Sustainability keeps growing as a trending topic. Just when you think there’s nothing more to talk about, another aspect of environmentalism pops up and gives us all something else to consider. Fantastic, isn’t it? All this opportunity to make the world a better place!
If you’ve read any of my other blogs this year, you’ll know that my joint passions for SEO and sustainability have well and truly collided, offering almost endless options for blog topics.
Welcome to the latest, but certainly not the last: Uncovering the opinions of SEO specialists on sustainability and how they can help…
A survey of the SEO community
Search Engine Land recently shared details of a survey of SEO professionals, which aimed to investigate their perspective on climate change and unlock practical advice for anyone in the SEO community to help make a positive impact on the environment.
The survey had a total of 331 responses from around the world, including:
- 33% of respondents were based in Europe, followed by the UK (26%), North America (21%) and Asia (11%).
- 62% of respondents were male, 34% female.
- There was a near-even split with respondents’ job positions, with 33% working on a freelance/consultancy basis, 31% working in-house and 31% working within an agency.
- 47% of respondents’ main area of SEO expertise was in technical, 34% content and 9% ecommerce.
The survey was broken up into 10 questions, of which we’ve cherry-picked the seven most relevant.
Q1: How to reduce the environmental impact of a website?
When asked to rank the impact of certain aspects of SEO on a website’s carbon footprint, the answers were:
As you can see, the top three responses were all around fairly well-known aspects of SEO, which are constantly growing in importance among the community, with the bottom two responses being lesser-known aspects. This shows us there are still opportunities for the SEO community to upskill and further our impact on sustainability.
Q2: Have you ever used an online carbon calculator tool to estimate carbon emissions from a website?
Interestingly, a huge 64% of respondents answered “no” to this question, showing that a large part of the SEO community isn’t quite geared up for the sustainability improvements which can come from SEO activities.
Q3: Who in a business should be responsible for addressing their websites’ carbon emissions?
42% of respondents felt it’s the responsibility of everyone involved, with a very low 4% of respondents feeling that the responsibility should fall purely on the shoulders of SEO specialists.
Q4: If Google included web page carbon emissions in their Core Web Vitals initiative, would it encourage more SEOs to reduce the carbon emissions of client websites?
In what probably isn’t a surprise, 78% of respondents felt that incorporating emissions data into Google’s CWV crawl would encourage more SEOs to get involved.
Q5: For agency folks, would you feel comfortable declining to work with a client that was a known fossil fuel polluter?
A huge 82% of respondents said they would feel comfortable declining to work with a client who is a known fossil fuel polluter.
Q6: Why isn’t making websites greener a higher priority within businesses?
38% of respondents felt there is limited understanding of the environmental impact of websites, but with a clear feeling that low consumer demand, lack of interest and lack of resources are also contributing factors.
Q10: Do you think climate change will have an impact on you personally?
A massive 90% of respondents believe climate change will impact them personally, underscoring the broad recognition of this global issue within the community.
What does this data tell us?
The responses to the survey help paint a picture of the wider SEO community – a picture of a desire and willingness to make a positive impact on website sustainability, only perhaps not quite being in the position to be able to influence that change.
The low instances of specialists having investigated the carbon emissions of their sites, suggests the vital link between day-to-day site speed improvements and their impact on sustainability hasn’t quite permeated the community.
This can be seen in the responses to the first question. Green web hosting is undoubtedly a good start for improving sustainability, but the greater impact is likely to be found among the other four responses.
More telling is that SEOs consider themselves the least responsible for being involved with reducing the carbon emissions of sites, below even the answer of “not anyone’s responsibility”, even though they are crucially placed to enact such change.
Perhaps the answer to that lack of awareness can be divined from the large number of specialists who said they would be more encouraged to take website emissions seriously if Google included calculations within its tools.
Generally speaking, SEO specialists are led by Google. If Google says jump, we say “How high?” However, if Google doesn’t offer some kind of direction, the SEO community can be guilty of waiting for it to give one.
Finally, we can see a community that doesn’t believe that there is enough knowledge of the environmental impact of websites for it to be a priority, as well as low demand (perhaps driven by a lack of interest) for such services. Add in a perceived lack of resources and you have a community who wants to help, but doesn’t quite know how.
What do we need to do to drive meaningful change?
I believe the answer to this question can be found in the insights above. At the moment, we have a community which knows climate change will affect its members personally, but who don’t believe they can make a difference.
Education among our own numbers must therefore be the first step in driving change. By doing so, we can quickly upskill the wider SEO community and help underline the vital role we can play in digital sustainability.
Once we’ve gained some traction in that regard, educating people from other specialisms, particularly developers, but also project managers, becomes a lot easier, and we can begin to introduce the subject to clients, as a united group of different specialists.
These crucial changes help us address the perceived hurdles in prioritising sustainable websites within businesses. By upskilling ourselves, it becomes easier to educate clients on the impact and value of website sustainability. This, in turn, generates interest and therefore demand for such services; which are already tied into site speed improvements.
What are Elixirr Digital doing?
Elixirr Digital is a little ahead of the curve when it comes to digital sustainability. We’ve been using website carbon checkers as part of our client pitches for a little while, but have recently developed the ability to assess URLs in bulk and generate a projected value for website carbon emissions once improvements have been made.
What’s more, we’re already in the process of upskilling our wider team to be able to talk to our clients about website sustainability, through internal team training and our regular knowledge share sessions.
In May, we hosted a webinar to introduce clients and prospects to the importance of sustainability. It highlighted the role SEO specialists can play in driving meaningful change and better aligning businesses with their customers’ interests.
We also hope to be able to extend this session to other external audiences, helping to spread the knowledge of digital sustainability as far as possible.
Watch the FREE digital sustainability webinar recording to gain access to exclusive insights. Alternatively, explore our digital sustainability consultancy services to see how we can help you make a difference.