9th December 2019: SEMrush, the leading online visibility management platform unveiled report on the ‘State of Content Marketing’ during the biggest SEMRUSH Marketing Show in India. The report reveals trends that are shaping the content marketing landscape. The story was created after analysing more than 450,000 tweets, 700,000 blog posts, and responses by more than 1,200 marketers to a survey. It was compiled after analysing data gathered between January and September 2019.
Twitter Analysis
The SEMrush study found the top 20 hashtags to appear with #ContentMarketing. The most popular #ContentMarketing tweets: #digitalmarketing, #marketing, #seo, #socialmedia, and #smm appeared 71%, 52%, 36%, 35%, and 27% of the time, respectively. The top 5 topics discussed in tweets with #ContentMarketing were strategy, social media, SEO, statistics, and AI. Of these topics, strategy was discussed 29% of the time; far ahead of social media at 11%. The visual content accompanying tweets consisted of images 50% of the time. Links accompanied tweets 72% of the time.
Authors of the most retweeted posts containing #ContentMarketing were ranked based on the number of likes, retweets, and performance of tweets published by them. The most famous author was Mike Schiemer.
Google Analysis
The top 5 Google searches related to content marketing were: “content marketing strategy”, “content marketing institute”, “content marketing agency”, “content marketing examples”, and “content marketing definition”. Each was searched an average of 6600, 5400, 3600, 3600, and 2900 times, respectively every month. The top 5 questions posed on Google about content marketing were: “what is content marketing?”, “what is content strategy”, “why is content marketing important”, “why content marketing”, and “what is content marketing strategy”.
The SEMrush report highlights the importance of strategy to content. It also highlights that SEO and content go hand-in-hand and social media is the preferred channel for distributing content. It also highlights that visuals draw engagement.
The report captured the most expensive keywords bids in the content marketing industry. At $37.4, the keyword “email marketing content writing” was the costliest. Organisations are willing to pay a lot for a single lead as a single click on a paid result can cost more than $37.
Blogs Analysis
Traffic to blogs in the three most expensive industries for digital marketers: Insurance, online education, and marketing arrived 63.69%, 61.65%, and 69.03% of the time, respectively, following an organic search. The top-performing articles on insurance, online education, and marketing had word lengths of 3791, 3674, and 5714, respectively.
SEMrush’s analysis shows that organic search remains the most effective way to draw traffic to industry blogs.
Content Analysis
SEMrush’s analysis of content showed articles having word lengths exceeding 3,000 attracted three times more traffic, two times more shares, and 3.5 times more backlinks than articles of average length. Short essays are 4.5 times less likely to be shared than long articles. The most shared items are listicles, followed by guides, and how-to articles. The report showed that articles with long headlines (14+ words) get more traffic, are twice as likely to be shared, and five times more likely to have backlinks than articles with shorter headlines (7-10 words). A possible reason is that long headlines are cleverer, which attracts audiences.
Structured content attracts more traffic. Articles that have h2 and h3 perform better. The study shows 36% of articles with h2 and h3 are high performing with respect to traffic, shares, and backlinks. The study also showed less than 15% of articles having word length exceeding 3,000 are not shared.
Content & Industry
SEMrush found that 91% of companies surveyed had a content marketing strategy. 77% of companies surveyed had a content marketing strategist. 43% of companies believed their content marketing strategy was good. And the two most effective content marketing tactics were search engine optimisation, and repurposing and updating existing content.
The key metric by which companies measured the success of their content was how much organic traffic it generated, followed by many leads it created. The biggest priority of companies in 2020 was generating more leads using content.
Companies overwhelmingly realise the importance of content. They prize high-quality content that drives organic traffic to sites. The SEMrush report shows the deeper nuances of content by highlighting what kind of articles add the highest value. This knowledge will allow companies to create content that drives traffic organically to their sites and generate more leads.
