7 SEO Metrics that are Critical in Content Marketing
Writing and designing content is one thing. Making sure people find that content requires tracking these 7 SEO metrics.
Managing a marketing program takes time and involves an ongoing commitment to both on- and off-page activities. With many channels to monitor, it’s a takes planning and expertise to measure the success of your content-marketing strategy. Here’s an overview of the top seven SEO metrics that should be monitored.
1. Organic search traffic
The main objective of any SEO strategy is to maximize organic traffic. This metric is the best measure of how well your site is currently optimized and whether your brand visibility is increasing.
2. Search keyword rankings
When buyers want to find a solution to their problem and compare the offerings available at various companies, they enter keywords in the search bar. If you content is marketed well, your pages will come up in the search results. Comparing your keyword rank with search volumes will tell you whether you’re targeting the right terms. If you are posting high-quality content to attract backlinks, then your keyword rank should also be increasing slowly over time. If you do not see any improvement, then it’s time to adjust your SEO strategy.
3. Referral traffic
This metric shows you how people find your website. Tracing the referral paths provides valuable insight into the influencers, social sites, videos and articles that direct the most traffic to your site.
4. Visitor behaviour
Understanding how your visitors interact with your website is essential for maximizing engagement and increasing conversions. By monitoring the average time people spend on a page, you discover whether you are nailing user intent. Similarly, factors such as the number of pages people visit, the bounce rate and the return user frequency show how well your site structure and design works for your audience.
5. Crawl errors
Crawl errors indicate broken links and other problems with the function of your website that, if left unchecked, could have a negative effect on user engagement, perception of brand quality and, eventually, search engine ranking.
6. PageSpeed
Search engines like Google are focused on providing the best user experience, and PageSpeed is a consistent ranking factor. Google’s PageSpeed Insights even measures websites for both desktop and mobile devices. To maximize user engagement and SEO, your website must be fast loading.
7. Lead generation cost
Attributing a dollar value to organic traffic is one of the quickest ways to assess the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. Comparing the cost (in time and resources) of sales leads—generated by referral and organic search traffic—to the value of leads from paid advertising shows the relative cost of each aspect of your approach. A successful SEO strategy should see the cost per lead for organic traffic decrease over time.
Using SEO metrics to nail content marketing
No single KPI will tell you how your content marketing efforts are measuring up, but by combining insight from several key SEO metrics, your brand can get more views of your content and increase brand exposure. It’s an important part of every digital marketing program.
