7 Best Ways to Measure and Improve Content Performance
Your content is critical to the success of your website. Don’t create, post, and hope for the best. Monitor your content to understand how your website is performing. Give it the best chance of success, and gain valuable insights to inform your future content creation.
Thankfully, we have ways to improve content performance in all the main areas. The most useful metrics to measure and improve content performance are:
Website traffic
Bounce rate
Time on site
Keyword rankings
Conversions
Social media engagement
Email opens
Everyone wants to improve their content performance. If you want to improve something, you need to measure it. Follow this guide step by step for better performing content and measurable results.
1. Low Traffic
How to measure website traffic:Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics for solid figures on how many people visit your site. Nobody does analytics like Google. Using this tool will help you achieve better search rankings because Google Analytics will not only tell you how many people are using your site, but also what pages they view, how long they stay, where they live, what sites they came from, and much more.
How to improve website traffic:
Share your content
Creating a useful, well-written blog post relevant to your audience is critical, but it’s not the end. To get results, spend as much time sharing and promoting your post as creating it. There is a lot of competition out there. Digital legwork helps people notice what you’ve done.
Use social media
Make the most of your social platforms. Tell all your networks about your post. And do so more than once for each blog post, finding new ways to reference it each time. Comment on relevant blogs and link to your blog post so people can access your more in-depth answer to an issue.
Leverage your mailing list
Now is also the time to use your mailing list. Tell your subscribers every time you have a new blog post. If they have signed up for more information from you, you will be doing them a service by letting them know you have more useful content for them.
Optimize your content
In addition to using as many creative ways as you can to spread the word about your blog post, optimizing the content will also increase traffic. Spend extra time on the headline. If it doesn’t engage people, they will never click, regardless of how good the content is.
Consider breaking your post into subheadings, which makes it easier to scan and absorb the information. And try using professional quality imagery to get people’s attention. It will reassure visitors that you care about your content and suggest that they should too.
2. High Bounce rate
How to measure bounce rate: Google Analytics
Your bounce rate tells you how many people look at your website only to hit the back button and return to the SERP almost immediately. This is a sign that people are not finding what they want. The content may be irrelevant to them. They may not find a sufficient answer to their problem. Whatever the reason, Google will take this as a sign that your site is not satisfying people. You are likely to lose position in rankings as a result.
How to improve bounce rate:
Reduce page-loading times
To lower your bounce rate, you need to make sure that your content is quick off the mark. Attention spans are shortening. If patience appears to be at an all-time low, it’s partly because there is so much choice. If you don’t fulfill users needs quickly, they will go elsewhere.
Use clear formatting
Convey your information quickly using clear, engaging subheadings. Format your text so that your content’s structure is easy to navigate and scan. Bullet points help convey information fast.
Encourage people to read for longer by breaking the text up with relevant images. Be careful that images do not repeat the text, but complement or reinforce it. Other multimedia tools, such as video and audio, can also encourage people to stay on your page longer.
Start a dialogue
Your website is an excellent opportunity for two-way communication. Ask questions. Encourage users to participate in a conversation. When you receive comments, be polite, enthusiastic, and respond promptly.
3. Poor time on site
How to measure time-on-site: Google Analytics
Not only will Google Analytics tell you which pages receive the most views, but it will also inform you how well you retain users. If you can increase how long people spend on your site, you increase the chance that they will convert. You will have more monetization opportunities and it signals Google that your site is useful.
How to improve time-on-site:
Interlink articles
One of the issues with developing content that users can digest quickly is that people may not stay o your page very long! You can mitigate this issue by inter-linking your articles. This way, you can entice visitors to look at other posts that match their interests and needs.
Tempting users to navigate topic clusters on your site sends a clear signal to Google that what you are doing is working. To do this, create a pillar page covering a wide range of topics in which a user may be interested. From this post, link to cluster pages that cover those topics in more depth.
Improve page-loading speeds
Also consider the mechanics of your website. If it takes users too long to load pages , you may lose them, even though they were interested in your offering. Give your website a tune-up to ensure that the pages are loading quickly and correctly.
4. Poor Keyword rankings
How to measure keyword rankings: Google Search Console Queries Report
Not ranking well for your chosen keywords? Google designed its Search Console Queries Report to give users keyword data with which to make better, informed decisions. Use this tool to learn more about four important metrics:
Impressions – this is how many times a URL from your site appeared organically in users’ search results.
Clicks – this tells you how many times people clicked on your URL when it appeared on Google’s search results.
Average position – Your URL is likely to appear in different positions for different searches. Google calculates your average ranking across searches.
Click-through rate – This is a handy figure that tells you how successfully you are getting users to click on your URL when it appears. The formula is clicks / impressions * 100.
How to improve keyword rankings:
Revise your content
To achieve better rankings for a keyword, consider whether you have gone into enough detail. Is your content the most useful, comprehensive content out there? If not, delve deeper and give it another draft. Don’t make content longer for the sake of it. Make sure to offer value throughout and cover areas your competitors lack.
Check your keyword usage
Users make fast decisions about where they need to click to find the information they seek. Help them by optimizing your title so that it contains the relevant keywords. This will also assure them they will get what they need from your site.
Using the keywords in your content is a given, but make sure that those keywords also appear in your subheaders, as naturally as possible. This tells Google your content is appropriate for users seeking content related to keywords.
