Content performance
How do we measure our SEO content performance and relate them back to our business goals. Measuring the performance
of your content is essential to determining the success of your SEO efforts.
Measuring reporting and tweaking your SEO effects will enable you to plan your
future content strategies. By looking at how your content performs, you'll be
able to understand what your visitors want, and provide more of it to them in
the future.
These questions are important
to improving your content and SEO strategy:
-- What content are our visitors viewing?
-- What is garnering the most views?
-- Are our visitors engaged with our content?
-- Are our visitors sharing our content with others?
-- Is our content generating quality business results?
If you haven't already, you can install a free tool, like Google Analytics, to
collect data that you'll need to help you get the answers to these questions.
-- What is garnering the most views?
-- Are our visitors engaged with our content?
-- Are our visitors sharing our content with others?
-- Is our content generating quality business results?
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First, figuring out what our
customers are looking at can be measured by simple page views. In Google
Analytics, you can head over to the Content reports, and you'll see a list of
the most popular pages of your website for the date range you're looking at. If
you want to find out which were your most popular pages as Landing Pages, or
the first page a visitor sees when they come to your site, you can head over to
the Landing Pages report.
If you're an advanced user,
you can even use Custom Segments to look at only visits that came from organic
search, or even specific search engines. While it's good to know which pieces
of content got the most page views, that doesn't tell us anything about how
well the content was received? Writing content is easy, but writing content
that will provide value and leave an impression on your visitors is much more
difficult, and that's what we're interested. We want to find out about visitor
engagement.
There are three metrics that can help you quickly tell how well visitors are engaging with your content: pages per visit, average time on site, and bounce rate.
There are three metrics that can help you quickly tell how well visitors are engaging with your content: pages per visit, average time on site, and bounce rate.
Visitors are considered more
engaged the longer each of the stay on your web page. This can be measured by
both average time on site, and the number of pages they view during their
visit.
The bounce rate is a measure
of how often a visitor lands on your website and then leaves without seeing any
other page of the site. Generally speaking, the lower the bounce rate, the more
your visitors were enticed by your content to dive deeper into your site.
Next, let's look at whether or
not our content is being shared online.
You can use a slew of social
media tools to measure how often your tweets and posts and pluses and shares
are re- shared throughout your social networks, tools like Google Analytics can
also be configured to track interactions that are happening both on and off
your site. Google Analytics can track how many times people are clicking your
social media sharing buttons, or leaving comments on your blog, and it can even
go out and find the public posts across a number of different social networks
that have been used to share content from your site.
You can use campaign tagging
and Google Analytics Traffic Sources reports to see how many of your visits are
coming from all of the sharing. Perhaps the most important question of all is
whether or not all of this content production is driving our business goals. A
properly configured web analytics tool is focused not just on counting pages,
but associating all of that data with business outcomes. Do the visitors who
came to our site as a result of particular piece of content end up buying
something? Calling us? Did they submit a lead form or download a white paper?
Did they sign-up for a product demonstration? Did they follow us on a social
network, or did they share our content with others? Did they sign up for our
newsletter? Each and every one of these goals has a real business value.
By understanding what content
drives these conversion actions, we can answer the biggest question of all:
What did we get back for our investment in SEO? Whether you use Google
Analytics or any other analytics tool, monitoring and measuring the performance
of your content will help you understand the value you're creating and help you
plan for and continually improve the content you'll be focusing on next.
Steve Steinberger
561-281-8330
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