Originality, relevance, and knowing your audience are core considerations for making engaging content, though myriad criteria such as length, visual elements, and technical factors play important roles in the formula for content marketing success.
That’s where our research comes in. We conducted extensive research to identify the key patterns of successful content that ranks and generates organic traffic.
Methodology
Focusing solely on organic traffic, we analyzed the visits, backlinks, and Facebook shares of 500K high-performing blogs that had 30-500K monthly views in 2021 to uncover several revealing patterns and characteristics. In our State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, we share several key factors for content creators to consider when designing and producing their content in 2022. In particular:
- Headlines (types, H1 length, and specific word choice)
- Structure (heading depth, list presence, and overall complexity)
- Visual content (the presence of images and video in numbers)
- Article quality and topic coverage (considerations for user intent, article length, and offering unique value)
Our research takes a generic approach to analyzing the data behind top-performing organic content. While our research cannot confirm that these findings are applicable and hold true for every industry, they serve as insightful guidelines that content marketers can apply to their strategy for 2022.
Here’s the summary of our findings:
