Semalt Expert Explains How To Evaluate The SEO Value Contents On Your Website
After writing your content, it is important to know what parameters are used to evaluate the SEO value of that content. You must find out how to assess your content and determine if your content is of high quality and has SEO value. This year, we've seen a close relationship between content and SEO. As consumers continue to find more relevant information and answers to their questions online, content marketers strive to ensure that the answers they provide on their WebPages are relevant and visible to their targeted audience.
Events such as Covid-19 affected the demand for optimized, high-quality information, which provided up to date analysis of happenings worldwide. With the way search engines have matured in recent years, marketers can now put the creation of dynamic content at the top of their business SEO plan.
There is a process of creating valuable content, and its impact on SEO is profound at the same time, it can be misinterpreted. It is one thing to put words together and call it a blog post or an article. It is another thing to mumble up words, sentences, and paragraphs that have real SEO value for your company and provide meaningful information to your target audience.
With content and SEO, quantity isn't always the best approach. However, by adding a new layer of insightful content, you increase the SEO quality of your content, which can help boost the performance of your website.
High-quality content
By a long shot, the quality of content is a subjective topic. Some experts may consider high ranking and a large amount of traffic as a good sign of quality. Other experts believe that quality content is determined by a specific type of engagement or particular actions. However, the end goal of any SEO content is to provide answers to the user's questions. High-quality content is one that is relevant, useful, and authoritative. To create quality content that performs well on SERP, you must adhere to Google's guidelines and SEO best practices.
In creating high-quality content, you should only look to impress search engines. The key lies in finding the right balance between optimizing search engine results and optimizing content for the users. Only when the right balance is achieved that's when you have created the best types of content.
In Google's webmaster hangout, a question was thrown at John Muller, and the question needed an answer to what quality content meant for Google. In his answer, he directed the perception of his audience away from what Google may algorithmically think quality content is to focus on the interpretation from users. If a user believed that content was of high quality, then that is great. That explains why Google always releases updates in its algorithm that try to match its user's intent and interpretations.
Measuring content value
Anyone that plans on using SEO to increase their organic search engine visibility and traffic should measure their results. This is because of the human role in content consumption and its effect on search engine rankings is essential to ensuring that your content satisfies both technical and human requirements.
It is critical that you understand the difference between what you measure between content and rank and how to measure content revenue. With this article, we hope to bring into perspective how to measure your content piece and its performance, as seen by search engine algorithms.
1. Technical SEO metrics
Technical SEO is considered the foundation of SEO metrics, organic rank, and visibility, which gives detailed insight into how well your content performs on search engines. To get a proper evaluation, you can look at a combination of certain on and off SEO page metrics.
Some factors to consider include:
- Keyword ranking: this involves how and where your content shows up on SERP.
- Traffic: this means how much traffic is being funneled into the page carrying your content.
- Click through rate: your click-through rate or CTR is the percentage of internet users that click on your page link from SERP.
- Backlinks: this is the number of inbound links that direct traffic to your webpage from other webpages.
2. Website engagement metrics
This is another measurement metric that shows where and how SEO and content combine to provide meaningful information for the audience. No matter how good you think your content is, without viewers, it can never serve its intended purpose. Without clicks from readers, you have no way of measuring or improving the expertise of content, authority, or trustworthiness. This is why EAT is so important.
3. Conversion rates
This could be sourced from a variety of places, depending on where your contents are placed.
Direct sources: this is directly from people who typed in your website/page.
Search: This is traffic from people who discovered your content on a search engine's results page.
Referrals: people who discovered your content via a link from another source. It can be another website or social media networks.
When you are looking at how a specific piece of content performs, look at the page level metrics. This includes:
New visitors: the number of new clicks viewing the content.
Interactions: how are people interacting with your content? Are they leaving comments or participating in the activities listed?
Bounce rates: do people stay to view your content, or do they bounce off in no time?
Value and conversion: are you experiencing an increase in sales and are your audience taking action based on your content?
4. Social media metrics
Thanks to the connectivity social media provides, people around the world can interact with your business and members of your team. This helps create trust as well as creating a connection between your content and your audience. When you study the behavior of your followers on social media, you can see how people are reacting to your content.
Reach: how big is the reach of your audience? How many people are likely to read your content?
Engagement: do people like, comment, and share your content? Is the number of your followers increasing?
Acquisition: are you benefiting from click through rates to your pages, referrals, social conversions, and assists?
5. Branding awareness metrics
This measurement metric is usually overlooked because it is difficult to track; however, placing a direct measurement for the impact of content on the brand should never be ignored. From traditional branding metrics to online branding, knowing how your content affects your brand gives a good indication of content performance. Content influences the brand and can be seen by monitoring.
Impressions: this refers to how many times your content gets displayed. It doesn't matter if it's clicked or not.
Share of voice: this refers to how your content is performing compared to your competition.
Brand vs. non-brand search traffic: the ratio of people searching for brand versus contents which carry no brand.
6. Revenue metrics
The purpose of the content is driving sales. That is why all roads lead down to one final metric, which is the influence of content on the revenue. The best way to get this usually comes from a combination of coverage media metrics and applying some form of attribution modeling in areas where it is difficult to draw a connection to the content piece and how much money you're beginning to make.
SEO metrics: rank versus targeted keywords, quick answers, inbound links.
Lead quality: landing page conversions and value.
Sales: page values, attributed scores, assisted conversions.
Ensuring your content is made of quality
Keywords and your choice of keywords are vital pieces for writing quality content for SEO. The better the overall quality of your content, the more valuable your content is. You should have a list of your keywords and ensure you have researched them properly before you start writing.
All through your content, these keywords will be able to fit in naturally so that the flow of the article is not disrupted. Remember, the keywords you choose are a realistic reflection of your ability to rank. That is why you need to use keywords with a high level of search volume. On a general note, you should look for keywords with search volume on the plus side of 100.
Conclusion
Creating great pieces of content takes time to create, rank, and accomplish their targeted business goals. As such, pumping out high volumes of content without a purpose behind it is not a wise SEO strategy.
SEO is a great way to measure content performance, and the value of content has the ability to influence every aspect of your business for better or worse. By focusing solely on ranking, marketers can miss the additional value of content marketing.
It is important that we understand that ranking is only the beginning of the content value measurement journey. Along the line, other factors must be evaluated in the journey towards recognizing and attributing value to your content. Thanks to this article and Semalt, you now know how to measure the factors that lie in between. In the end, it is such little factors that make the difference.