If you want your business’s website to be seen online, then you need solid SEO. Well-optimised content is a core pillar of the overall SEO picture, and it’s an ongoing process that can grow your website’s search rankings meaningfully over time.
To get the most out of content-focused SEO, you need to start on the right foot and then measure its performance and overall success over time, making refinements as you go.
In today’s blog, we’ll take a closer look at SEO content, the key metrics to measure, and how to fine-tune your efforts to improve your SEO performance. So, let’s jump in!
Types of Content for SEO
Various content approaches can be taken to help bolster your website’s search rankings and broader visibility online. Some common examples of SEO-rich content include:
Product and Collection Pages
For businesses that sell many products and services, particularly those involved in the e-commerce space, it is essential that you have devoted product and collection pages. Product pages refer to individual products while collection pages are where all specific product types are listed.
For example, if you’re a sports retailer, you’d have individual product pages for every type of running shoe you sell and then a broader collection page where all running shoes are listed. This allows you to work on ranking for a broader term (‘running shoes’) while also making granular optimisations for each individual product page.
Blog Posts
Blogs allow you to expand your SEO content efforts by speaking about the broader components of your business and industry. They present ample opportunity to build upon established keywords and introduce new ones, including longtail keyword phrases.
Returning to the example of running shoes, blogs can tap into common queries people have about them. Topics could include ‘How to Choose the Right Running Shoes for Your Workout Regimen’ or ‘How to Lengthen the Life of Your Running Shoes’.
This also presents an opportunity to build your website’s overall perceived authority by directly providing informative or educational content that expands your reader’s knowledge.
FAQs
Whether these are included on product or collection pages or developed as standalone pages, answering FAQs will bolster your rankings around common product or service questions.
Well-structured FAQs give Google and other search engines clearer signals that you’re providing information that’s benefiting users.
Benefits of Measuring Your Website’s SEO Performance
Measuring your content and the broader state of your SEO efforts aren’t just beneficial to your business’s website, they’re essential. Some key benefits of monitoring SEO performance include the following:
- You can identify the pages with SEO content that’s working (by measuring views, time on page, click-throughs, etc.) against content that isn’t working (high bounce rates, minimal time on page, limited impressions, low search rankings, etc.)
- You can assess the performance of high-priority keywords and if they’re ranking higher in search engine results and leading to more website visits.
- The ability to measure how relevant the SEO content is to users’ needs and if it’s driving desired actions (click-throughs, conversions, enquiries, purchases, etc.)
- Understanding the staying power and authority of your content – are people sticking around to read it, view media, and click through to other relevant pages?
- The ability to compare the performance of broader keywords and terms against more localised or targeted versions (e.g. ‘running shoes’ vs ‘running shoes Melbourne’ vs ‘waterproof running shoes’, etc.)
Measuring all facets of your SEO performance will allow you to constantly tweak and modify your efforts to hit the right balance.
What SEO Metrics Should I Track?
When it comes to how to measure SEO performance on the content front, the four areas we suggest focusing on are search rankings, organic traffic, revenue/conversions/key events, and bounce and engagement ranks.
Search Rankings
When it comes to improving your SEO performance, the first metric to look at is how your different keywords and key phrases are ranking on Google. Your site’s search rankings can be assessed through tools such as Google Search Console and Ahrefs.
By looking at the search rankings, you’ll be able to see if the keywords you’ve focused on have improved in rank, remained the same, or dropped. It provides you with a preliminary sense of whether or not your efforts are yielding the results you desire.
Organic Traffic
The better your SEO, the more organic traffic you’ll gain. You can use tools such as Google Analytics and look at your website traffic and filter it to focus on organic users that arrived through search queries.
You can have a broad overview of all organic traffic numbers and then narrow down these metrics by looking at specific URLs or search terms to see which ones are bringing in the most engaged organic numbers.
Revenue/Conversions/Key Events
Through platforms such as Google Analytics, you can create specific events or actions to be tracked so you can identify when users are completing key events (filling out a form), converting (such as through a lead generation page), or driving revenue for your business (completing a product purchase).
