Have you ever done a “content audit?”
By now, you should have more content in your blog than you can easily keep track of.
With content, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, confused, and out of your strategy.
Plus, this topic doesn’t get discussed a ton.
And then in small and local business, you already have more than your fair share of battles to fight.
…Now I’m recommending you add another item to your list that gets longer every day?
Yep.
What You Want to Learn
When all’s said and done, you want your content to grow your business, right?
Otherwise, why do you create it?
Here are the top goals and metrics you can use to measure your progress:
Sales
At the small and local business level, this is difficult. No one reads your blog post and excitedly dials your phone.
That’s just not how content works for any business!
In reality, they read your blog, email, e-book, or whatever. And they do this several times over the course of months, or maybe a couple years. Then, because they remember your information and find it so useful, they give you a buzz when they need your service.
It’s incredibly difficult to measure the precise role a blog post plays in the purchasing process.
You can drive website visitors from your blog posts to a landing page with a form or unique phone number.
You could also do a correlational analysis. For example, when you notice an increase in your blog readership, you also see an increase in contacts on your website’s main contact form.
That’s less definitive proof.
But if you see a relationship, you know your blog plays a role.
This isn’t easy to measure. And it can require a high amount of customization based on your business and content strategy.
Organic Traffic Increase
Traffic leads to sales.
If you don’t get the traffic you want, this may mean you have an ineffective content strategy, no good way of promoting your content, the wrong type, or perhaps content that simply doesn’t interest your audience.
It takes months to increase your traffic because Google takes months to index your content.
And if you choose to promote your content actively, it can take months before your contacts actually publish their link to you.
But if you’re consistent in content creation, you should notice an increase in traffic over time.
Time On-Page
This one tells you whether you hit the mark with your content itself.
A couple aspects to consider:
- Your content may not receive the time-on-page you want if you don’t have an interesting writer
- Low times could also mean well-written topics, but a poor topic selection
Basically, you want to see greater than a minute for a 500-word blog post.
That puts you above average.
And if you see a couple or several minutes for a blog post of any kind, you’re knocking it out of the park.
In terms of topic selection, keep doing what you’re doing, and the traffic and sales will come.
…So that’s kind of a quick poor man’s content audit.
And remember, you may need to highly customize yours to accurately measure the effectiveness of your own strategy.
