Inside: The most important content marketing KPIs new bloggers need to focus on.
Within the world of blogging, there are so many little tools that you can use to better your business. Over time you slowly build up a strong arsenal that you can pull from while you are navigating the online world.
Of those tools, a few stand alone on your journey to success. I will be talking about one of my favorites today, and that is content marketing KPIs that you need to keep an eye on as you post content.
These insights can give you ideas on what you can do to improve your blog while also allowing you to track your growth.
I love to use KPIs to create goals or milestones. When I reach them, I celebrate myself a little bit. See? This can be fun! I don’t want to overwhelm those of you who are new to this world, so today, I am only going to focus on the MOST Important Content Marketing KPIs for Bloggers. But first, a little background:
What Is A KPI
In order to understand how to use your KPIs, you must first know what they are. Here is the perfect definition of what a KPI is, written on qlik.com
KPI stands for key performance indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help people across the organization make better decisions. From finance and HR to marketing and sales, key performance indicators help every area of the business move forward at the strategic level.
This definition does not touch on how KPIs are used for blogs, so I will explain. When you have a blog, your success is measured by how many people consistently visit your pages. The more people who view your content, the more opportunities you have. A blog can be a real business that makes real money, but you need to know how to get it there.
KPIs are like a roadmap to your success. You can use them to change your strategies, learn more about your target audience, and more. Below you will find the best KPIs to focus on while you are just getting started. I go through what they are and how you can use them to your advantage. Take a look!
MOST Important Content Marketing KPIs for Bloggers
1. Traffic
Okay, I wanted to start with this one because it’s the perfect place for you to start. The traffic shows how many people come to your blog on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can find these stats under the ‘insights’ section on your dashboard.
Traffic tracking by time
You get to use these numbers to closely watch what things work for your site and which don’t. For example, you may see that your highest click-through days happens to fall on the weekend.
This could be because your target demographic is busy with work during the week. In the future, you can plan on having more content ready by the weekend.
Traffic by source
This section will also be able to tell you where your traffic is coming from. You can use this information to gear your promotional content more on those sites.
For example, if you see that most of your views are coming from Instagram, you can take extra care when posting on there since you are more likely to have your viewer click on your article.
2. Page Views Per Post
This section will show you which articles are getting the most views. You can then take this information and have your future content reflect the ones that are doing so well right now. This could change as time goes on, so it’s something that you should be keeping an eye on.
Blogging is a never-ending game of staying up to date on trends.
3. Keyword Rankings
You can see where your keywords are ranking on google. This will tell you how likely you are to come up in a search engine when your keyword is used. If you notice that your shorter keywords are not doing so well, shift towards long-tail ones for a while and see if your blog starts to improve.
Keywords are perhaps one of the most helpful tools that you can use when you are trying to get ranked on Google. If you don’t know what a keyword is, then you need to learn more about them. Here is a list of some of the best SEO tools for blogging.
There are a number of softwares you can use to track your keywords, I like SEMrush the best.
4. Content Marketing KPI: Returning Visitors
Finding out how many of your visitors are returning is a great way to see if your content made an impact. When you have someone that comes back for nearly every post, it helps to make your website look more legitimate in the eyes of Google.
Yes, Google has eyes, and they are everywhere. I didn’t mean for that to sound creepy, but it kind of is. 😉
Lucky for us, we can use that to our advantage. By following certain precautions, like focusing on how we EEAT – we can make sure to stay in Google’s good graces.
5. Organic Website Traffic
This stat will tell you how much of your website traffic is organic, meaning how much of it is naturally occurring. This could look like a post continually getting views months after it was posted.
6. Content Marketing KPI: Inbound Links
Inbound links are super important. These are essentially the number of times that another website linked to your post. This makes your blog look very credible, which makes it easier to rank on google. Ranking on Google then helps to boost your traffic, which is a win!
7. Social Media Inputs
Last but not least, your social media stats are a huge teller of how well your blog is doing. Now don’t get me wrong, your blog stats are the most important thing. At the same time, your social media can hold a huge audience for you to promote your new content too. So you need to pay attention to things around these areas likes, shares, and comments.
Getting feedback from your community is key to having a successful blog. Here are 31 social media KPIs that are great to track as well.
You may see that you get most of your social media engagement when you post in the evenings, so it may be best to promote then if you want to get more traffic to your site.
You can easily track your social media visits to your site using Google Analytics as well.
Content marketing is a very important part of blogging. Otherwise, no one would see your content. KPIs allow you to look at your progress and make the changes that are necessary for growth.
You can use these tools to help catapult you into the success that you have always wanted. I hope this list of the most important content marketing KPIs for bloggers has left you feeling inspired and ready to conquer the internet.
If you want to continue learning about ways that you can better your blog, I have so much more to share with you. I’ve been doing this for a very long time now, and I love sharing what I know with the people who will benefit from it.
I have many articles, but this is a great place for you to start.
