SEO agency market statistics
This report is computed directly from this directory's dataset: 36,855 agencies across 132 countries. No estimates, no extrapolation — only what the listings declare, with the limits that implies, stated at the end.
Data as of .
Key figures
Agencies listed
36,855
Countries covered
132
Distinct cities
6,916
Where the agencies are
The market is highly concentrated: the top five countries account for 71 % of listed agencies. That concentration reflects both the size of the digital economies and the language of publication: an English-language directory structurally over-represents English-speaking markets, and that is a limit worth keeping in mind.
What agencies sell
Nearly every agency declares SEO, which makes the word useless as a selection criterion. The usable signal is in the combinations: an agency pairing SEO with content and development works differently from one pairing SEO with social media and branding — the first fixes templates, the second produces visibility.
Declared specialties
Specialties are self-declared and far more discriminating than services: technical SEO, e-commerce SEO and local SEO show up as genuinely distinct crafts with different methods and deliverables. When shortlisting, look for the specialty, not the service.
Team sizes
The overwhelming majority of agencies declaring headcount have fewer than fifty people, and a large share fewer than ten. That is useful for a buyer: the person selling the engagement is very often the person delivering it, which is good news for quality and bad news for continuity when they are away.
How old the agencies are
Across the 10,499 agencies declaring a founding year, the median is 2013. The sector is young, and age is not itself a quality signal: an agency founded in 2012 still selling 2018 tactics is worth less than a 2021 team that measures what it does.
Working languages
Language is the most underrated criterion in an SEO shortlist. Content that has to convert in a language the team does not speak natively gets translated, and translated content reads like translated content — both readers and engines notice.
Price positioning
Among agencies declaring a price positioning, the mid market dominates. To translate those symbols into amounts, the budget estimator derives the hours your programme needs and prices them at your market's rate.
Methodology and limits
The figures are computed over the entire published dataset, with no sampling. Fields come from listings submitted by providers or compiled from public sources, then normalised: only values from the site's taxonomy are counted for services and team sizes, which is why 3,743 listings do not appear in the city breakdown.
Three biases are worth stating. The first is self-declaration: an agency ticking nine services ticks them because it wants to appear everywhere, not necessarily because it is competent in all nine. The second is linguistic: a directory published in English and French attracts more listings from those markets. The third is temporal: listings age, and a team declared at fifty people two years ago may be thirty today.
This is precisely why the site ranks providers on verified Search Console data rather than on what they declare. A listing says what an agency wants to sell; a performance export says what it produced.
This data is free to reuse with a link to this page as the source.