Increased site traffic and better SEO rankings are leading indicators of good content marketing, but other key areas of measurability to marketers include outbound and inbound links, blog post comments and downloads of exclusive content, among others.
Successful content marketing just doesn’t happen overnight. But once it all clicks, you’ll have to keep close watch on your metrics to increase site traffic and higher organic search rankings. You’ll need to check for other indicators as well, including blog post comments and shares, outbound and inbound links and even email-gaining downloads. More on that below.
But before the measurement occurs, get your site (or where the content will be distributed) ready for SEO and measurement metrics. Some site architectures are clumsy and complicated. Instead, make your site SEO-friendly. Check these tips here. Clean, SEO-friendly sites in part determine your site’s success.
Search engines look for clear, understandable link structures and HTML text pages – those are the pages that show up in searches. If your web pages are full of images, Flash files and more, search engines will have a hard time finding your content.
Outbound and inbound links
Outbound and inbound links are the backbone of good SEO for your site. Outbound links begin on your site and lead to another external site. Conversely, inbound links go from an outside site to your site. If you can get great inbound links from major sites, such as a major news site, that inbound link to your site is given high credence by search engines and builds your organic rankings. Read more at Moz on external links.
Blog comments and shares
Commenting on blogs used to be an effective SEO tool, but the overload of spam comments in recent years has devalued its effectiveness. Too often, company employees are being required to “go forth and make blog comments” and link back to their own site. Unfortunately, Google and other search engines have seen through this, and the gains are less that they used to be.
But sharing blogs on social media is gaining strength. Distributing blog posts on your company’s social feeds can elevate your content into new areas. Encouraging others to share and, hopefully, link back to your site will result in increased traffic for your site. Over time, the higher social signals will help in lifting your content’s ranking.
Other tips
- Avoid duplicate content: Duplicate content is also an issue you should avoid because it loads more content on the site. Duplicate content is more of an issue lately, with the same content being used on product forms, e-commerce product descriptions, print-friendly pages and more. Click here to learn more about how to fix duplicate content issues.
- Make sure your content is indexable: Get your site in HTML text and keep link structures crawlable and short so search engines can find the site and categorize it for search.
- Create excellent content: Now, do all the preparation work to get your content ready for your site – brainstorming content ideas, developing content personas and audience features, driving content goals to sales and business targets, creating editorial calendars. Use these steps to create great content!
Lastly, take a look at some of the most popular search ranking factors from last year over at Searchmetrics. You’ll see that successful content marketing walks hand in hand with great SEO and measurement practices. Learn to utilize these resources and the other valuable information here at contentmarketing.com to create winning content marketing.
