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How is content marketing changing in 2024? What SEO tactics are working right now? Which part of your strategy should you fine-tune?
Staying ahead of the curve in content marketing and SEO has never been more difficult.
With constant algorithm updates, AI getting better by the second, and the generative search release, many content marketers are left confused about what to do and who to listen to.
But does this mean you should forget about spending time on content and SEO altogether? Well, not exactly. These channels still work, but you’ll have to adjust your strategies.
To gain deeper insights into these critical areas, we partnered with multiple companies and surveyed over 140 businesses to explore the current state of content marketing and SEO.
We gained a lot of information on what’s working right now, which tactics are showing results, and even talked about the future trends that these companies plan to implement going forward.
Ready to dive in?
For this report, we partnered with Knowmad, Secret Sushi, and several others to survey 140+ companies and uncover what’s working for companies investing in content marketing today.
50% of the companies we surveyed belong to the Marketing and Advertising industry (most likely, they’re agencies).
And shy of 80% of the surveyed companies have less than 50 employees.
If you use content marketing and SEO for your business, we want to invite you to join our exclusive benchmark group called Content Marketing and SEO Benchmarks for All Companies.
Users in the group can anonymously compare their performance with other companies for free. All you have to do is connect your tools to the group (which is also 100% anonymous).
There are currently 8,000+ members and you can search metrics from tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and HubSpot Marketing.
Even if you focus on other channels besides SEO and content marketing, you can still scroll through Benchmark Groups and find the groups most relevant for your marketing efforts. You can find everything from PPC to email marketing.
The data we got from Benchmark Group offers invaluable insights into the performance metrics of companies that use content and SEO across various industries.
We’ll share some of these insights below to help you better understand your own content performance and see how you stack up against others.
Let’s start with sessions.
According to the data provided by the Benchmark Group Content Marketing and SEO Benchmarks for All Companies, there were 4.32k sessions in June 2024 (median, 8791 contributors).
Top performers had 19.69k sessions in the same period (also median) – indicating there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Also, according to the data provided by the same Benchmark Groups, there were 63.64k impressions in June (median, 3282 contributors). Top performers, on the other hand, had 270.58k impressions in the same period (also median)!
There were 1.17k clicks in the same period (median, 3282 contributors). Top performers have more than 4 times more in the same period.
Want more metric insights like this? Join our invite-only Content Marketing and SEO Benchmarks for All Companies and get the data instantly, for no charge.
Aside from our Benchmark Group insights, we also have lots of interesting statistics that we gathered during our survey.
We wanted to know everything from who handles these channels in companies to the formats they will invest in going forward. So, let’s start with the former.
For 67% of respondents, all content marketing and SEO tasks are handled internally by their own employees.
As for the SEO tactics they used in the last 12 months, here’s how our respondents rated them:
When it comes to the ways companies primarily select the keywords they optimize their content around, about 49% of the respondents stated that they use search volume, rank difficulty, and relevance to select their keywords.
Most companies use the following strategies to build links to their content:
According to our respondents’ experience, the highest impact on the rankings and search traffic is ‘ensuring their content matches the user’s search intent’.
Another thing we wanted to know is who these companies classify as “competitors”?
Interestingly, 47% of the respondents consider their actual competitors (who sell similar products and services) as their main “search” competitors.
For 40% of the respondents, the main competitors are Companies outranking them for relevant keywords.
Nowadays, one of the hardest things to do in content marketing is to stand out – especially with so many companies relying on fast content production with AI.
So, how do our respondents do it?
For about 44% of the respondents, the most common or primary way they ensure their content stands out from the competitors is ‘by providing their own unique perspectives or insights’.
What about measuring the success of content marketing and SEO?
For most of our respondents, the best indicators of the content marketing SEO efforts’ success are:
We asked the respondents what percentage of their company’s time spent on content marketing is allocated across several activities. Results show that the most time is spent on Writing.
