How To Use SEO Metrics To Measure Your Content Marketing ROI
Two common challenges of SEO are measuring content marketing ROI and tracking success. However, there are a few SEO metrics you can use to create more convincing reports.
SEO can be a bit of a dark art. There is no fixed way to attribute each click on an ad to a specific keyword, so it’s not like with paid search where you can easily measure conversions against initial investments.
Marketers usually measure the success of marketing campaigns through metrics like open rates, the total number of subscribers, or social engagements. In the case of SEO, there can be a lot of challenges and it’s crucial to know your numbers.
It’s hard to keep up with the technical requirements of your development team and clarify organizational issues, but it can be even more frustrating trying to track your content marketing ROI.
The ROI of your content marketing efforts is usually expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the profit made by the investment in time, money, and resources.
In this article, I will be talking about the most useful metrics when it comes to measuring the accounts of your content marketing and how they tie in with SEO. These numbers are going to prove just how much more valuable investment in search engine optimization can be for your company.
- Better ranking on average
- Increase in organic conversions
- Increase in organic traffic and clicks
- First page search volume increases
- First page keyword growth
Best Metrics To Measure Content Marketing ROI
The metrics that provide the best understanding of your SEO campaign or organic presence come down to what you’re looking for.
It is important to remember that, just as with average KPIs, goals, and targets will also differ depending on the type of content.
This applies to the audience and the media format, among other things.
Data like these assists in tracking the ROI of SEO (along with other metrics).
This data can also be used to justify how SEO helps support content marketing efforts–especially when we are trying to prove the “value” of these activities.
How To Use These Metrics To Report On ROI
Content creation can cost a great deal of both time and money. There are countless departments and resources involved in content production.
When you want to demonstrate the importance of quality content within the first phases of product development, it’s important to use these metrics to tell a great story.
The first step to understanding the ROI of content marketing is establishing a baseline before you start making updates. For this, create benchmarks for content that already exists on your website.
It is always a good idea to check out your newly published content as soon as possible, this will be a chance for you to highlight their success to decision-makers and stakeholders. Executives care about how much traffic you get from SEO success. They want to know how well your content is converting, but the day-to-day process of using SEO insights for content development doesn’t really fall into their job responsibilities.
How Should You Use These SEO Metrics In Reporting?
Increase In Organic Conversions
This is an easy but very useful way to share with the team how well the content is performing. Conversions may be different for each type of content.
While these numbers are great, there is no better indicator as to how engaged someone is with your content than the number of times a user shares your post or hits the “buy now button.”
Whether you’re speaking to executives or not, organic conversion data is always a good place to start when you’re trying to show results from content marketing. They’ll be able to see how much of an impact your digital content has on their company’s bottom line.
First Page Keyword Growth
SEO takes a long time so it’s good to set realistic goals. Comprehensive keyword research is a big first step. You can also optimize or write content, depending on what you hope to accomplish.
One effective content marketing strategy is to try the “hub and spoke” approach, where you become authoritative about a topic that your page covers. Showing how much our page has grown in search engine results pages (SERPs) can be an effective way of measuring how much more visible it’s become over time.
As content marketers, we want to help decision-makers understand why SEO is important. One way we can do this is by showing them how our SEO efforts are impacting the SERPS.
You should also take note of changes to the website’s search ranking, as well as increases in the volume of people searching for your products or services. If a higher search volume is seen on Page 1, it’s a good indicator of how many people are clicking on our content and how easily noticeable it is.
Increase In Organic Traffic And Clicks
A key metric to include in a report is the number of website traffic and clicks content has produced. This can help inform future campaigns. This is a pivotal time to see what content is/isn’t performing well, and how users are engaging with the content.
When there is no data that proves how content drives conversion, it’s important to keep track of how many people read the content and which pages they spend the most time on.
Sometimes it takes a user a while to convert and come back, which means that there’s not always an obvious connection between what search engine optimization did for them and the conversion.
By measuring the traffic count or the number of clicks you may have, you’ll be able to prove to your company that the content is being seen by many audiences, leading to an increase in conversions.
Summary
When it comes to measuring the success of your content, trying to present the story in a way that can be easily understood can be very tricky. The metrics listed above are all good ways of showing executives how important SEO is for their website. With improved visibility, there is more traffic, conversions, and revenue generation.
Setting up reporting dashboards to see the impact of your content can also help identify when something is not working so you can make adjustments and try to optimize your content. If we don’t properly track the impact our SEO team has on the content of our website and report it correctly, we’ll have a harder time becoming a more mature SEO-oriented organization.
The key is to make everyone understand the importance of SEO in the organization. When you can do that, it becomes a more widespread strategy. The more you work hard on your SEO strategy, the easier it will be for budget and resources for SEO to be allocated.
In addition, you can have detailed information about the best SEO tools by reading my article titled Top 10 Free SEO Tools for Site Audits
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