Sonja
2022 was a great year for SEO content writing, but we can make 2023 even better! Hindsight is 2020 (or…2022?) and we’re ready to take a look at what happened in the world of SEO this year. Here are some of the most important content writing statistics that you need to know for 2023!
Blogging and Content Writing Statistics
1. 8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog readers. That’s a huge number– in the US alone, there are 307 million internet users. If 80% of them are reading blogs, that’s a potential audience of more than 245 million people.
2. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more sales than those that don’t.
3. SEO writing can give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links.
4. Articles with images get 94% more total views. You can use stock photos or other stock images; images are easy to add and are a small amount of effort for a major return.
5. Pages ranked in the top 10 results for any keyword have an average of 1,890 words, prioritizing long-form content.
6. Brands that post 16 or more blog posts each month generate 450% more leads than brands with 4 posts or fewer.
7. An average of 3.2 million blog posts are created each day. Many of these are generic and receive little traffic. To set yours apart, focus on keywords and building links to end up higher in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs). Statistic pages, like this content-writing statistics blog, are a great place to start.
Trends
8. Blog writing for SEO is huge for sales – 71% of B2B buyers consume blog content during the buying process. If you can write about your product and provide how-to guides to using it, you will likely see sales improvements.
9. Longer blogs are doing well. The optimal length for a blog post is in the 2,250 – 2,500 word count range. Too much longer than that and people lose interest. Most people scan blogs, so make sure that yours are easy to read and broken into small, mobile-friendly blocks of text.
10. Site design is important; around 38% of users will not interact with a poorly-designed site.
11. SEO content writing is more attractive than email; 61% of Americans spend three times more time-consuming blog content than email content. Users seek out blog content, but often regard email as spam.
Industry Data
12. Up to 93% of all online experiences begin with a search. Usually, this is in a search engine; however, a lot of product research searches begin on Amazon.
13. 96% of mobile search traffic comes from Google.
14. Google holds 86.5% of the overall search engine share in the US.
15. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results; while most people will click on the top two or three search engine results, those first few slots are crucial.
16. 0.63% of Google searchers clicked on something from the second page. That’s less than 1% of users.
17. The #1 result in Google gets 27.6% of all clicks. You want to aim for this top spot!
What’s “In” Right Now
18. 76% of bloggers published a how-to guide in the past year. How-to guides are some of the top blog posts, with half of BuzzSumo’s top headlines being instructional posts.
19. Product blogs are hot; 60% of consumers say that they were influenced by a blog post about the product.
20. Readers love numbered lists; when you put a number in the title, your blog post gets an average of 18.62% more social engagement.
What Works… And What Doesn’t
21. Backlinks are working. The first website on Google has 3.8 times more backlinks on average than the sites in the 2nd to 10th positions.
22. Sponsored content is not working – at least 80% of people say they skip sponsored links, while another metric had 99% of people reporting that they skipped or ignored Facebook and Youtube ads.
23. Longer blogs are working. Blogs with a word length of 2500+ get shared the most on social media.
24. Paid ad networks are not working – 42.7% of internet users have ad-blocking software. This includes ad blockers on desktop and mobile devices, including tablets.
25. Images in your blog posts are working; 60% of consumers are more likely to consider a business when an image shows up in local search results
26. Content audits are working – 65% of companies who say their content marketing is very successful do content audits more than twice a year.
Halfway through our list of 2023 content writing statistics!
Copy and content writing for SEO statistics
27. 36.3% of SEO professionals spend the majority of their time on keyword research.
28. 21% of individual bloggers spend 2-3 hours per post.
29. “Listicles” receive 80% more page views than other content marketing types.
30. Lists in general are helpful; blog posts with at least one list every 500 words get 70% more traffic than those without lists.
31. Including a personalized call to action in your blog post increases your conversion chances by 202%.
32. But don’t get too pushy with those CTAs! Pages with one CTA link have an average conversion rate of 13.5%, but additional links lower that rate.
Social Copy for SEO
33. SEO writing drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
34. About 70% of Americans regularly use social media. This includes data across all
demographics.
35. Facebook is the leading marketing site for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and B2C marketers.
36. Social copy and social proofs are extremely important for small businesses, but the best way to get social traffic is to claim your Google My Business page. This alone comprises a quarter of the ranking signals for Google’s local SEO stats.
37. Images are very important for social copy and social media. Marketers use visual assets like images, infographics, stock photography, and even videos in their social media marketing 80% of the time.
What Changed in 2022 for Content Writing
39. Meta descriptions became even more important; around 75% of the top websites actively use meta descriptions.
40. Predictive SEO writing became more popular than evergreen content; predictive blogs with titles like “The Future of…” outperformed other types of content.
41. Mobile blog traffic is up; 54.4% of all website traffic worldwide is from mobile devices, up 2% from last year.
Google Search Patterns
42. Over 70% of marketers believed that using good keywords is the best strategy for SEO
43. Voice search is becoming more important; 55% of users use voice search (which usually uses natural language for the search terms)
2022’s Hot Keywords
According to Google, these were the top keywords of 2022.
44. General Search: Wordle, India vs England, Ukraine, Queen Elizabeth, Ind vs SA
45. News: Ukraine, Queen Elizabeth passing, Election results, Powerball numbers, Monkeypox
46. Athletes: Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, Manti Te’o, Shaun White
47. People: Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Amber Heard, Vladimir Putin, Chris Rock
48. Places: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, The Great Pyramid of Giza, Christ the Redeemer, Royal palace of Brussels
2022’s Keyword Trends
49. 50% of all web searches used strings of four words or longer, so embrace those long-tail keywords!
50. Local searches have gone up; the terms “Where to buy” and “near me” increased 200% over the past two years and search queries for “(store) near me” have grown 250% over the same two years.
That’s all folks, the ultimate list of content writing statistics for 2023!
Are you realizing that you may need some help with blogging? That’s what we’re here for.
