How can you tell if your blogs are working? After an effort of brainstorming for topics, writing, editing, and promoting, you cannot help but wonder if your blogs are working or attracting visitors. Crafting and posting blogs with captivating and informative content is an effective way to attract visitors. And that is one of the many goals – to attract viewers or readers who will become leads.
While it is essential to focus on the quality of your blog content, ensuring that these blogs attract and retain viewers is equally important. However, measuring the success of your blogs can be confusing and difficult to handle. What exact metrics should you consider? What numbers are most important? Figuring out which measurements are most vital and prioritizing them will help you ensure that your blogs are all performing at the top of the industry standards.
Whether you are launching a new construction blog or making sure your content performs successfully, there are a handful of things you should always look up to measure your success. Read more below.
Get Started with the Basics
1. Measure Social Media Engagement
It is expected that you should always promote your blog posts on social media. There are many options, but today, some of the most popular social media channels are Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Look at the number of likes and shares every post obtains. This is another effective way to measure the success of your content. If time permits, you must do some digging to see how these shares perform. For instance, if a popular industry influencer shares your posts with his social media accounts and gets many likes, you should want to know this.
Assessing social media performance is a great way to decide what to blog next.
2. Set Goals and Measure Overall Growth
You must be tracking the growth of your blogs over time. If you are about to launch a blog, set proper blog goals for growth, like a ten percent increase in visitors in the first three months and twice as many visitors per month. Getting increasing growth post-launch is perhaps one of the best tests of the success of your blogs.
If your engagement and metrics have the same results month after month, you are most likely doing something wrong. While your blogs may level off and stay at a certain number of visits and subs, you must always see considerable growth in the early stages of the blogs.
3. Check out your Keyword Ranking
If you are not integrating some selected keywords carefully into your blog posts, you should get started. You should pick keywords with a moderately high monthly search volume and lower difficulty rating. But do not worry if you use low search volume keywords at first. It is still a good move. This helps you move up so you can rank for keywords with much higher search volumes.
Hubspot, Google Analytics, and other similar tools can help you figure out what keywords you must be using in your blog posts. Remember, you must always aim for long-tail keywords to have a much better chance at first ranking in Google Search.
Pro Tip: Let’s assume you carefully pick keywords for your blog posts. To get started, perform some checks to see if they are performing well. The better your keywords rank, the more traffic your blogs can get from search engines. As a result, the more your blogs will have visitors. A win-win, right?
4. Look at Your CTA clicks
Expectedly, all of your blog posts must have CTAs on the bottom. Make sure to always look at the number of views these CTAs gets. Checking and counting the views can help you better determine how many views your blogs are getting and how engaged the readers are. In addition, you must always look at the conversion rate from views to clicks, including the conversion rate for clicks to submissions, to get a much better idea of the CTA performance.
If your view to click and click-to-submission ratios are higher, then bravo! This only means that CTAs on your blogs are always effective and your blogs are most likely attracting and converting leads.
5. Check out the comments section
It is often wise to take a step away from the data and metrics and take a closer look at how people engage with your blog posts. Perhaps, a particular post of yours did not get a lot of social shares and lead conversions but got a few fantastic, relevant comments. This is a major success, even though no data supports it.
Moreover, interacting with the commenters is a great way to convert visitors to leads. Therefore, go and get conversations going to build better relationships that can help your company grow in the future.
Important Metrics You Need to Track
What we share with you above are purely simple tactics, categorized as level one in difficulty. We didn’t tackle much about metrics (a much tricky one) – an excellent valuable tool in gathering specific data that everyone has to pay attention to. Are you ready to get started? Let’s talk about metrics.
1. Page view and Page per view
If you do not know what page view is, it refers to the number of times a visitor viewed your blog posts. This is considered a good guide since it lets you know what topics your readers are most interested in and what blog posts are the most popular. The page per view indicates whether your visitors found your blogs exciting or informative, nudging them to read and finish the whole thing.
The top visited posts can become your model for your future blog posts. You may also choose to add links to the post that will lead to other pages on your blogs.
2. Traffic by Channel
When it comes to analytics and marketing – a channel is any visitors to your website, especially in your blog section. For instance, some users might arrive at your blogs through the social media profiles, one channel, while others might get there through paid search, a second channel.
With Google Analytics, you can always take your page view data and filter it by channel. Google can then provide a list of channel definitions since they refer to tagging in with its analytics system.
3. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings
SERPs are a list of results returned by search engine queries. Each page of your blog falls on different SERPs positions for relevant phrases and keywords. You have to use a tool to track your SERP rankings. We recommend Ahrefs Rank Tracker. This solution enables you to acquire an accurate picture of whether your Local SEO efforts are delivering results or if you have to focus on better keywords or strategies.
4. New blog leads and customers
Using your blogs to drive traffic and gain clients is critical to your content marketing strategy. To know exactly how you are doing, you must track the number of leads your content generates. One way you can do this is to use trackable links throughout your blogs, especially on CTA buttons and links related to internal content.
5. Conversion rates
Your blog’s channel is often tracked with the primary goal in mind – improving conversion rates. Make sure you use a tool that can customize your views of many conversion rates. However, the simplest way you can determine your rate without using any tool is to divide the number of conversions you are getting by the total number of site visitors within the same time frame.
It is crucial to always keep in your mind that many companies today have a lot of benchmarks for what is being considered a successful conversion rate. So, be sure to know your standard or yardstick when it comes to a successful conversion rate.
Make Sure You Level Up with Content Audit!
Constantly check if your blogs are working as expected. Take everything we share with you above. Check out all the metrics to successfully determine your blog’s performance. And as you track all these metrics, always remember your top goals. Is it to educate and inform viewers or interact with your target visitors?
Yet, the point of your blogs is to draw target leads to your website, right? For some, comments’ quality is more valuable compared to page views. However, some metrics are more valuable than others, depending on your goals.
But wait, there is another thing to do. You need to conduct a content audit. And ConstructionMarketing.io can help you with that! We can provide you with critical information that you also need to consider alongside a suite of metrics outlined in this blog.
Talk to us today and let’s discuss our list of Digital Marketing Services we offer to our clients!