Most companies included these in at least one piece of their content in the last 12 months:
In order to improve and update their content, most surveyed companies tried the following:
43.70% of the respondents incorporate social media into their content marketing strategy by creating long-form content for SEO and then reformatting and repurposing parts of it for social media sites.
What changes are these companies planning to make in the future in terms of format?
Most companies plan to make more of the following formats in the future:
More than 60% of companies do not plan to do Courses or Curation of other people’s content and 52.94% do not plan to make Podcasts.
We also asked about budget changes – 61.34% of the surveyed companies plan to increase their investment in creating content for SEO in the next 12 months.
What about the use cases for generative AI?
Well, 62.18% of the surveyed companies stated that they use AI for content generation or enhancement (e.g., AI writing tools), while 47.90% use it for keyword research and SEO optimization.
In content marketing and SEO, what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. That’s why marketers are always making new shifts to try and stay ahead.
For the experts we talked to, these are some of the latest shifts they’ve made that had an impact on their SEO performance:
Finding new ways to repurpose content maximizes the value of your existing materials.
When you properly recycle and adapt content, you can reach different audiences across various platforms without the constant need for fresh material.
Cady Wakitsch of Passage Technology said that their company had seen a decrease in traffic even though they were publishing the same amount of content. The most significant shift was finding new ways to repurpose content, such as updating older blogs and republishing them to newsletters and email distributions.
They also said that:
“Higher quality leads still is not, traffic-wise, back to what it was in 2021. But I think that people are staying on the page longer, they’re actually reading it, you know, not bouncing right away. So I think that it’s at least higher quality leads of people who are reading it now.”
Cady Wakitsch
Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Passage Technology
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Devin Kelley of Spreedly also talked about repurposing content and the positive effects they’ve seen with it:
“So probably the most significant shift is repurposing content. Before I arrived, every piece that we built was independent. Now we take a topic, we do the hardest thing first. We don’t build that webinar and another webinar, we spend three pieces of content that came up during the webinar, all out of that motion.
And so, what is that done or what improvement have we seen? We continue to see a positive momentum in ranking more highly but the real focus of that change was not to significantly boost our rankings it was to be to maintain the content production that we have bought while being much more efficient with our time.”
Long-form content is one of the best ways for your company to share in-depth information that builds authority and trust with your audience.
And due to the longer form, you have more room and time for effective persuasion when you create top-notch long-form content.
But how often are you really using it? Could you benefit from increasing long-form content production?
Salvatore Surra of Seamless.AI says that their biggest shift was “moving away from posting a lot of short-form content at a higher frequency to posting longer-form content that is consistent but not as high volume.”
“The content being produced was very repetitive and lacking any new value or information. We spent a lot of time consolidating a ton of content, almost 25% of the low or non-performing content was removed or consolidated into an existing piece to improve its value. If the information was similar to what we had then it was just scraped entirely. Prior to implementing this strategy, the content being posted didn’t see much organic traffic at all, but once the new approach had been executed, indexing of the content went up, rankings improved, and organic traffic started flowing in.”
“The current year-over-year numbers are through the roof at well over 10x the results. The traffic has grown steadily each quarter since and appears to be fairing well through these latest algorithm updates. We feel the strategy is sound and will continue producing high-quality content that adds value with fresh perspectives and original information rather than just copying what’s out there.”
PRO TIP: Want an easier way to track how your long-form content is performing? Check out our free Google Analytics 4 KPI Dashboard. You can track metrics like average session duration, engagement rate, page bounce rate, and more, all from a single dashboard.
Adding a special section just for showcasing customer reviews is always a good way to try and build more trust with future customers.
Reviews act as social proof, and they show that others had good experiences with your product.
Michael Sawyer of Ultimate Kilimanjaro is one of our respondents who talked about using this method:
“We’ve recently added a customer review section titled ‘Clients Love Us’ and incorporate reviews from our clients. There are very few strategies that work better than word of mouth and online testimonials are modern-day word-of-mouth marketing. We currently have 419 reviews, all from clients that have met and climbed with us, and we often get inquiries where people read about another person’s good experience.”
