Commentary

The Price Of Content-Related Keywords, Features Of Best-Performing Texts

An extensive look at content marketing strategies across search and social reveals some interesting insights on the price of keywords, how words are used, and what company managers expect from employees.

SEMrush released a new repot — State of Content Marketing 2020 — by analyzing more than 600,000 tweets, hundreds of thousands of search queries, and 1,200,000 blog posts, and surveyed 1,500 marketers worldwide.

The annual State of Content Marketing Report found that while nearly 84% of survey respondents have a content strategy, just 11% believe it’s an excellent one.

Survey respondents said employees would like them to be more proficient in areas other than content marketing. Although 52% mentioned marketing as the key skill, 49% would like their employee to be familiar with social media, and 44% need SEO at a minimum.

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Among the findings, the data identified the most expensive keyword term — content strategy conferences 2020 — with a price of $20.76; followed by b2b content marketing agency at $19.91, and content strategy conferences at $19.12.

Another part of the project required analysts to determine the most popular 2020 Twitter topics and hashtags, and the questions and keywords most-searched on Google that align with content marketing.

To collect this data, SEMrush analyzed hundreds of thousands of 2020 Google search queries related to content marketing and surfed through more than 600,000 tweets in English that contained the #contentmarketing hashtag and were posted between January and September 2020.

SEMrush looked at how often hashtags appeared alongside #contentmarketing. The top five hashtags used with #contentmarketing were #digitalmarketing at 71%, #marketing at 64%, #seo at 62%, #growthhacking at 44%, and #smm at 40%.

The top five keywords discussed with the phrase were strategy at 34%, SEO at 18%, social media at 10%, tools at 4%, and trends at 3%. Some 88% used links and tweets in visual content, 74% used images, 26% used summary with large images.

SEMrush analysts also looked at visits, backlinks and social shares of more than 1,200,000 articles picked from domains with a blog section that had from 30,000 up to 500,000 sessions.

The goal was to establish the correlation between metrics and various elements such as the texts’ length, headlines, structure, and the presence of visuals. These findings aim to help marketers understand what content characteristics will better help them reach their goals.

The data found:

  • Long texts (3000–7000 words) get twice as many page-views and 24% more shares than articles of average length (900–1200 words).
  • 7000+ word articles are absolute leaders in terms of content performance, as they drive almost 4 times more traffic than articles of average length (900–1200 words).
  • Short posts (300–900 words) gain 21% less traffic and 75% less backlinks than articles of average length (900–1200 words).
  • Short articles (300–600 words) are not shared at all 3 times more often than long-reads of 7000+ words
  • More than half of the posts with a complex structure (h2+h3+h4) are high-performing in terms of traffic and engagement.
  • 44% of posts with a simple structure (h2+h3) are also high-performing.
  • 39% of texts with no structure at all (no h2) are low-performing in terms of traffic and engagement. • Posts containing at least one list per every 500 words of plain text get 70% more traffic than posts without lists.
  • 10–13-word headlines drive twice as much traffic and X1.5 more shares than shorter ones (< 7 words).
  • Posts with one image get twice as much traffic as posts containing text only. These also get 30% more shares and 25% more backlinks.
  • Posts with 7 or more images get X4 more traffic than articles containing just text.
  • Posts that don’t contain a video get 92% less traffic and 24% less shares than posts with at least one video.

 

 

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