in Indonesia (where there are many more men than women on Facebook as a total), France, Italy and Spain. The one exception is Turkey where the gap between men and women in that age group is 3%.
16. 32% more women than men report that they are likely to take advantage of time-limited offers.
17. 48% more women than men said they found online dating meaningful.
18. There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%).
19. Women users make up 41.1% of all LinkedIn members.
20. 35% of women aged 18 to 75 participate in the blogosphere weekly. Of the women online 53% read blogs, 37% post comments to blogs and 28% write or update blogs. 58% of women bloggers post entries at least weekly, and of those who actively read blogs, 80% do so at least once per week.

Learn More About David

Make search something you are good at. Get your website ranked on Google's first page with a tried-and-tested, practical, 20-step method that works. Now updated for Google Panda's search algorithm update. Low on cost, high on value.

Tweet

Share on Tumblr

Buffer

Pin It

READ NEXT:

How to get your site rank higher on search engines and be indexed deeper

• < Prev
• Next >