Anything Boys Can Rank, Girls Can Rank Better: Why Women Should Consider A Career in SEO or SEM

Article here. Excerpt:

'Any technical industry is bound to be at least somewhat male-dominated. Our society has unfortunately not yet fully embraced the fact that men and women can be equally talented when it comes to technical careers. SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing, a.k.a. pay-per-click advertising on search engines) are certainly no exception. In fact, it seems as if these are some of the more intensely male-dominated sectors of the digital marketing industry to work in.

As a woman who has created a very successful career in the search industry, I find this particularly disappointing. I truly believe that women have every every bit of likelihood to be just as good at, if not better than, any given male counterpart in the same line of work, especially when it comes to SEO and SEM. Some reasons why they may be even better in this line of work include:

• Ability to multitask. Women are very accustomed to juggling several different types of responsibilities. Being able to keep many different types of tasks moving forward concurrently is a huge asset to an SEO team.
• Patience. Many women have raised or are raising children, and we’re all biologically programmed to be able to do so. There is no greater need for patience than that! And many aspects of search, especially organic optimization, require patience. SEO is a long term marketing strategy that does not provide instant results, and making changes to test theories does not yield immediate feedback. Being a patient strategist and being able to foster patience in clients and stakeholders is an absolute necessity in this field.
• Analytical thinking. Many women (especially yours truly) have a tendency to overthink things. The nice way of saying that is that we can be very analytical. Being able to think and rethink (and rethink some more) your way through a challenging data discrepancy or unusual change in traffic patterns is a great problem-solving strength and is crucial to the long term success of search campaigns.

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Obviously it’s not appropriate to make completely generalized assumptions based on gender alone, as each individual is completely unique. And even though I truly believe that women have a propensity to excel at SEO and SEM, I deeply respect all of my male colleagues in the industry, and I don’t want in any way to infer that we are superior to them just because we are female. That is most certainly not true.

However, it is a statistically sound fact that women operate differently than men in some aspects, and many of those unique characteristics can lend themselves very nicely to being an effective search engine knowledge worker. It’s an extremely rewarding line of work to be in, and is often conducive to working from home, making it easier for women to effectively balance a career and a family.'