76% of published SEO articles are written by White Authors

Dear friends, I'm hoping you'll give me 5 minutes of your time today so I can share something extremely important with you.

We published the 2024 Race Gap in SEO Authorship, and here's my main insight:

76% of all published articles were written by White folks

Now, before you start feeling annoyed and wondering why this matters, I want you to check your privilege and understand that:

Authorship is visibility

Visibility is access

Access opens doors

Open doors lead to better quality network

More quality network brings in more referrals

More referrals lead to more revenue

Our ultimate goal at The Freelance Coalition For Developing Countries is to put money in the hands of marketers of color so you can see where Authorship lies in there.

All right, let's get into it.

Once again, Wix comes out on top, thanks to George Nguyen's brilliant work. Now, back to back, Wix has platformed the most BIPOC authors in the industry by percentage relative to the total number of blogs they published.

More context in the article

Most of our audience live in developing countries. It's not enough to ask them to write guest posts or create a program prioritizing guest posts from BIPOC authors. Pay BIPOC authors because most of them cannot afford free labor. I say this from personal experience. I think George can attract a diverse talent pool at Wix because he pays authors.

The same can be said for Areej AbuAli and Women in Tech SEO

She sent me this message this morning.

Okay, back to the report So, let's see...did any brand improve from 2022?

Yes, Year over year, Semrush nearly 5xed the number of BIPOC authors on its platform in 2023, followed closely by Moz , which platformed 16 more BIPOC authors than in 2022.

But this is not enough compared to the number of White authors on these platforms, it should be more. I'm hoping that this report leads to conversations where brands that can afford to, create a program geared towards platforming more BIPOC authors. It has to be a paid program, or it just doesn't work.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for BIPOC talent, I encourage you to check out The FCDC talent page. We vet every profile before it goes live.

If you're a person of color, or you know someone who is, could you please ask them to contribute to our salary database? I think it's extremely important for benchmarking and to help other BIPOC folks get an idea of what their peers are charging so they don't undercharge.

Y'all, we're also looking for sponsors for our annual cohorts. At this point, it's a maybe because we're having trouble getting companies to sponsor these cohorts:

Email marketing

Tech SEO

Coding for beginners

(5,000 GBP to co-sponsor a cohort)

More details are in our pitch deck here.

If you have a contact who would be a great fit to sponsor a cohort, can you please make an introduction?

90% of the funds we raise in a year come through the cohort sponsorship.

Full disclosure — I had no part in the report. jadesola kareem , who runs our community, did all the work. Lidia Infante supplied the data, and MJ Cachón Yá?ez provided the crawls, custom author, and date extractions used for the report. All graphics were provided by Adedoyin Afolabi . Thank you to these amazing women for their work.