Say you’ve read all about why digital marketing is important for your small business. You’ve been sold on the benefits of SEO services and have learned all there is to know about Local SEO. You may even have produced dozens (or hundreds) of content blogs on your site, slowly and steadily driving traffic to it, and making an influx of sales in the process. So what’s next?
Glad you asked. Because creating content (by regularly publishing blogs) is only the first step. What you do after you have content on your site is just as, if not more, important. More precisely, how you evaluate your content—how you decide what goes and what stays, and what kind of content you produce moving forward—is an opportunity for your business to double down on what works, and discard what doesn’t.
Content Evaluations – What Are They & Why Do Them
By now you should know that content is anything that goes on your site. This could be the copy on your home, about, or landing pages, the blog content on your blogs, or the images and descriptions that make up your product or service pages. It could also be various marketing content—like graphics, audio, or video—that you’ve uploaded to your site. A content evaluation is exactly what it sounds like—it’s an assessment of your content, and how well it meets your goals.
When you evaluate your content via a content evaluation, you view it in the context of how it addresses the needs of your readers and customers, on their way to accomplishing the website goals (conversions) you’ve set out for your site. Meaning that, since every business has different goals, there’s no straightforward way to determine what kind of content should be kept or discarded for every business. At the end of the day, the way you should be judging your content is by the results that you’re looking for.
If you’re not getting the results you want—it’s likely a sign that your content isn’t as effective at converting your readers’ or customers’ as it should. In other words, poor results are an opportunity to figure out what about your content isn’t working, and to take another stab at figuring out what is. That’s why regularly evaluating your content—by periodically performing content evaluations—is so important, because it can help your business learn, through trial and error, what content most resonates with your audience, enabling more traffic, more growth, and more conversions, in the process.
Content Evaluations 101 – How To Evaluate Your Website Content
While the nuts and bolts of performing a comprehensive content evaluation are far from simple, at the end of the day there are two methods to evaluate your content. One—one you should be doing daily and weekly—is looking at your engagement numbers using web analytics tools (like Google Analytics). By looking at key metrics like page views, total conversions, conversion rates, bounce rate, exit rate, or average time on site, you can first determine if people are reading your content and for how long.
Paired with a search analytics tool (like Google Search Console), you can see what content is actually being read, as well as how well it’s working, in terms of triggering conversions on your site. In contrast, you can also better assess what content isn’t working—or what about your content needs to be improved. For example, having below ‘average page views,’ (which tells you how many pages the average user visits before leaving), could be a sign that your conversion funnel lacks clarity and needs an upgrade.
You can also look at data outside the scope of traditional analytics to assess your content, as well. By looking at your comments (if you enable them) or how many people are sharing your content online, you can further validate your insights. Knowing that someone took the time to share your content with their friends, for example, is a huge indication that your content triggered a nerve. This can help point the way to content that’s not only being read, but that’s good enough to prompt a conversion or something like it.
The second method for evaluating website content, while a bit more abstract, is to look at your ‘business numbers’ to assess if your content is triggering physical real-world conversions. More sales is likely a sign that more people are buying, just as a greater number of email subscribers is an indication that something is prompting readers’ to subscribe. By keeping track of what content you’re publishing when you publish it, you can better assess whether a particular piece or type of content is correlating with above-average results. If, for example, a particular piece of content triggered an influx of online traffic, prompting a spike in sales, you’ll now know what that content was, and be able to identify what worked so well about it.
Work With A Professional Marketer
At the end of the day, the best way to evaluate your content is by the results you want it to achieve and the goals you want to reach. If you have a website and it’s not giving you the results you want, it’s a sign that something needs to change. That said, evaluating your content is a process far easier to explain than to do, which is why it can be so beneficial to work with someone more experienced.
How to determine what goals your website can realistically achieve can be tricky, since it’s based almost entirely on your business, the scope of your content, and your audience. Moreover, knowing what analytics tools to use (and what metrics to track) is even more complicated. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg—since turning traffic metrics into actionable insights is what a content evaluation is really all about.
If you’re stuck on evaluating your content (or on setting goals for it), don’t hesitate to reach out to Hercules SEO. Our experienced team of dedicated digital marketers can help you set benchmarks for your content based on your business, your website, and your audience, and provide a step-by-step content strategy for achieving them. Give us a call today to find out more!