Wakefield, MA, January 10, 2008 – In-house search engine marketers (SEMs) are receiving healthy salaries in line with their experience levels but if you want a salary in the mid-to-high $100s to the $200K range you are usually going to have to invest five to seven years to get there – a traditional dynamic in which experience brings greater compensation. The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), www.sempo.org, today announced this and other top line findings from its first-ever survey of in-house SEM job salary compensation.
One of the key findings is that roughly one third of in-house search engine marketers are managing monthly budgets in excess of $200,000. “We anticipated a lower ceiling of monthly spend closer to the $100,000 range so we were pleasantly surprised,” says Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee and Lead SEO Program Manager with Microsoft. “The $200K monthly spend is a healthy barometer of the search marketing industry and it syncs up with SEMPO’s current trend projections that SEM spending will double by 2011, to more than $18 billion.”