Personal stories make your content more relatable and make your brand feel more human. People can connect with your message much more easily.
What’s more, sharing your own experiences sets your content apart from others by offering unique insights. It’s not a piece of content that anyone can generate with a few AI prompts.
Justin Staples of JS Interactive explains that there’s a “greater demand for originality in content, so infusing the personal experiences of others has helped us achieve more desired results with increased traffic and natural links formed from other companies referencing our content. Really tap into the minds of select individuals with extensive professional experience, and capture their voice and expertise in our content creation.”
Using a priority matrix to figure out which content projects to tackle first helps you focus on what matters most. It makes sure you’re working on the projects that will have the biggest impact and get the best results.
You can sort tasks based on how important and urgent they are, and avoid wasting time on less critical projects.
Teresha Aird of Custom Neon says that “a few months ago, we started using a priority matrix to determine which content/SEO projects get worked on first – prioritized by what will have the highest impact (rankings/conversions/web traffic) while requiring the fewest resources.”
“Previously we were working towards prioritizing the highest impact regardless of the time/resources required. This new prioritization method has meant we get more high-impact content/SEO tasks done in a shorter space of time, instead of investing it all into a single time-consuming piece/task. Even if these aren’t the highest impact pieces/tasks, collectively they have contributed to a larger positive outcome in terms of rankings/web traffic/conversions. There are also the secondary positive outcomes of staff getting satisfaction from ticking off items quicker and then feeling energized to begin the next.”
Generative search experience, constant Google updates, AI content… staying updated with all the latest trends is becoming increasingly more difficult for content marketers.
That’s why we talked to some of the most successful names in the industry to see how they’re navigating these shifts and what they expect to see in the future.
Here’s what they pointed out:
With AI’s ability to quickly churn out content, many marketers are relying on it to speed up TOFU content production. And our respondents think this trend will only get more popular.
Josh Gallant of Backstage SEO even claims that “AI is going to dominate all things TOFU in every industry.”
“Basic informational queries are going to send virtually zero clicks to websites as AI snippets get bigger and better (i.e. Google AI Overviews). The good news is—MOFU and BOFU topics are going to be AI-proof for a while yet. Actual in-market prospects that are building their consideration sets and doing deep product research aren’t going to read one AI overview and be satisfied the same way a person Googling “what is a KPI” would be. Granular jobs-to-be-done and category research topics are the play, in B2B especially.”
Josh Gallant
Founder & SEO Consultant at Backstage SEO
PRO TIP: Are you using Instagram to post your TOFU content and push leads further down the funnel? If so, you should check out our free Instagram Business Post Performance Dashboard. Instead of relying on Meta’s confusing reporting interface, you can connect all your most relevant metrics in one easy-to-understand dashboard for monitoring.
The experience component of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is particularly growing in importance.
With AI tools generating massive amounts of today’s content, experience is one area where you can differentiate and provide a unique perspective.
Steve Jaenke of Digimark talked about this and said that “anyone can create ‘expert’ content now with AI with a simple prompt, for example, ‘You are Tony Robbins. Please create an article about overcoming grief’. Experience is different though. It’s not as easily faked. I think the difference between content that ranks and content that doesn’t will be the experience component.”
It’s still not quite clear how generative search experience will work, but many content marketers are worried that it will lead to SEO becoming less important.
With Google focusing on giving users a quick and direct answer to their questions, business blogs may stop competing for certain keywords if they notice that they’re not bringing any clicks.
Bernie Borges of iQor says that they believe that “SEO is dying.”
“Ok, not literally, but let’s face it. More people are searching on AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more. The search results on Google simply aren’t that good anymore. There is no such thing as page one anymore. SEO as we knew it has been turned upside down. In our business, search is NOT how we get into deals.”
Even when you start implementing the right SEO strategies, you’ll still need to be able to properly measure your performances and results.