Include semantically-related keywords
Using semantically-related keywords will give your content more depth. It will show both users and Google that your site is covering a topic thoroughly. It also casts a wider net, attracting users using multiple search terms.
5. Low conversions
How to measure conversions: Google Analytics Goals
Achieving high traffic is great for self-esteem, but it won’t necessarily do anything for your business unless those visitors are also performing the actions you desire. Whether you want them to download a free ebook, sign up to an email list, buy a product, or anything else, measure your goal to improve content performance.
Google Analytics Goals gives shows you how many people are completing an activity that contributes to your business success. Measuring traffic is useful, but you can improve content performance by measuring how people behave in relation to your website goals. This step will put you ahead of much of the competition.
How to improve conversions:
You’ve built your traffic, but the job is not over. Now you need to help users do what you want them to. Here’s how.
Make sure you have a CTA
People like to be told what you expect. They are often happy to interact with your website if you make it clear how you wish them to do so. Whether you want people to comment, share a page, or subscribe, you should achieve more success if you tell people with a clear call to action.
Review your CTA
The wording, placement, and look of your call to action can have a big impact on user behavior. If you experience low conversions, try changing your CTA. Put it in a different place on the page. Put it on a different page. Change the size or color. Use an image.
Consider making one change at a time. Measure the ongoing results using Google Analytics Goals. Keep tweaking one element at a time to approach the best arrangement for you and your site.
Include or improve trust factors - EAT
It pays dividends to demonstrate Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Aside from potentially impressing Google, which tends to be good for business, it will encourage people to perform actions on your website.
Improve your EAT by attracting links from reputable websites, creating excellent quality content with referenced sources, and remaining contactable online.
6. Weak social media engagement
How to measure social media engagement: Google Analytics + platform-specific measuring
Social media helps you be in the right place at the right time: all the time. Like every other aspect of your business that’s important to your success, it’s not enough to show up. Measure your results to learn how you are doing with social media and you could use do better. As well as measuring your social media performance, in general, using brand tracking via Google Analytics, take advantage of social media tools for measuring the effectiveness of specific campaigns.
How to improve social media engagement:
Be specific – As ever, ensure that you are clear about your social media goals. Being specific will help you measure your success and pinpoint areas to improve. Potential goals include:
Building awareness – measure volume and exposure
Increasing engagement – measure shares and comments
Building traffic – track URL shares and clicks
Take your time –Remember to measure performance over time. The more consistent the performance data you gather, the more you can learn and develop your social media presence over time. You may not achieve instant results, but be persistent and will start to see the curve change.
Understand your ideal customer
Improving your social media performance requires time, effort, and consistency. Pro-actively begin conversations that are meaningful to your visitors. Address their pain points and empathize to demonstrate that you understand their needs and desires. When you understand your customer, engaging them is easier.
Respond promptly
One of the benefits of social media is that it allows instantaneous communication with people all around the world. Understand this advantage and ensure to reply promptly to any message to your business.
7. Poor email open and click-through rates.
How to measure email campaigns: Platform-specific tracking
When is the time to measure and track your mailing list performance? As soon as you send your first message. Make the most of mailing list providers’ proprietary tracking tools.
MailChimp, for example, collects a lot of data, providing as much context as any user needs to monitor the performance of a mailing list over time. Look out for open rates and their comparison to other businesses’ open rates. These give you a benchmark for your mailing list performance. Also keep an eye on click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribes, which are among the most useful metrics for monitoring and improving your content performance.
How to improve email campaigns:
Keep your list clean
A mailing list requires regular maintenance. Remove defunct addresses regularly. To ensure your content matches your subscribers’ needs, you may need to remove some subscribers or you may need to modify your content.
Perfect your timing
Your mailing system will likely suggest the times of day and days of the week that achieve the most opens and clicks. For example, sending your mailing in the early hours of the morning may not generate as many views and subsequent opens as timing your mailing to hit email inboxes at key times during the workday.
Stun them with the subject
Like optimizing your headline, your mailing’s subject needs to attract attention and generate interest. Avoid gimmicks, but don’t be afraid to make bold claims if you can back them up. In many cases, the subject line is all that determines whether someone clicks now or never. Make it now.
Nail the CTA
Once a user has clicked on your content and read it, don’t let them disappear without a trace. Remember that your content serves a purpose for your visitors and for your business. Make your content work for you by telling your readers what you want them to do.
Create interest in the content
Promote your mailing list content before, during, and after every mailing. Promoting your content need never stop. Create continual interest by talking it up and creating conversations on social media.
Address a pain point
People receive a lot of emails. You will be more likely to get attention if your email speaks directly to your recipient. To do this, go out of your way to understand what he or she needs. Then provide it, fast.
Conclusion
Creating excellent content isn’t over when the typing stops. Once you have created quality blog content, it’s time to measure and improve it. Measure key metrics using powerful tools like Google Analytics to tell you how your pages are performing. Even if the results are better than you expected, take action to improve them further. The next time you create a blog post, use what you learned the last time. See how its performance measures up to previous posts.
Blog content is an evolving activity involving many moving parts. With a consistent, professional attitude, you will improve content performance. For more information about measuring and improving blog content, or for some hands-on help, get in touch with Blog Hands.
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