Blogging is essential for a commercial website—getting your business’s story out there and engaging with your consumer base. However, it can feel like launching your well-crafted words into the void; not having any sense of how well your blog has done its job; or if your efforts are hitting the mark.
There’s so much to juggle when running an online business; getting your website to rank higher with search engines, writing good content or hiring great content creators, updating offers and promotions, and having a steady stream of crowd-pulling blogs.
So how can you ensure your blog posts get the attention your website and business need? In short, the answer is data, or more precisely, metrics.
Metrics are the data generated by your website, its usage, and interactions expressed in numbers. Collecting this data about your blogs might sound complex, but it’s relatively straightforward. There is a range of online tools that can help you, including those offered by Google.
But where do you start? Which areas are the most important to focus on? Here are ten metrics you should consider.
Table of Content
1. Top Posts
A logical start is to discover which of your current posts are the most popular. This information can give you clear signposting for where to focus in terms of future posts, as you can quickly see where the areas of interest are for your audience.
You can also get an idea of what format of blog content is the most appealing in terms of video, text, or audio. You might also decide, having identified the most popular blog posts, to add a ‘popular posts’ button to guide visitors to this content. You can also lead users to related content in this way, for example, from a post on organizing your agenda you might want to link to one on digital journaling.
2. Traffic
It’s a good idea to drill down into traffic more generally. By traffic, we mean the number of visitors to your blog. Looking at the traffic to your site will give you information about the demographics of those coming to the blog and in turn, give you insights into driving more traffic.
Traffic includes how many pages views your website has had, but be aware that this will also include any times the page is refreshed or a person revisits the site. The number of page visits will differ for every business, but in general, a slow, steady increase is the pattern you want to see.
You’ll also want to note which channel site traffic comes through. By channels, we mean the route a visitor took, for example, through social media, guest blog posts, or online ads.
This information is valuable. For example, if a guest post that carries a link to a web development estimate template drove traffic to your blog, you might decide that creating more content relating to the practical needs of freelance web developers would be valuable.
3. Engagement
Engagement covers a variety of interactions with your blog. Comments and how long visitors spend on your site are two indications of the level of interest and likelihood of making a purchase.
There’s also a ‘bounce rate’ to consider. Bounce describes people who arrive at the site for whatever reason but quickly close it down and don’t engage further.
A bounce occurs for various reasons; it’s possible the person clicked on the wrong link and mistakenly opened your site, but it’s also possible that something the person encountered when they arrived put them off.
It’s worth checking your website speed; slow loading sites make users lose patience and move on. But bounce can be down to content; make sure you have longer posts to keep interested, add videos, and ensure your meta descriptions spark interest and are a true match with your content.
Addressing these points is a form of customer service; after all, your website and blog should cater to your consumer base. Avoid barriers, such as poor quality content or low website speed; it’s important to make it easy and appealing for potential customers to engage with your content.
4. Subscribers
Subscribers are visible and easily tracked pieces of data. If you are getting subscribers, you are getting something right. As with visits to your site, you should be looking for subscribers to be steadily increasing over time, looking for spikes and drops in numbers, as these could show the success or failure of strategies.
Subscribers need to feel the experience is worth the space in their inboxes. Giving quality content in newsletters and not bombarding subscribers with messages is critical. It’s good practice to coach staff in not abusing this direct channel to customers, just as call center coaching can make all the difference to how consumers feel treated.
5. Social Media
It’s helpful to know how many users are visiting your site from social media platforms—especially if you’re running a marketing campaign on social media. In this case, you’d expect to see a steady stream of clicks from those platforms.
If the metrics tell you this isn’t happening, it’s time to change tack or boost your social media activity. There are ways to optimize your content for social media; for example, it’s worth looking at ways to actively grow your blog using Instagram.
6. Lead Generation
Identifying where leads are actually generated from, rather than using call center ANI, provides crucial information. But looking at this data can also tell you which sources are generating the most leads, and which of these are leading to conversions.
It’s worth investing more energy in channels that grow your consumer base, so if a source, such as social media, isn’t pulling its weight, it’s worth rethinking. Capitalizing on traffic driven to your site from your blog by ensuring there is a clear call to action on sidebars is a good way to achieve this.
Remember to keep a tally of leads that convert from your blog and drill down into the numbers to assess your contact-to-customer conversion rate. Leads are only valuable if they lead to actual engagement with your brand and ultimately, sales.
7. Backlinks
Backlinks also called inbound links to come via other websites through a hyperlink. Backlinks have a relationship with SEO because the more you receive, the higher your search ranking will be.
Backlinks are a sign of approval for your site and content, so they are extremely useful. Knowing how many you are receiving is therefore vital. It’s worth looking at the various tools available to boost backlinks if you don’t see many coming.
8. SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is crucial for raising your site’s ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). To utilize this data, you need to check where your blog pages are ranked on the SERPs.
This will be dictated by keywords and phrases, which you can check. SEO is fundamental to website hits, and it’s worth ensuring you have researched what you need to know about SEO.
But one sure way to boost SEO is to have good content; blog posts that readers genuinely find interesting, informative, and helpful.
9. Conversions
Conversions are any action you are trying to elicit through your blog. This could be sales, signing up for newsletters, or downloading content. This will obviously vary for each individual business and its activity.
Conversion rate metrics will tell you the number of readers downloading content, liking blog posts, and signing up, who aren’t necessarily existing customers and contacts. These are new users and are exactly what you’re aiming to attract.
The number and nature of the conversions is an opportunity to gain insight; as with MLOps model deployment; the idea is to monitor, learn and streamline with the information you gather from looking at the metrics.
10. Email Traffic
Emails are effective, but simply having a contact who has agreed to receive your messages is no guarantee of authentic engagement.
Metrics can help by giving you the rate of emails that actually get opened. Although, you will need a specific email tracking tool to see these figures. If this rate is low (typically lower than fifteen percent) you might want to think of ways to get recipients to open your emails.
It’s worth trying several tactics and then checking metrics to find out which have been successful. You can also track click-through rates, in other words, the number of users who followed a link to your site after opening an email.
Measure for Success
By looking at the metrics of your blog, you are harvesting a rich seam of information readily available from the data trail created by your blog itself. Ideally, you want to spend time looking at metrics regularly; set aside time each month to do this, and you’ll be able to make changes and adapt content accordingly.
It’s also a good idea to set goals for the level of growth you want to achieve. What you see in the metrics can then be checked against these goals.
Having this valuable resource at hand for checking traffic, engagement and conversions is an essential tool to measure growth and make it happen.