And with so many different metrics and KPIs to look out for, it’s becoming harder and harder to only rely on a handful of tools.
We asked our experts how they measure and analyze SEO performance in 2024 and here’s what they shared:
Google’s native SEO tools are an indispensable part of any modern marketer’s toolkit.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide comprehensive insights into website traffic, user behavior, and search engine rankings. Without their data, it’s nearly impossible to make smart decisions, hit goals, and improve your SEO efforts.
Nayeli Vivas of FiveRings Marketing shared their approach to measuring SEO performances with these tools:
“We use GA4 to track our website’s traffic sources, user engagement, and conversions from organic searches, among other important metrics. We analyze these trends to adjust our strategies as needed. Google Search Console provides additional insights into keyword rankings and site health. We also track inbound leads across all marketing channels to evaluate our success.”
PRO TIP: Do you rely on Google Analytics 4 to track traffic data, but are still confused by the complex interface? You can simplify the entire process by downloading our free Google Analytics 4 Website Traffic Dashboard. Keep track of all your key marketing metrics from one place, no need to juggle through dozens of GA4 reports anymore.
A comprehensive analytics approach means using a variety of tools to capture all the relevant SEO data and get a full picture of how your website is performing.
Georges Fallah of VBOUT shared that “to effectively monitor and evaluate the performance of our SEO strategies, we employ a comprehensive analytics approach.”
“This includes regular tracking of both total and unique traffic to our existing pages and articles, as well as key engagement metrics such as average session duration and conversion rates from these pages.
Additionally, we closely monitor search volume and traffic trends for queries related to our business. This data not only informs our understanding of current performance but also guides the development of future content. By analyzing these metrics, we can identify successful strategies and areas for improvement, ensuring that our SEO efforts are both effective and efficient.”
Dashboard software tools can pull data from different sources into one easy-to-use interface, letting you track key metrics in real-time and from a single place.
With dashboard software, you can easily spot trends, see how your SEO strategies are working, and find areas that need improvement.
Michael Pyndus of BrandExtract shared how dashboard software has been helpful for his team:
“We build specialized dashboards that help us monitor our content performance as well as keyword positions. These dashboards pull in data from many great tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and even SEO tools like Semrush.”
You don’t have to track all metrics, at all times. Instead, a better plan is to prioritize certain goals depending on where you are with your campaign.
Here’s how Austin Mullins of Conversion Media does it:
“At the beginning of a given campaign, we’re focused on input goals – are we producing high-quality content at the rate we’d planned on, it is well-formatted and designed, and are we securing the quality and quantity of links to it we’d hoped for.
If so, then we begin to look for traffic and keyword ranking growth. Then, finally, we start to track conversions. This includes both mid-funnel conversions (like people using our gated free tools or downloading free assets), and bottom-of-funnel goals (typically demos, trial sign-ups, or purchases).”
Content marketing and SEO have never been more difficult and competitive – but with the right strategies and methods, you can still outperform most of your competition.
There’s just one thing… even when you implement the proper strategies, you’ll still need to measure your performance and make sure each area is optimized.
This is where Databox Dashboards come in.
With Databox, you can centralize all your marketing data from 100+ integrations, including Google Analytics, HubSpot, Facebook Ads, and more, into one customizable dashboard. This means no more juggling multiple tools or spending hours on manual reporting.
Everything you need is in one place, updated in real-time.
Not only can you visualize your performance metrics with ease using drag-and-drop functionality, but you can also create detailed reports and share them seamlessly across your team. Whether it’s through email, Slack, or even streaming directly to a smart TV, Databox ensures that everyone stays informed.
The benefits don’t end there. With features like drill-downs, you can dive deeper into specific data points to uncover hidden insights.
And if benchmarking is part of your strategy, Databox allows you to compare your performance against industry standards effortlessly with Benchmark Groups.
Sign up for a free trial today and see how easy it is to turn your marketing data into actionable insights and drive your business forward.
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Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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