What percentage of the US understands what SEO means?

[Scotty]

Looking for the approximate percentage of those who know that SEO means Search Engine Optimization

[la guera]

i had no idea what it meant, so I would guess that that not a lot of people

[Deepa Maran]

Hi,

Re: General mass - I am in the SEO industry for the past 7 years. I haven't come across many people to whom I can talk about search engine optimization without explaining what it is, and I would go for even a lower percentage for people to know about its acronym.

Re: Marketers - We need to educate our clients what these industry acronyms are before using them because most of them don’t know these acronyms.

That said, you can research the searching behaviors and demographics information of searchers by using these tools:

1.Google insights http://www.google.com/insights/search/ tells U.S. is not in the top 10 country list for the people searching for “SEO”.
2.MSN Adlabs demographics prediction tool http://adlab.msn.com/Demographics-Prediction/DPUI.aspx (predicts a user's age, gender, and other demographic information, based on their online behavior) predicts 62% of the male and 31% of users in the age range 35 – 49 search for “SEO”.

[chris m]

I would guess that less than 1% know what SEO stands for. On the other hand, I would say that nearly 50% of people generally get the idea that a top Google ranking for a highly searched term will equate to traffic to a website. In my experience though, most people over 40 have any idea how valuable it is, and most people under 30 can't afford to pay for it :-)