So, you’ve got a great blog that’s popular with your visitors and you create content for it regularly. Now you need to put together a blog content strategy: first and foremost, you need to find out which posts are the most popular so you can create more ones like them.
Yet how can you do that? The answer lies with blog post analytics that you can access through our tool. Title Console pulls data from Google analytics and your sitemap, giving you access to data that’s easy to digest.
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at the most important analytics that you need to look for in our blog post analyzer software. When you know what your visitors want, you can tailor your content to their tastes, attracting more visitors who you can then convert.
Are you ready to learn more? Then read on!
Table of Contents
Check Out the Number of Blog Readers
You need to track the number of visitors who come to your blog over time. You may find that this increases and decreases in a predictable way. For instance, if you run a blog about winter sports, you can predict that you’ll get more visitors during winter, but you can also get more granular. You should track the number of visits that your blog receives from month to month.
The key reason for doing this is that two key parts of a content strategy are budget and timing. If you’re releasing lots of content during June, but few people are reading it, you may wish to reduce the amount of content that you create. This doesn’t mean putting out zero content: consistency is still very important, even if the number of visitors is low, but you may be able to cut your blogging budget during these times.
Refocus your blogging efforts on months where you’re expecting more visitors.
Where Does Your Traffic Come From?
Understanding where your blog traffic comes from allows you to refine your content strategy. Using blog post analysis, you can take a look at where visitors are ultimately coming from.
Two very important metrics to consider are organic search and paid search. Organic search refers to visitors who come to your site via Google search results, rather than by clicking on ads.
By looking at organic search figures, you can see which topics are performing best in the SERP and have a good search volume. For instance, if you have a blog post that’s titled “the best budget SUVs in 2021,” and it’s drawing a lot of traffic, you can try out other SUV-related topics, such as “the importance of regular SUV maintenance” or “where to find great aftermarket SUV parts.” Using these tips, you can create the type of content that your readers want to see, increasing the likelihood of getting more visits to your blog.
Paid search analytics work fairly similarly to organic search analytics but they also differ a lot. With this, you want to look at which pay-per-click keywords are drawing in the most traffic: if you’ve linked PPC to your blog posts, you can quickly look at the keywords that are drawing in the most clicks.
If for instance, you’re targeting “SUVs in [your town]” and you’re getting a lot of clicks, you could start to use variations on these keywords. For instance, you could try “vehicles in [your town],” and so on.
This isn’t an either/or situation. You should be analyzing both organic and paid searches, using both of them to augment your content strategy.
What’s Your Revenue per Page?
Of course, visits aren’t the only thing that matter to you as a business. If your website is monetized with ads or affiliate links, you also need to think about the amount of money that you’re making on each page.
You may find that evergreen content makes you the most money: this is the kind of content that won’t date as much as other content and isn’t particularly seasonal. For instance, you could write an article about “5 reasons to visit [your town],” which would be considered evergreen content. However, this won’t always be the case, and if your seasonal content attracts a lot of clicks, it may make you more money.
By looking at which content makes you the most money, you can refine your blog content strategy. For instance, if you’re making most of your money from seasonal content but would like some more consistent income, you can start trying to create related evergreen content.
One thing that you need to bear in mind when considering revenue per page is the content’s age. Your content usually needs around eight months before it will reach a good position in the SERPs. If your content is just a month old and isn’t making you much money, don’t jump to conclusions: this is a metric that you should watch over a longer period.
Is Your Bounce Rate Good or Bad?
Sometimes you need to take your site’s bounce rate into careful consideration. The bounce rate is the number of people who come to your site and “bounce off,” i.e., only look at that one page and then leave again instead of visiting another page on your site.
Bounce rate is important for two reasons: it indicates engagement of the visitors and also some say it affects your SEO.
If your landing page is informative and answers all the questions the reader came to find out, your bounce rate will be sky-high. Just like if your content is low-quality or lacks a call to action, you’ll find that people back out of your website and go back to the SERP. The bounce rate can definitely not tell the quality of your content if you have an informational website monetized with ads. But if you sell a service och product, you want the visitors to visit more than just that first landing page.
A high bounce rate tends to indicate a lower-quality website if you sell a service or product, if the visitor bounces back to the SERP quickly, the search engines might get the signals that your webpage wasn’t that good. They will rank your website lower in the search results, which will harm your other blog posts and your website as a whole.
If your business on your website requires visitors to visit multiple pages, you need to do everything you can to keep your bounce rate down, so take a look at the posts that have a good bounce rate and try to create more content in the same vein.
Are People Sharing Your Content?
One of the cornerstones of good content is shareability. If your content is interesting, compelling, and well-researched, you will likely get more shares on social media. Shares are important because they get more eyes on your website and they also act as free marketing: each tweet or Facebook post is an advertisement for your site, and also counts as a backlink for SEO purposes.
While Google Analytics’ tracking of social engagement is somewhat limited, it’s still a good way to examine the shares and social engagement of your content. Take a look at which articles are getting the most shares and engagement on social media, then use this as guidance for your next blog posts.
If you’re able to create solid and shareable content, you should see a gradual uptick in the number of visitors to your website, which you can then convert to paying customers.
What Content Converts Customers?
Conversion rates may seem like a similar metric to revenue per page but there’s a subtle difference. While revenue per page looks at the revenue that the pages themselves make, conversion rate is a look at the number of sessions that end in a conversion, which could be signing up for your mailing list, making a purchase, or another goal.
If you run a business, then the conversion rate is an incredibly important metric. You need to create content that inspires people to buy your products or services, or makes them sign up for emails, etc.
You should take a look at the characteristics of the content that converts more customers: does it have a great call to action, a particular topic, or something else? Use this to plan your content and create more paying customers out of your blog’s readers.
How Many People Are Linking to Your Posts?
Backlinks are a very important part of your SEO strategy. A great post that’s authoritative, well-researched, and interesting, will hopefully garner a lot of backlinks.
The more backlinks your content has, the better it will rank in SERPs. This is because Google wants to give its users the best possible experience, and by ranking sites with lots of backlinks highly, they’re more likely to consider your blog as an authority on the subject.
The key to getting more backlinks is quality. While you can pay for backlinks, these will often come from less-reputable websites, and they may even result in a spam penalty from Google!
If you want to get more organic backlinks, you need to create well-researched content similar to that you’d find in major newspapers or magazines.
Use These Metrics to Refine Your Blog Content Strategy
We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the most important metrics to consider. By using blog post analysis, you’ll be able to refine your blog content strategy and improve your blog, no matter what your end goal is.
Our software can help you do just that. We want to make your analytics easy to access and understand, which is why we created Title Console. If you’d like to try it out on your website, you can try our free subscription tier today!
