SEO

23 Actual Content Metrics From Actual Marketers

Published

6 months ago

March 7, 2024

23 Actual Content Metrics From Actual Marketers

There are too many content marketing metrics out there. But we know which ones are actually used (we asked on LinkedIn and X).

To organize things a bit, we’ve organized the metrics into eight categories. Just the names themselves will give you a good idea of what’s important in content marketing.

Let’s get to it.

This type of metric measures the efficiency of the content team.

These metrics make perfect sense. Once you get a good grasp of your content strategy, you want to scale. In other words, once something starts to bring results, you want to do more of it.

Two metrics you should consider here are:

Publishing frequency.
Meeting deadlines.

The first one, pointed out by Sara Stella Lantazio, is about the number of articles, videos, social media posts, emails, etc. published in a given period.

Publishing frequency takes advantage of the very nature of content marketing – the more you do it, the better the results because they compound, and the easier it is to get those results, too. It’s true, regardless of the channel you’re using.

For instance, here’s a chart from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer showing how the traffic (orange) and referring domains (blue) to my article portfolio have grown proportionally to the consistent growth of new articles published (yellow).

The second metric, meeting deadlines, was mentioned by Nick Jordan. This might be helpful for in-house teams, but it’s super important for agencies. It tells you everything about how realistic your estimates were and whether you can take on more work.

We’ve received many responses underlining the importance of organic search traffic, and keywords are the absolute cornerstone of this channel. As you probably already know, the higher you rank for keywords, the more visible your pages are on the search engines like Google, and the more traffic you get.

The metrics that marketers mentioned to us were:

Impressions: how often a site appears in search results.
Rankings: what pages rank for a given keyword. That’s how you know if your SEO is working and when to step in to optimize your content.
Organic keyword growth: the number of keywords that a page or site ranks for. As pointed out by Goran Mirkovic and Jacob McMillen this metric is especially helpful on new content to see if Google starts to rank it.
Rate of keyword acquisition: very similar to the metric above, but this time we’re interested in how fast Google ranks content. Samantha North said, “in my experience, when it picks up lots of keywords quickly, it’s going to rank well”.
Share of voice: percentage of all possible organic clicks (from SERPs) for the tracked keywords landing on your website.

There are two types of tools you’ll need to track these metrics:

Google Search Console. The only tool that allows you to measure impressions in Google’s SERPs reliably. Tools like Ahrefs allow you to tap into that data and get some more functionality out of it, but you still need to have GSC set up.
Ahrefs Rank Tracker or a similar rank tracking tool of your choice. Although GSC allows you to track rankings, it has very limited functionality with poor experience (here’s a long list of reasons why). Also, that’s where you get more refined, professional metrics like share of voice.

Next to keywords, backlinks are another thing content marketers use for measuring content performance. They are a measure of the impact of the content on the site’s authority.

And there’s a simple reason why backlinks are so important – they are still one of the strongest ranking factors. The more backlinks a page gets, the higher its chances to rank.

Moreover, the link equity you acquire this way flows throughout the entire site through internal links and increases the site’s authority.

Our commentary: backlinks are increasingly hard to get. They’ve become a currency of the web between those who need backlinks and those who can provide them. So, theoretically, backlinks should be a sign that your content is so good that people want to link to it, but in reality, some sites won’t link until they get something in return.

So we’d say track backlinks but only to your link bait content or if you’re doing link building.

An interesting insight into this topic came from Goran Mirkovic — don’t track backlinks in the very early stages of the site. It takes time to earn them, whether naturally or by link building.

Tip

The quality of backlinks matters more than quantity. If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can turn on the Best links mode to see the growth of the most impactful backlinks.

Leads measure the content’s effectiveness in converting visitors into prospects.

Typically, this metric is used with either gated content that requires contact information to access or content that encourages the visitor to get in touch, for example, for free consultation.

What we’ve heard from marketers is mostly pretty much the standard:

MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads): these are potential customers who have shown more interest in what you’re offering than the average visitor by leaving contact information. They might be ready to buy in the future, but they’re not quite there yet.
SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads): these are a step further along than MQLs. They’ve been reviewed by both the marketing and sales teams and are considered ready for a direct sales pitch.

And there was one metric I don’t see very often – high intent leads or HILs, shared by Josh Bradley. These are the people who demonstrate a clear need for a product like yours. Best if they match your ideal customer profile.

The best way to track leads is with a tool that allows for lead scoring and easier handoff to sales (Hubspot and the likes).

Traffic is the measure of content’s effectiveness in attracting clicks to your site. That’s right, not unique users, just their clicks.

You want to measure traffic only for content that is actually designed to generate traffic. Some social media posts (if not most) or emails won’t fall into this category because they are meant to be digested on the spot with no clear CTA guiding to the site.

The best way to measure traffic is to measure its growth. Marketers do it on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Shorter time periods are rare since content marketing takes time.

But here’s a pro tip – if you want to see which content landed well, you can take the first 7-day period to identify that content.

“I often measure how much traffic an article received in the first week. It’s a good indicator of how well we ‘launched’ and promoted each article, and which topics were most interesting to our audience.”

