In order to stay relevant in your industry, you need to be blogging. And not just blogging for the sake of blogging – but having a true content strategy. A content strategy starts with determining a buyer persona, developing pain points, and writing keyword-based blogs around these pain points. So, if you’ve gone through each of these steps, and you still aren’t sure what the point of blogging is – now what?
When we want to determine what the traffic is doing on our blogs, we examine a few metrics. These include how many views are getting received on the blog, on what page the reader is entering into the site, and what readers searched on Google to land on your blog.
Related Post: Buyer Persona: What it is & Why You Need One ➢
Number of Views
When someone views your blog, this is recorded as a “Session” within Google Analytics. By tracking how many sessions have occurred on your blog, you can begin to develop a baseline for what’s an average number of visitors reaching your content.
Let’s say the first three blogs you write and publish to your site have about 30 views per blog over a one-month period. You then estimate your next blog would do about the same. This is an optimum time for you to start advertising and pushing out your blog. This can be done in a variety of ways. You can begin an email marketing campaign, utilize LinkedIn InMail, or even post a link of your blog to your network on LinkedIn. If your average sessions in a one-month period increases, you’ll know you’re marketing tactics are working. The more eyeballs you can have on your blog, the better!
Landing Pages
Landing pages are defined as the page in which someone enters your website. The most common landing page on most websites will be the homepage. Think about it – you Google something, and hundreds of websites come up. There’s a good chance, especially if you know nothing about this topic, you’ll choose from the top five options. So, each time you click to go to that page, Google Analytics will count that as one session occurring on the site and attribute it to one session with that being the landing page. It’s important to watch these sessions because you want to understand how and why people are coming to your site.
There are many ways to watch how people are coming to your site – but what are the most important metrics to pay attention to in your analytics? Personally, I pay attention to Social & Organic traffic to the landing pages.
If you share a blog on your LinkedIn on page, someone clicks on the link and heads to your site to read it, that’s important. Paying attention to that metric shows how well, or not well, your social channels are working in your favor.
Organic traffic to landing pages, on the other hand, shows people finding your blog through Google or other search engines. This means someone has typed something into the search bar in order to find an answer to a question or problem. If your blog is the one coming up in the search results (without paying for it), that’s great! This means a blog has been optimized to reflect keywords people are searching for and ranks for those keywords. This is exactly what you want to see when using blogging metrics.
Related Post: How to Target Your Buyer Persona ➢
Keywords
Lastly, pay attention to your keyword rankings. SEM Rush or Moz are both great resources to help understand what your keywords on your site are doing. For example, I had a client who was looking to improve their rankings around the Engineering Recruiting space. By consistently blogging a few times each month, for three months, they were able to increase their ranking on Google from 78th to 8th (which is on the first page!) for Engineering Talent.
Content is king in the world of SEO and ranking above your competitors. To make sure your blogging is working to benefit you in the way you’re hoping for, pay attention to these metrics!
Need help with your content strategy and blogging metrics to outrank your competitors? Contact the Parqa team today!