Ugh. This is embarrassing.

If you’re reading this, chances are you know about Wix’s SEO Hero contest. If not, you can read up on it here.

I feel… pathetic.

I’ve never claimed to be an SEO expert but I’ve been doing this thing for the better part of a decade. Surely I’ve learned something along the way, right?

I made a giant mistake.

Maybe it’s because I was sprinting to get my SEO Hero entry site up, making it more likely I’d overlook something obvious. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been coddled by developers my whole career, allowing me to remain a noob when it comes to implementation. Heck, maybe it’s the Illuminati. There’s no way of really knowing.

This research has been updated. View the most recent results here.

Does where you live affect your odds of getting a job in SEO? Do large metropolises only seemingly have more SEO career opportunity until you adjust for population size?

Supply and demand – that’s ultimately what I’m after with this exploration. And while there has been research posted on the subject, it didn’t take into account the number of individuals vying for those jobs.

And why settle on “SEO” jobs, anyway? After all, there’s been legitimate acknowledgement of SEO becoming less of a job title and more of a key skill to have in a Swiss Army type of role. 1 Well, I’m glad you asked.

This research is about the present, not where we’re headed. Take a look at the number of United States job title postings from Indeed.com pulled in January 2017.

• title:(“inbound marketing”) OR title:(“inbound marketer”)- 40 (-34% from July 2016)
• title:(“content marketing”) OR title:(“content marketer”) – 466 (-3% from July 2016)
• title:seo – 824 (-8% from July 2016)

In closely related fields, “SEO” is still the heavy favorite when it comes to job titles.

OK. Let’s skip to the good stuff. I’ve added anchor links below so you can jump around as you wish, but I do have one last thing to help set the stage.

Although Google has been lumping volumes and bids together for similar keywords for a couple years now, it has really been kicked up a notch since June, with a much more liberal interpretation of “close matching variation”.

Of course, Google is doing this for our benefit, right?

This is what Google has to say about close keyword variations.

After reading an article from Sam Nemzer on the Moz blog about a month ago, where he dove into what this really meant for SEO 1, I was intrigued and wanted to see some of these examples for myself.

The SEO community has been complaining pretty heavily as we’ve now had even more reliable data stripped from us 2, but after reviewing some of these examples, I’m sort of surprised the PPC community isn’t more up in arms. 3After all, it’s their dollars Google is making them spend on, in some cases, completely irrelevant keywords. Take a look for yourself.