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Measuring your Goals

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Tracking progress

Measuring your goals is really important because it ties in with tracking progress, based on your content creation and campaigns.

The benefits of measuring goals by tracking your progress are that it:

  • Identifies areas of success and improvement going forward. If you can see where you’re failing, you can see where to improve. If you can also see where you are having success, you’ll be able to determine what is working and what to focus more on.
  • Helps you understand how your target audience interacts with your content. Figure out what content the users are reading the most, what pages they are converting on, and what pages they are bouncing out of to help you figure out your strategy for upcoming months and quarters.
  • Determines future opportunities for more content. Data such as internal search terms, new keywords your content is ranking for, and an increase or decrease in your goal metrics can help you understand new opportunities for more content.

Metrics to measure the success of your SEO content

You can use the following metrics to measure the performance of your SEO content:

  • Conversion rate: An increase in conversion rate shows better-optimized content that is converting customers.
  • Time on site: This shows how engaging your content is and if it holds the audience’s interest.
  • Inlinks (incoming links): Are other websites linking to your content?
  • Audience demographics: Have your target audience demographics increased? For instance, if US traffic increases after adding more content on a specific topic that you previously identified your US audience is interested in, then you know your goal has been met.

Content-tracking tools

You can use various tools to determine the success or failure of your SEO content initiatives:

  • MuckRack shows you which influencers and journalists are sharing your content on social media.
  • BuzzSumo helps you track social shares of your own content, as well as competitors’ content (by searching domain). It also shows you what content is popular on social media when searching by keyword.
  • Google Analytics gives you data about what is going on with your site – time on site, bounce rate, website traffic, and so on. It also shows you referral sources of people who found your content from other websites.
  • Tag Manager helps you tag URLs to identify where they came from. For instance, you can share a URL on Twitter with a tag that shows it was shared on Twitter. When someone clicks on that link in Twitter, it will show in Google Analytics that that is where they came from. This is great for tagging specific campaigns or promotions, so you know what platform is driving traffic to your site.
  • SEO Tools give you more data and insight into what people are searching for on your site, as well as on your competitors’ sites. They include Searchmetrics, SEMRush, and Raven.

Example: BuzzSumo

This is an example of tracking social media shares of content (see slide ‘BuzzSumo’). By looking to see which of your content is being shared most on social media, you can see what content from your website is most popular. Additionally, by looking at most-shared competitor content, as well as what content is being shared most for a specific keyword, you can gain insight into what your target audience is most interested in, as well as what is being shared most on social media.

For instance, if the topic ‘history of paisley’ is really popular, you can use BuzzSumo to determine what type of content does best, and prioritize that first. It could allow you to see that infographics about paisley get more social shares than blog posts, so you can create an infographic first.

Example: Google Analytics

This screenshot shows an example of an audience demographic segment (see slide ‘Google Analytics’). Because for this site, US-based traffic is the priority, we can track growth using this view in Google Analytics.  In this example, we see that our US-based site traffic makes up about 33% of the website’s overall traffic. If our goal was to increase this by 5% in quarter one, we can use analytics to track our progress.

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Kelsey Jones

Digital Marketing Consultant and Writer

  • 9 years’ experience in SEO and writing for the web
  • 17 years’ experience in HTML
  • Experience writing content for small and large brands
  • US Search Awards Judge 2014, 2015, 2016
  • The Drum US Search Awards Judge 2017
  • Former Executive Editor, Search Engine Journal, 2014-2017

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

SEO Content
Kelsey Jones
Skills Expert

This module covers the key concepts involved in SEO and content marketing. It outlines best practices for researching your SEO content and aligning it with your content strategy. It also covers best practices for creating content in a productive and efficient way, and demonstrates how to evaluate the performance of your content to ensure that it is meeting your content strategy objectives.