13 Blog KPIs You Should Be Tracking
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Blogs are insanely valuable—there’s no disputing that.
A blog can do many things for your brand, including boosting awareness, driving organic traffic to your website, positioning you as a thought leader in your industry, and helping build relationships with your target audience.
In fact, businesses with blogs see 55% more website visitors and earn 67% more leads.
However, there’s a lot more to blogging than just throwing words on a page. When executed properly, blogging can serve as the cornerstone of your content marketing efforts, ultimately feeding into a wildly successful 360° digital marketing strategy. Don’t get caught pumping out blog post after blog post in a vacuum with no purpose—this is a great way to waste valuable time and resources.
Not sure how to maximize the potential of your content marketing blog strategy? Let’s get into it.
Understanding your target audience is the first step in creating a successful blogging and content marketing strategy. Write and create for them with a purpose.
Begin by creating detailed customer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on market research, data analysis, customer reviews, and more.
Ideally, you want to identify what’s bothering them—their “pain points”—and then look to address these issues with content that provides a solution—your product or service. Identifying these pain points takes careful analysis, but it’s worth it if you want to create blogs people actually want to read.
Leverage analytics tools to gather data on your website visitors and social media followers. This data can provide insights into user behaviour, interests, and demographics. Tap into your best resource—your customers—by conducting surveys and collecting feedback from them directly. We also recommend analyzing your competitors’ content and their audience engagement. There are plenty of ways to discover what you need to be talking about on your blog.
Remember that your audience will evolve over time, and market trends can change. Therefore, regularly revisit your audience research and adjust your blog content strategy to remain aligned with your target audience’s needs.
A content audit allows you to take stock of all the blog posts you’ve already published. This crucial step will help you identify high-performing content, pinpoint low-performing content, and find gaps in your content. It’ll also give you the opportunity to adjust your optimization efforts based on algorithm updates, enhance the user experience, and consolidate any related content into comprehensive guides or series.
Organize your blog’s content by developing a category and tagging system. This not only aids content planning but provides a high-level structure that is easy for users to navigate. When it comes to SEO, categories and tags tell search engines what your content is about—refine and optimize them strategically.
Auditing your content will help you identify which blogs have been the most (and least) successful in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions. From here, you can update or repurpose high-performing content to maintain its relevance and effectiveness. On the flip side, you can choose to improve, revise, or consolidate underperforming content—or retire it altogether in order to maintain a standard of quality.
One of the best practices for blogging is conducting ongoing keyword analysis. During an audit, review the keywords that have brought organic traffic to your existing content. Address any high-value keyword gaps and note any instances of keyword cannibalization. This simple but effective blogging strategy can help you avoid competing with yourself by unintentionally targeting the same keyword across multiple posts—it’s basically mutually assured destruction.
A blog audit is the foundation of a well-informed content strategy. Take the time to future-proof your efforts through data-driven insights for more impactful results.
Start by defining clear and measurable goals for your blog content strategy. What do you aim to achieve with your blog? It could be increasing website traffic, generating leads, building brand authority, or something else. Outline specific KPIs that will help you track your progress. For instance, you might track metrics like page views, conversion rates, time on site, or email sign-ups.
Create a content calendar to plan and organize your content. Having a structured plan ensures consistency and helps you stay on track. Here, you can define the topics, formats, target keywords, and publication schedules for your blog posts. Balance evergreen (timeless) content with timely and topical content that addresses current industry trends and news.
Great content alone isn’t enough; you need a plan for promoting and distributing it. Develop a blog promotion strategy for sharing your content across various channels, including social media, email marketing, and guest posting. Encourage social sharing and engagement by including social sharing buttons and fostering a sense of community through comments and discussion.
Having a well-organized blog content strategy doesn’t mean anything if your content can’t be found!
Format your blog with on-page elements that search engines use to understand your content. This includes title tags, meta descriptions, header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and alt text. Keep them concise, compelling, and engaging—and don’t forget to incorporate relevant keywords.
Strategically place your primary and secondary keywords throughout the content, ensuring a natural flow. Incorporate keywords in the opening and closing paragraphs, subheadings, the URL, and more. However, make sure to avoid keyword stuffing, which can harm your SEO.
Master the art of internal and external linking to direct traffic accordingly. Internal linking to other relevant pages will support link equity as well as keep users engaged and on your site longer. Try to use descriptive anchor text that contains target keywords.
Optimize images and multimedia content with detailed file names and alt text. This not only helps with SEO but also improves accessibility. Consider including videos, infographics, embedding social media posts, and other elements to enhance user engagement.
Take the time to learn these on-page SEO best practices for blogging and you’ll reap the benefits.
