Your website is the foundation of your digital presence, with design and content coming together to reflect your brand. Ongoing content marketing can drive traffic to your site and provide information to visitors that helps them become self-qualified leads. Each piece of content on your website, whether that’s a blog post or a product page, presents an opportunity to connect with your audience. But how do you know if you’re hitting the mark?
When it comes to content marketing, one of the most important things to consider is how you’ll evaluate the impact of your efforts. Fortunately, thanks to free tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, you can know how your content is performing instead of guessing.
In this article, we’ll cover the top content marketing metrics you should track, and what insights you can glean from the data.
#1: Organic Traffic
One of the first metrics you’ll want to examine is organic traffic. Organic traffic demonstrates how much visibility your content has on the SERP (search engine results page).
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is the segment of users that naturally arrive at your website after using a search engine.
How Do You Measure Organic Traffic?
Measuring organic traffic is simple. You can filter your website traffic by channel through Google Analytics, isolating traffic coming in from organic search. Typically, organic traffic is measured by users and sessions. Users are the actual visitors or people that arrive at your site, whereas sessions are the unique instance in which a user visits your site.
Once you’ve zeroed in on organic traffic, you can apply additional filters. All within Google Analytics, you can see how many organic visitors are new versus existing, what page they’re arriving from, and more.
#2: Time on Site
Even if your website is increasing your organic reach, traffic alone is not enough to indicate the success of your content strategy. Clicks without context can be impressive, but they don’t necessarily result in meaningful engagement. Analyzing how much time users spend on your site can indicate whether or not your content resonates with visitors. Time on site is the average amount of time users spend across your site in totality in a single session. Time on page allows you to isolate individual pages or posts.
Both metrics help you understand whether or not the keywords you are targeting are drawing in the right audience for your business goals. Even if your content strategy successfully generates traffic, you need to consider if that traffic leads to meaningful interactions.
#3: Conversion Rates
The primary goal of content marketing is to drive qualified leads to your website. It’s not about simply flooding your website with visitors—you want those visitors to take a specific action. To measure this, you can use conversion rates.
To calculate the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to your website. Conversions can vary depending on your unique goals and sales funnel. Common conversions may include tracking contacts captured, certain amounts of time a user spends on particular pages, and clicks.
You can measure the conversion rate for any desired action you want your website visitors to take.
#4: Keyword Rankings
To drive organic traffic to your website, you need to rank for effective keywords to drive your business goals forward. There are two key things to keep in mind when measuring your keyword rankings:
- Keyword difficulty: This is the measurement of how difficult it is to rank in Google’s organic search results for specific keywords. Understanding keyword difficulty can help you build the right strategy. Usually, you’ll want to work toward more difficult keywords over time.
- Keyword positions: You must continually monitor your rankings for your target keywords. Rankings can change over time, and understanding your position will help you correlate this to other trends, such as conversion rates.
#5: Domain Authority
The stronger your domain authority, the easier it is for you to rank for important keywords. When measuring your website’s domain authority, start by looking at the overall domain rating, which shows the strength of your website’s overall backlink profile. Backlinks are do-follow links that point from other websites to your website. You can analyze the overall health of your site and focus on domain authority using online tools like Moz or Ahrefs.
Additionally, you can use these tools to measure individual URL ratings, which indicates how strong a backlink profile is for a specific webpage.
Combined, these metrics help you understand how well your backlink strategy is performing and can give you insights into why specific pages continue to rank poorly for keywords.
Set Goals, Measure, & Track Your Success
With dozens of metrics to consider, it can be difficult to zero in on what’s most important to examine. Whether you’re a beginner getting ready to publish your first blog post, or you’re a seasoned content marketing expert, there’s a lot to consider — let us be your second set of eyes.
At 434 Marketing, we believe marketing decisions can be and should be backed by data — and that’s one reason we specialize content marketing. We help our clients identify key moments in their target audience’s buying journey and craft content strategies to meet users’ needs.
Interested in a free consultation?
