Sharing our experience — how we helped the global project Careerist analyze blog effectiveness, optimize content strategy and drive more traffic and sales in the US market.
Hello! SEOWORK team here — data geeks, developing an analytics SEO-platform. In the beggining of this year, the team of ambitious EdTech startup Careerist approached us with a request to help identify areas of growth and optimize the content strategy for their blog, which accounted for a significant portion of their traffic and converted into sales. We love such tasks, especially since our platform allows us not only to analyze the current situation and implementations but also to run SEO tests and check hypotheses before scaling up.
Why do we care?
Careerist is an EdTech startup with monthly revenue of $1.5M, it successfully entered the global market and has strong positions in the US market. At its website the company offers programs for young professionals who plan to build a career in IT. In addition, the company site also has a blog. The blog helps readers understand what is going on in the markets, decide on a course of study and so on.
Blog articles not only generate interest in the company’s main product, but also attract organic traffic from search engines and convert it into leads. Maintaining such a blog is not cheap for the company, and the cost of authors’ services rises several times over in case of creation expert content. In such a situation, it is important to be sure that the content strategy is optimal and that investments in it work off as much as possible.
- How to evaluate the effectiveness of the content and identify possible points of growth?
- On what topics of articles is it worth to focus?
- What length of the texts is optimal?
- Are all the authors effective and is it worth investing in involving readers in the discussion of the materials?
Let’s see what answers we got to these questions.
What to write about?
For the first we decided to figure out what topics are the most popular among the readers and how they are ranked.
As we can see, keywords on the Job Market topic are quite popular in terms of search volume. The visibility of such articles is also high, so the team will continue to publish materials on this topic.
There was also a significant search volume on the theme Advice, but the visibility of these articles was very low, indicating the need to place more content on this topic and its optimization. According to analysis it can increase the visibility of the resource at least two times.
Long-read or 3 minutes for reading?
Definitely the length of the article texts does matter. But how much? Are expert long-reads so interesting for readers? Maybe we should focus on short publications and thus reduce the cost of copywriting?
Using the SEOWORK platform, the team tested hypothesis by comparing the effectiveness of pages with different text lengths. As a result, we found out that long-reads (over 15 thousand characters) are not popular, but short articles (up to 10 thousand characters) are not so effective either. The optimal length of an article is between 10-15 thousand characters — the visibility of such articles is at least 20% higher.
What is about links and reader comments?
Do such attributes of articles as links and readers’ comments matter? Should it be “must” for the authors and how much should the community manager involve the community in the discussion of articles?
Let’s explore!
Authors often link to external sources in their articles, and the number of such links can reach and even be more than a dozen.
Does it affect visibility? And how?
Let’s look at the analytics. As you can see on the chart, articles with a large number of links (more than 9) perform poorly.
It is optimal to place articles without external links or – if you add links, then from 3 to 9 external links, this will increase search visibility by at least 25%.
Sometimes readers leave comments on article pages. Is it worth actively working with the community and further involving readers in the discussion of articles? It seems that this should have a positive effect on visibility in search results. But can we confirm this with figures?
At the time of our analysis, we did not have enough data to confidently answer this question, so we decided to run an experiment.
Experiment
Careerist team selected several articles and asked the readers to share their thoughts in the comments on social networks and newsletters.
The result
We have been monitoring the changes in the visibility of pages with new comments in SEOWORK. The platform allowed us to create group of such webpages – very convenient for testing hypotheses, and we used it to evaluate the results. We compared the visibility of a group of articles with comments with the visibility of the control group (blog articles without feedback from readers).
The graph confirms that comments are important and increase visibility by at least three times (!!!). Obviously, it is worth stepping up and motivating readers to leave feedback.
Author efficiency
Creating content is not cheap, creating expert content, even in English, can be several times more expensive.
Several teams and copywriters are engaged in writing articles for the blog, and we decided to check whether there is any difference in the efficiency of the content they create. We were pleased with the result – we did not find any significant differences, and that meant that all the authors met our expectations and generated great content.
What was the result?
Thanks to the cooperation with SEOWORK platform, the Careerist team adjusted its content strategy:
- prioritized the preparation of articles on certain topics,
- began generating content in accordance with the updated requirements,
- tested the hypothesis and launched a more active work with readers.
The progress was also evaluated with SEOWORK platform and the team noticed an improvement in the visibility of pages with updated content in the range of 30% and a steady increase in search traffic from the blog.
The SEOWORK analytics platform has provided us with the analytics we need to make data-driven decisions. We may evaluate the impact of our content on search visibility and ranking, and we understand what we may improve to grow. Our first steps with SEOWORK are already showing good results, which means we are on the right track.
Max G, CTO/Co-founder Careerist
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