How your words appear on the page matters. Whatever you do, avoid publishing blogs that are just giant walls of text!
Your blog layout should be intuitive and easy to navigate. It should also be mobile-friendly and include fonts that are readable on any device. When it comes to accessibility, responsiveness, and style, reading your blog should be a seamless experience for everyone.
Consider how visual elements apart from images and video can enhance readability and scannability. From simple but effective formatting considerations like a table of contents, quote blocks, or highlighted sections that feature additional resources.
Most importantly, don’t forget about the user experience when it comes to conversions. Use clear and visually distinct CTA buttons to guide users toward desired actions, such as subscribing to your newsletter, downloading resources, or sharing content on social media.
Interactive elements can also work to your advantage. Passive content is fine, but content that engages consumers is what gets conversions. This is especially true at the “interest” stage of the marketing funnel.
Some examples include surveys or polls, quizzes, calculators or other tools, slideshows or galleries, live chatbots, progress bars and gamification, to name a few. Anything that prompts the user to engage beyond reading in a way that supports the experience is a great idea.
When it comes time to distribute your blog, think about where your target audience is most likely to engage with your content. This could be on social media, in a newsletter straight to your subscribers, or on a platform like Medium, LinkedIn Articles, or another industry-specific website.
Content that’s shareable wins on social media. Repurpose your blog content into different formats, such as videos, podcasts, or infographics and distribute them on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Remember to tailor your content to each platform’s unique audience and requirements. Take this a step further and collaborate with influencers in your niche to promote your content—increasing its reach and credibility.
Case studies, whitepapers, and other types of industry-specific, branded content can benefit from paid advertising. This blog promotion strategy, whether it be on Google Ads or social media, allows you to target specific keywords or demographics in order to reach highly relevant audiences.
This off-page SEO blog promotion strategy can produce substantial results when incorporated into your content marketing efforts.
Search engines like Google consider the number and quality of backlinks when determining a website’s authority and trustworthiness. High-quality backlinks can improve your blog’s search engine rankings, leading to more organic traffic.
One way to build backlinks effectively is by creating valuable content that naturally attracts links. However, this is easier said than done. An effective blog outreach strategy usually requires time and effort.
You can build backlinks by reposting your blogs on sites like Medium, or by networking with other bloggers. Providing them a guest blogging opportunity might lead them to reference your blog in their work down the road. Or, you might just make a friend who wants to share your content with everyone they know!
We would be remiss not to discuss this blog content strategy—and other content marketers would agree! About 70% of bloggers are updating old content, and those who do are twice as likely to report success.
Think about it: As time passes, information can become outdated. Regularly updating your blog allows you to correct inaccuracies, remain current, and align with the latest industry trends and best practices.
Stay competitive in your niche by seeking out low-hanging fruit when it comes to high-value keywords. If the coveted top result was published a few years ago, it’s more likely that by re-optimizing your content, you have a higher chance to snag it from under them. Search engines favour fresh content, so by updating your blog posts, you’re essentially sending a signal that your content is up-to-date and more valuable.
Instead of constantly creating new content, updating an existing blog post can be more time and resource-efficient. Not every article needs a complete overhaul—you can make incremental improvements to your existing blogs, saving effort and resources.
Regular content updates are a smart investment in the long-term success of your blog. Stay proactive in order to maintain its quality, relevance, and performance over time.
With all this taken into consideration, how can you determine if your blogs are working? Measuring the success of your content marketing blog strategy involves tracking and evaluating your KPIs to determine how effectively your blog is meeting its objectives. Some KPIs to consider include:
By consistently measuring your blog’s KPIs you can quantify adjustments to your content marketing strategy. Use this data-driven approach to help you get the most out of your blog.
Your blog is a powerful tool, but harnessing its full potential requires expertise, time, and resources.
Get the most out of your blog by letting the experts handle it. The Influence Agency will develop an effective content marketing blog strategy that addresses your audience’s pain points, is aligned with your brand’s marketing objectives, and is expertly optimized to garner exponential reach.
Looking to branch out into other forms of content beyond the blog? Contact us to learn how we can help with that, too.
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In the world of paid media, what works and what doesn’t? You’ll have to run A/B tests to find out! Whether you’re testing which keywords bring more traffic or which social platforms earn more ad engagement, you won’t find out what really works for your brand until you test it.
Revisit your initial goals. Did your efforts bring about the results you expected? Tracking results is an essential step in your brand’s paid advertising campaigns. The data you collect from currently running ads will help lay the foundation for your future campaigns.
After tracking your results, you’ll be able to see where adjustments are necessary. There’s always room for improvement, so keep striving to consistently resonate and build trust with your audience—it’s how to create paid ads that pay off.
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