Many analytics tools track traffic, but not all of them show you growth, so here’s the formula for traffic growth:

= (Traffic this period - Traffic last period) / Traffic last period * 100%

You can also measure the total traffic to pieces or directories of content to compare them or show the impact of the part to its sum. Ahrefs lets you do that in two ways: through Site structure report and by manually choosing which content to group together via the Portfolio feature.

Site structure report in Ahrefs. — Site structure report.

Portfolios feature in Ahrefs. — Portfolios feature.

Another reason why you’d want to measure traffic is to measure conversion (more about that in a bit). Traffic is the basis of conversion because it tells how many clicks resulted in sign-ups or sales.

Let’s take a closer look at organic traffic since this type was mentioned to us the most.

In terms of absolute numbers, the most accurate data will come from Google Search Console. Just open the tool and go to the Performance tab.

Performance report in Google Search Console.

However, SEO tools like Ahrefs will give you better functionality despite the metrics being estimations. You can:

Create portfolios of pages or even whole sites to track.
Instantly see how you stack up against competitors.
See which pages gained and lost the most traffic in a given period.

Tracking traffic is just a means to an end, and this is where SEO tools got your back too. In Ahrefs, there’s a nifty report called Opportunities which points you to pages and keywords with a good outlook for improvement.

Audience growth shows the demand for more content from your audience.

Social media, email, and podcasts are the channels where you want to measure that.

In terms of the actual metrics, these came up in our poll:

Newsletter subscribers growth.
LinkedIn audience growth.
YouTube audience growth.

No surprises here. Standard metrics, natively tracked on the respective platforms.

At Ahrefs, we track some of these metrics, too. They’re especially helpful for gauging the impact of new types of content.

Generally speaking, if you’re creating relevant and valuable content, the number of subscribers should be growing. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are some nuances here:

Viewer fatigue. They’ve learned what they wanted, your once-attractive format was viewed once too much; they’ve basically outgrown your channel.
Decreases caused by an algorithm change on YouTube.
You’ve stepped into a niche too far away from their interests.
Some types of content or topics have a higher tendency to attract subscribers. For example, most subscribers on AhrefsTV come from our beginner-level content.

1709841366 513 23 Actual Content Metrics From Actual Marketers — Organic growth of subscribers to AhrefsTV

Engagement is the measure of content’s ability to catch and keep attention.

Engagement is probably the most controversial type on this list. It’s supposed to be a proxy of how interesting/entertaining your content is, but it’s not always reliable since it’s dependent on too many factors:

Audience size.
Algorithm changes.
Time of day.
Relativity of the metrics themselves. Is a long time on the page always a good thing? If you’re putting the most important information above the fold, could you blame content for not being scrolled all the way to the bottom?
Content consumption trends.

We were informed about the following metrics:

Likes and comments on social media (a tip from Nina Cleere, JD).
Email list engagement: how many people open your emails (open rate) and how many click on the links inside them (click rate). Higher than ever unsubscribe rate is also a sign that people don’t enjoy that type of email (a tip from Ryan Robinson).
Time on page: how long people spend reading or interacting with a specific page on your website (a tip from Irene Malatesta).
Scroll: how far down a page a visitor scrolls. In many cases, deeper scrolling should indicate the content is engaging enough to keep readers interested (a tip from Mariya Delano).

One interesting metric we saw was content mentioned in conversations with sales reps. So if the content makes its way into a prospect’s hands and it’s good or helpful enough to be mentioned in a conversation, that’s huge. It’s pure word-of-mouth, comparable to recommending music or a movie to a friend (thanks again for the tip, Sara Stella Lantazio).

Another interesting insight about engagement came from Rohan Hayes. He tracks engagement only for the ideal consumer profiles. Makes sense since this additional dimension of metrics takes the “vanity” out of “vanity metrics”.

In other words, the direct impact of content on the bottom line.

You could also define it as the content’s ability to generate the most valuable interactions because not all content says “buy”.

Here are some of the metrics we’ve seen in the comments (we added one ourselves).

Revenue/signups correlation with traffic. Based on the premise that as more people visit your site, you have more opportunities to convert visitors into subscribers or paying customers. It’s an elegant concept because it escapes the problems of attributing specific content to conversions (a tip from Nick Jordan).
Conversion growth from the bottom of the funnel content. This type of content can significantly impact sales, as it targets users who are already considering buying and just need that final nudge (a tip from Samantha North).
First page seen to paying customer. If your content is the first page a visitor has seen and then converted into a customer, that means the content works (a tip from Bojan Maric).
Content downloads. This refers to the number of times visitors download something from your website, like an ebook, or a whitepaper. High download rates can signal that your audience finds your content valuable (a tip from us).

Tip

For detailed data insights, like linking revenue to website traffic, ChatGPT can help. Simply ask, “Analyze this data, calculate and visualize the correlation between [data points].” This straightforward request provides clear, convincing results.

Final thoughts

Just one more thing before we wrap this up – not all of these metrics were tracked by all marketers.

This means that content strategies differ, and it’s ok if some of these metrics don’t make sense in your strategy. Take your time and choose the ones that do.

Got questions or comments? I’m on LinkedIn and X.

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Related Topics:Actual Content marketers Metrics seo

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WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

2 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

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SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

21 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

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SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

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