Skip to main content

5 Ways to Ensure the Success of Your Content

Written by Emma Phillips on . Posted in CONTENT MARKETING.

measuring the success of your content

There are many ways you can measure the success of your content. To help, we’ve picked some of the most effective methods that glean the greatest insights to ensure your content is reaching the right people, leading to higher engagement and conversions.

With the constant updates from Google surrounding the likes of EAT guidelines, it can feel like measuring the success is a moving goalpost. But, by analysing what content has performed well and what’s missed the mark, you’ll start to understand the differences and this can inform future content.

What we’ll cover:

  • Knowing your audience
  • Establishing the purpose of your content
  • Defining the metrics that matter
  • Taking an SEO approach to content
  • Why backlinks matter

1. Know your audience

Why do we need to know our audience to produce great content? It’s imperative to start by understanding your audience’s challenges, what attracts them and how you can support them to be able to create useful and engaging content.

The more knowledge you have about your users, the more informed your content decisions will be, ensuring your efforts are focused on delivering as much value as possible.

Establishing personas is a great way to step into the shoes of your audience. By researching your audience, speaking to colleagues and customers, you can identify the type of content they need and feed this insight into your content plan.

2. Establish the purpose of your content

For your content to be effective, you need a firm understanding of what your producing content for in the first place. Is it to generate leads or to attract subscribers to be nurtured? Do you want your website to be a hub of content to educate and assist users? Or perhaps achieving higher rankings is your end goal.

Establishing SMART objectives is an effective way to measure how your content supports success. Important for providing clarity, they drive focus towards reaching your goals and getting the most out of your efforts.

So, what does SMART stand for and how do you ensure the objectives you create are SMART?

  • Specific: When setting a goal, be specific about what you want to accomplish. Think about this as being the defining statement of what you want to achieve.
  • Measurable: Ensure your goals are measurable in one way or another. This makes measuring progress more tangible and helps keep your team on track.
  • Achievable: A completely unattainable goal will only demotivate your team, therefore, it’s important to strike the right balance between an attainable and unrealistic goal.
  • Relevant: Consider how your marketing objectives tie back to the wider business strategy and support its achievement.
  • Timely: If your objectives are not time-bound, it’s more difficult to be successful. Setting target deadlines not only gives people a goal to work towards, but it helps to outline priorities.

3. Define the metrics that matter

With clear objectives in mind, you’re in the best position to determine the key metrics that will help you understand the performance of your content. Metrics you may want to look at within your measurement plan could include:

  • Bounce rate: Your bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page. Why a user leaves is up for interpretation however, they could have ‘bounced’ back to the referring website or they simply could have found what they needed. Generally, the lower the bounce rate, the better as it shows a user has continued to engage with your brand and website.
  • Page views: This metric shows how many pages a user has visited on your site. The more pages they view, the more interested in what you have to offer.
  • CTR: The click-through rate is the ultimate gauge of engagement. A high CTR shows your content has piqued interest whereas a low CTR could indicate you’re either targeting the wrong audience or that your content does not have a compelling reason to engage.
  • Time on site: This is how long a visitor stays on your site before leaving it. If someone reads your blog for just a couple of seconds, they most likely weren’t very interested and perhaps the content didn’t meet their expectations.

Having defined your goals, you can decide which metrics are the best to measure. One of the easiest ways to measure many metrics is through Google Analytics. On their own, these metrics don’t tell us much but as you delve into the data and pair findings with other metrics, it can be used to influence and improve future content.

If your content appears to be underperforming, there are other metrics you should check too to rule out wider website performance effecting its success. Load time, for example, is worth exploring if you’re noticing consistently high bounce rates. We’re not as patient as we once were, and if a page is taking too long to load, users are likely to go elsewhere. The same applies to a bad mobile user experience so try digging into the device type users browse with.

4. Take an SEO approach to content

Without a doubt, taking an SEO led approach to your content is one of the best ways for you to achieve consistent results. The higher you rank in the search engines, the more organic traffic you’ll to generate for your site.

Undertaking keyword research is key to understanding both what your audience is searching for as well as keywords with the greatest search potential. It also ensures that the content you produce aligns with what your customers are searching for. By using keyword strategies, you can give focus to your content efforts to write about relevant topics that answer their needs.

By using tools like Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush, you can see what keywords competitors are targeting too, how often people search for keywords, how competitive the keyword is, related keywords and much more. Google Trends and Answer the Public are also good for uncovering ideas that you can form content around.

With a defined keyword list to target, focus on naturally placing keywords within your content and avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. Not only can this make content disjointed to read, but Google is also likely to penalise such practises.

Producing high-quality and SEO optimised content can be difficult and you might want to consider working with an SEO agency to gain maximum benefit.

5. Look at content shares and backlinks

Looking at shares of and backlinks to your content are other good indicators of the value users see in what you have produced. Publishers love to share interesting data before linking to the source, by providing relevant and unique statistics or leveraging your internal experts, you can work on garnering links from other websites that cite your content as a source.

High-quality backlinks are an important factor that Google’s algorithm considers when ranking your page within the SERPs. Google identifies links from high-authority publishers and recognises them as trustworthy, therefore, boosting the authority of your website which leads to rising search rankings too.

How can we help?

With significant time and resources typically required to produce quality content, you want to know that your efforts are driving the maximum return on investment for your business.

Our tips will help you keep on top of your content and ensure it adds real value to your business while discovering ways to further improve it. To get even more from your content and achieve your business goals, lean on the support of a specialist agency.