Despite this confidence, the study has found that there is a wide performance gap, with not enough being done to raise the strategic importance of search or improve communication between tech and marketing teams.

Only 13% report that respondent organisations’ current SEO efforts are ‘very effective’ in meeting marketing goals, while just 8% of respondents labelled their organisations’ ability to calculate the return on investment from SEO as excellent. Almost four in 10 consider it poor (26%) or very poor (10%).

Furthermore, just 6% of respondents claimed that automation is fully deployed for improving site performance in their organisation, with four in ten (41%) stating that improving on-site performance is largely manual. For 17%, this process is entirely manual. This highlights the massive opportunity to automate Search Engine Optimisation, particularly for larger sites.