This includes actions they take on specific pages and identifying if they ended up on that page or form through organic means such as search results. You can utilise Analytics to see if specific SEO-driven pages are resulting in desired actions from users and, by extension, that your efforts are driving a tangible ROI.
Bounce & Engagement Rates
Assessing bounce rates and engagement rates is also key to understanding the effectiveness of your SEO content. The ideal result of optimised content is not just that it will help your search rankings in general, but that the content is relevant to what users want to learn from those searches.
If an optimised page on your website is still seeing high bounce rates, this can be a clear indication that the relevance of your content to the specific search query is misaligned and could use further refinement or a new approach. Conversely, a high engagement rate can be indicative of your SEO content being relevant, valuable, and in a good place.
Tools to Measure SEO Performance
Many tools can be used to measure SEO performance. On the Google front, Google Search Console allows you to assess and monitor SEO performance, particularly in terms of the search engine results page (SERP).
You’ll be able to assess data such as the number of impressions per keyword, where your keywords rank in Google’s search engine results, and what the associated click-through rate with those keywords is.
Google Analytics opens the door to see how SEO is benefiting your site’s overall performance, how many organic visitors are going to your site, whether organic efforts are leading to conversions and sales, etc.
There are other SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, that can provide breakdowns of your ranking performance, link quality, and overall SEO health.
Screaming Frog can be used to conduct an SEO audit of your site as needed. It provides snapshots of issues such as duplicate content, poor platform optimisation, page and loading errors, and so much more.
These tools do go even deeper than what we’ve discussed here, so it’s certainly worth learning more about each and how they can assist your business’s optimisation efforts.
How to Evaluate Content Quality
The rule for SEO content is that it needs to be genuinely valuable to the end user. Google and other search engines won’t reward you for keyword stuffing or just producing basic, derivative content.
It needs to be useful to humans, first and foremost. Below are four key areas for evaluating the quality of your content.
Relevance
Good content-based SEO isn’t just about the right keywords or writing something so that it’s readable to humans. If your webpage or blog is focused around a specific keyword or search query, then you need to ensure that the page is directly speaking to that enquiry.
You can’t write a blog such as, ‘How to Choose the Right Running Shoes for Your Workout Regimen’ only to then go on and barely speak about running shoes and different workout regimens. So, always ensure that there is a clear relevant tie between your focus keywords and the content you write around it.
Competitive Analysis/Industry Analysis
Seeing what your competitors are doing on the content front and assessing how effective they are can help inform your efforts. Where do they excel, where do they fall short and why? Do they get more granular with their content strategy or do they couple broader efforts with paid solutions?
You can use tools such as Screaming Frog to analyse competitors and see how they structure their SEO and the keywords and related terms they focus on. Understanding the strength of competitors and the industry at large can give you the necessary context to evaluate and fine-tune your SEO.
Content Audit
Content audits are a great way to see where your content is hitting the mark and where it’s off-aim. You’ll discover where optimisations are needed. These could include:
- Pages missing meta descriptions.
- Low-quality images or images that lack alt text.
- Limited word count.
- Improper content structure.
- Keyword scarcity or keyword stuffing.
- Lack of authoritative or reputable sources when discussing statistics or studies, especially if you’re posting Your Money, Your Life content – this is content that could impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.
Content audits are essential to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your content, and what can be done to improve its overall quality SEO viability.
Human v AI Written
The buzz around AI has been going strong for about two years now, coinciding with ChatGPT’s initial release back in November of 2022.
For website owners, however, you need to tread lightly with anything AI. While ChatGPT can be helpful for content ideation or even helping you settle on an alternative tone, it should not be writing your content.
Google and other search engines do punish the rankings of pages and websites that are highly suspected of using generative AI for their content creation. Websites such as GPTZero and Copyleaks’ AI Detector Tool are useful ways to analyse your content and ensure it’s not AI or suspected of being AI.
Are you looking to enhance your website’s content and SEO but don’t know where to start? The Reform Digital team is here to help. Get in touch with our SEO specialists today.
