Blog Performance Measuring: 4 Essential Metrics

How are you measuring your blog performance? Today we’re giving you some useful tips. It’s a fact that if you are a Millennial, you most likely, don’t remember how the concept of blogging started 20 years ago. Back then, blogs were online personal diaries, where people would share their thoughts.

They had very few followers and almost no visibility. Now, we live in a world, where blogs have the power to turn a business into a huge success or leave it in anonymity.

In this article, we will question the importance of having a blog on a selling website and how to measure its success. We will consider some of the best practices in SEO.

Foremost, we will focus on the essential metrics marketers should keep track of. Also, you will learn how to increase the performance of your blog. So let’s start from the beginning.

The Power of Blogging in the Business Trajectory

People don’t want anymore to buy a product or a service only because the company selling it says it’s good for them. They want to be able to trust a brand before spending their money. The best approach for gaining trust is through a blog.

This way, a company can advise on its area of expertise and attract leads. Converting visitors into clients is not the only power a well-structured blog has. Google always says that “content is the king.” New, interactive blog posts will bust a website’s SEO score and bring more clicks.

SEO is a form of precise art and those who master it tend to think very mathematical about the subject. Yes, a web page needs keywords and backlinks.

And yes, in 2019 on-page optimization makes the difference between rankings. But don’t forget that the quality of the content posted on a blog is the one that keeps the visitors engaged.

A webpage could have all the right SEO factors for a search engine to show it in the first positions. Yet, if that article doesn’t provide useful information, people will abandon it shortly.

But how do marketers know if they are doing the right thing with the company’s blog?

Luckily, there are a lot of services that offer specific data.

1. Google Analytics is a free tool and also the most popular service that provides insights about blog posts. KPI indicators such as traffic, conversions, and sales are all gathered in an intuitive dashboard. With a few clicks, bloggers can follow the number of visitors for each landing page, where they came from, as well as the best source to bring traffic.

2. Ahrefs is a paid digital marketing tool, dedicated to backlink analysis. Ahrefs uses its bots and index to provide an extensive audit report with backlinks. It provides URL rankings, competitive analysis and many more features to choose from.

3. Moz SEO Software is a subscription-based marketing tool. It offers an effective SEO strategy and implementation for online marketers. When it comes to blogging, MOZ helps SEO content writers have a robust toolkit to achieve their blogging goals.

The performance tool has lots of helpful features. Keyword research, competition analysis and link intersect are few of them. Each stage of the inbound marketing has a correspondent tool in Moz.

Knowing what tools to use to measure the organics, let’s see what data you should keep an eye on. These are the most critical metrics to keep an eye on and always improve.

Here are 4 Essential Metrics for measuring your Blog Performance

The Number of Organic Visits

Trends start from people, so the first step to a successful blog is getting to know the visitors of your blog.

Where do they come from?
Why are they leaving?
Which is their primary interest on the site?

It might seem a basic metric, but every future marketing strategy starts from here. It is better to always keep an eye on sudden increases or decreases.

Over time, the best practice to choose is to track the number of visits by each blog page. This way, it’s easier to notice which blog topic performs better and which type of content brings the most visits.

Also, the source of visits is a valuable insight to track. Although organic visits are the best ones to target, it is good to acknowledge what other channels work for you. Is it social media, other referral blogs or Google organic search that users come from?

Acquisition source is essential to know what improvements to make, what acquisition channels to use in their niche and what topics their potential buyers search for.

Average On-Time Page and Bounce Rate

These two metrics have to deal with the visitor’s level of engagement. The average on-time page measures the exact time the user has spent on a specific blog post.

The bounce rate reflects the number of users for a page that go away after seeing only one page. Both metrics are important as they measure the level of engagement with the content you provide.

There are some traps though. For instance, if for an article of 1000 words the user has spent only 5 seconds, we cannot consider that a valuable visit unless the user is a speedy reader. There is no golden number indicating normal bounce rate or average time on page.

But they can help bloggers see which pages are the best ones for quality visitors and which pages need improvement. Besides editing your content, check if the text corresponds to the keywords or tags that are set.

Click-Through-Rate

CTA-s are some messages that tell users what you want them to do next. These buttons need to draw attention, and this is why bloggers should do A/B testing. Which color make people click on the button, which phrases, design or message suits the best? In this case, keyword optimization is a weapon for getting the best CTA ratio.

Use tools such as Ahrefs, Google search trends or Google search suggestions to add new queries. Always check if the meta titles and meta descriptions are relevant, genuine and optimized.

Conversion rate

For a blog to bring sales, it needs to have pertinent information and to prove that its data is related to some good products. The conversion rate for a blog isn’t the same as for e-commerce. Blogs are an informational source and not selling machines.

The conversion rate can refer to a landing page conversion, filling out a contact form or submitting user’s personal information. In any case, a conversion makes a reader more valuable and a blog is an excellent opportunity to make conversion possible.

Conclusion

Once we have passed through the most critical data, it’s clear that metrics are a necessary evil. Words and content are primary, once they are optimized. Content creators should measure the parameters, analyze them and implement the changes when needed whether they are trying to boost the organics of a personal blog or a blog of a selling website

Watch this space for updates in the Technology category on Running Wolf’s Rant.