Content marketing, primarily in B2B, is very effective in responding to visibility and lead generation issues. For this your content must be read. In fact, your blog – and its articles – is one of the main entry points to your website. To understand what material works and why, it is necessary to analyze it and measure its performance. For this you have to study different metrics of your blog. In this article, find out which ones to follow, and how to interpret them…
audit your blog
Chances are, you already have a blog with more or less posts on it. That is why I invite you to audit my content. First, because it’s always good to audit your articles and keep them up to date. Indeed, some links or information are obsolete. But also because Google’s SEO criteria change very often. Google rewards the freshness of content.
In addition, it makes it possible to recreate the inner mesh. Auditing your blog will allow you to modify your semantic cocoon and link articles between them that weren’t necessary.
Finally, thanks to various metrics, you’ll be able to understand which articles work, but specifically which ones don’t. You can then shift them to new keywords, optimizing them to gain visibility. It will take you less time to write new articles from the beginning.
Tools to analyze your content and metrics
To conduct your audit, I invite you to create a dashboard, which will allow you to have an overview of your data. You can create it directly in Excel.
I use three different tools to analyze my blog metrics. All from google.
google ads
Google Ads will allow you to track searches on the keywords you want to rank for. In fact, you can write the best article in the world, if it is optimized for keywords with 0 searches per month, it will never be read.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics will allow you to track the behavior of your readers. Which article is your site’s entry page, or vice versa an exit page? Average read time, bounce rate, number of monthly views… so many metrics that allow you to understand whether your articles are popular or not.
google search console
Google Search Console will help you understand two things. First, you’ll learn more about how people find you. What are the keywords and searches that lead to your site or blog. This is a good indicator and can give you some on-topic ideas.
Again, this will help you know whether your titles are sellers. In Google Search Console you can see the number of impressions (the number of times the article is viewed in Google search results) as well as the number of clicks (the number of times a user clicks on a link). If the CTR (click-through-rate) is low, it may mean that the title does not correspond to the search performed by an Internet user. So the title should be changed.
Metrics to follow for your blog
You can track different metrics for your blog, and there are several ways to do it. Personally, I follow blog demos and KPis in crosstab so that I always have the source.
source of your traffic
It is very important to consider the source of your traffic. In fact, it allows you to understand where your traffic comes from, but above all it gives an idea of ​​what dissemination functions are working.
I follow the following traffic sources:
- To have a global view: Direct, organic search (allows you to know whether your SEO strategy is working or not) and paid search;
- For social strategy: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook;
- For co-branding actions: all blogs on which we have guest articles;
- To go further: All sources on which marketing effort has been made. For example, your landing page, Medium, your newsletter, your nutrition emails, etc.
Basic metrics to follow for your blog
Your article’s position on Google
Your ranking is important in Google rankings as it allows you to understand the resulting traffic. You can find this metric by going to Google Search Console in the Performance section. You can then select by search (queries) or by content (pages).
If you want to know the overall position of your site with respect to a keyword, I invite you to use the SEO Hero Ninja tool.
This KPI can also be found in Google Search Console. A link URL records an impression for a user when it appears in a search result. That’s why it allows you to know how many Internet users have viewed a Google search that leads to your article.
clix
Also to be found in Google Search Console, a click is counted when it sends the user to a page outside of Google Search. In other words, if an Internet user clicks on a link that remains in search results, it does not count as a click. Also, clicking a search result on an external page, coming back, then clicking the same link again counts as a click.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on your article by its performance (click impressions = CTR). In particular, it will help you understand whether the title or meta description of your article makes you want to click or match the search done by Internet users.
number of unique visitors
You can find this data in Google Analytics, in Acquisition or Deals. This tells you how many people have visited your blog or article. She
Allows you to understand which page brings the most traffic.
percentage of new visitors
It is interesting to differentiate your regular visitors from your new visitors. Your blog, in B2B, is developed for a commercial and notoriety purpose. The higher the percentage of your new visitors, the more new business opportunities you have, the more your brand is recognized. Be careful not to get adversely affected. If you only have new visitors, your message may be wrong.
bounce rate
According to SemRush, the average blog bounce rate is between 75% and 80%. It measures the proportion of Internet users who have visited only one page of your site. For a blog, a high bounce rate is not a bad sign. Actually, if the internet user gets answers to his questions, he will just go to one page and start again. So aim to have it on my blog, thanks to article suggestions and internal netlinking at the bottom of the page.
Reading Time – Average time spent on the page
This KPI is to be studied by knowing the size of your articles. Reading time of 1000 and 2000 words article should not be same. If so, it probably means that readers are not following your article.
to go further in the analysis
landing page
This metric allows you to understand how many visitors came to your site through this article to search on Google Analytics in the behavioral part.
exit page
Apart from the bounce rate, this can be a good indicator. It helps to understand how many visitors left your site through that article.
Percentage of penetration in relation to the overall traffic of the site
It is interesting to know how many visitors come through a page on a site/blog. The goal is to understand if this page suggests on the scales. In fact, if an article brings you 100 unique visitors per month, that’s good. But what if your traffic is 1000 or 10000 per month? It doesn’t mean the same thing.
achieving your goals
You can create goals in Google Analytics. It is interesting to understand if your blog is helping to achieve these goals. For example, you want your visitors to fill out the contact form. So you can analyze how many people have filled it thanks to the blog.
Number of shares on social networks
Virality is interesting to follow, as it allows your brand notoriety and expert image to be judged. This also increases traffic to your blog.
backlinks
Internal and external links are important for your SEO positioning. They are also indicators of the quality of your content. To detect inbound links to your site, you can use a tool like Google Webmaster Tools or SEMrush.
analysis of your images
It’s not just the text that matters! Images too. So you can analyze impressions, clicks, click-through rate and position on Google. This will also give you traffic.
To go further, SEMRush has put together in one very comprehensive infographic the key metrics that you need to follow for your blog.
