Developing high-quality content to drive better results on search engines is the most important SEO issue to address this year for enterprise marketers, according to a new report published by SEO Clarity, North Star Inbound and Buzzstream. The study aimed to uncover the latest trends and determine exactly where marketers are driving the most return on investment.
SEO remains a core activity for enterprise marketers, as almost half are spending more than $20,000 (£15,466) every month on SEO. Technical SEO, which is defined as the activities that improve how search engines crawl a web page and index content, is generally the main focus for enterprises, ahead of content development and traffic analysis.
However, the growing demand for high-quality content and its importance for driving better SEO results on Google and other search engines means that content development is the most pressing issue for 45.5 per cent of marketers this year, placing it way ahead of mobile optimisation (30.3 per cent), optimising user experience (24.8 per cent) and implementing voice search (22.1 per cent).
The study also suggests that marketers are maturing in their approach to content campaigns, as 83.7 per cent now make decisions about what to create or optimise after completing research on keywords. The majority are also eager to tap into important topics in their respective industries when creating engaging written articles and videos, and almost a third look at highly ranked pages from competitors to inform creative.
The latest report is yet another indicator about how B2B enterprise marketers are doubling down on content to drive the results that they need for their business. A study published by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs earlier this year found that the majority of marketers are now either “very committed” or “extremely committed” to content marketing.
The ROI for content campaigns is also improving, as 54 per cent of marketers said that they are enjoying either “somewhat more” or “much more” success in their endeavours compared to 12 months ago. The improvement is mainly being driven by a better optimised content creation process and strategy development, both of which can be aided by working with a digital agency.
