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Great content is only half the battle
Well done! You’ve written some great content, in fact, you’ve been knocking it out of the park for some time. Everyone you’ve spoken to internally is raving about how good your content is – you’ve smashed it. Not only is the content astounding, but you’ve also made sure to optimise it for SEO. You’ve got all your H tags in place. Your keyword density is great and you’ve even got your metadata and slug spot on. But what about content performance?
Despite all the praise and self-congratulation, you won’t know how well your content is performing if you aren’t measuring it. The end of the year is the best time to review your content. However, if you were too time-strapped to do an end-of-year review, there really is no time like the present!
What to measure
What you need to measure content performance will be determined by the key goals for the business and the primary objectives of your content. Whilst sales and leads are typically the most crucial metrics, it’s also important to consider other indicators such as:
Organic Traffic Levels
Good content, combined with good SEO should see an increase in your organic traffic levels. Have yours increased? If you’re not sure, then use the current measurement as a benchmark and look to increase this over the next quarter.
Keyword Ranking
Your content needs to appeal to your key readers, but it also needs to be seen by search engines too. If it is optimised for search engines, then, over time, you will see your web pages climbing through the ranks for your chosen keywords.
However, if your chosen keywords are not ranked on page one, one thing to check is that you have chosen the right keywords. They may be the perfect ones for your business, but also for everyone else’s – meaning you’re fighting in a very crowded market. Are there keywords that are more specific that you can truly own?
Engagement Rates
Not only do you want to attract people to your content, but you want them to actually read. Low engagement rates indicate that people are leaving your page as quickly as they arrive! Not only does that mean that they are not reading your content, but search engines will penalise that too.
Low engagement rates can suggest to search engines that you have somehow ‘misled’ people to get them to your page. That the content itself isn’t relevant and doesn’t really answer the query they had! Which will dramatically shift (in the wrong direction) your keyword rankings!
Call to Action
Every piece of content you publish should have some form of call to action (CTA). A clear instruction of how and why your reader can get in touch with you, and this can and should be measured. How often is the CTA completed? Are certain topics or styles of post performing better than others? Is one CTA converting more than the others? And if you can’t measure this because you don’t include a CTA, then this can be the first update you make for your content strategy in 2024.
Content Performance: Data creates insights, which drive action
The key reason for measuring is to gather data. Data that will provide you with insights into the effectiveness of your content. From these insights, you can take action, whether that’s improving your current strategy, or continuing with your existing approach.
So, make sure you stop, take stock and measure how effective your content has been.
However, if you are time-strapped, being pulled in all directions and can’t get to it. Or, it all feels a bit daunting and you want a helping hand, contact us. We can take this weight off your shoulders, act as an extension of your marketing team and do it all for you.
Or you can read our Content Marketing FAQs
If you’re measuring your content performance already and it isn’t performing the way you want it to, then we can help. Book a free Content Teardown with us and we will review your content against our Kick-Ass Content Methodology and come back to you with tips and tricks for improvement.