How to Measure Your Blog Posts Search Performance

Just how successful are your blog posts? Are you reaching your targeted audience and bringing business to your website? The internet has so much information available to measure search performance. It can be quite overwhelming and time consuming to sift through all of the data out there. Which data should you focus on to measure the success of your blog?

Is there an easier way to monitor blog posts search performance? Which information is most useful and easy to access? To simplify your efforts and start seeing what is happening or not happening with your blog performance, here are three ways to measure your blog search performance.

1. Measure Number and Type of Visitors

The first and most obvious way to measure the performance of your blog is to find out how many visitors your blog is attracting. This number will indicate how successful you are at attracting visitors to your website. Google Analytics will take you a step further and show you the types of visitors who are viewing your blog. To gain a better idea of where your visitors are coming from, you can use Technorati to track links to your website from other websites.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free and provides basic report of blog Visits, Pageviews, and Bounces. This kind of usage data gives you a big picture of your blog search performance and how well your blog is reaching customers. Google Analytics gives detailed information on visitors to your blog. You get measurements of total visitors, new visitors, return visitors, direct visitors, and feed subscribers. Successful blogs have increased numbers of repeat visitors and direct visitors. These types of visitors lead to subscribers and purchasers.

Just remember, Google Analytics provides you with the numbers; you provide the application of those numbers by finding common strengths in highly visited blogs. You want to reproduce the quality of content which is drawing in visitors. Take note of which topics generated the most site visits and make a plan to produce more blogs on those popular topics.

Technorati

Something you want to pay attention to is what is called an inbound link. Put simply, this is when visitors get to your website from following a link another website. The very purpose of a blog is to reel in readers with an educational topic to drive search traffic to your website. Interesting blog topics will increase your number of inbound links.

You want to keep track of the number of inbound links each blog post is generating. This information will help you know what topics are driving the most search traffic so you can generate create the kind of content viewers are searching for. Technorati, a blog raking service, is a great choice for tracking inbound links.

2. Measure Visitor Activity

A true measure of a blog’s success is when readers are converted to business prospects or subscribers. Measuring the number of subscribers is important. The number of subscribers is a direct indication of a successful blog. People subscribe to well-written, high-quality content.

Just tracking number of visits to a blog cannot measure the credibility of your brand within your specific industry. Subscribers will promote your brand for you as they share it with friends. Subscribers lead to product purchases and event participation. To get to this point, it’s important to measure visitor activity and conversion rates.

Spring Metrics

If you’re not familiar with Spring Metrics, you really need to check it out. It’s one of the best tools for tracking conversions. Conversions are something you definitely want to pay attention to and learn how to track. It’s great when people view your blog or website, but the real goal is getting them to take some kind of action once they get there. These actions, known as conversions, include subscribing to your email list, leaving a comment, and making a purchase.

Setting up Spring Metrics is easy and painless. It involves setting up a confirmation “Thank You” page with their javascript code. It’s as simple as that. Spring Metrics will automatically track everything for you allowing you to focus more time on blogging. You’ll get detailed information on conversions as a whole as well as individual activity.

Google Analytics URL Builder

You can also track conversions with Google Analytics. It allows you to tag your URLs with custom tracking parameters. Basically you define your goal and a special URL will reveal the source of the click. When you use the newly created tagged URL, Google will track all incoming traffic to your site and actions.

The detailed conversion information is valuable. You can actually track the pages a user viewed and the prior steps they took before a conversion action was made. What this means is you can now see what caught the attention of subscribers before they subscribed to your website or made a purchase. You can see which pages are generating the most interest and gaining real results.

3. Measure User Behavior

The third way you want to measure how well your blogs are doing is to measure the behavior of users. What are users doing once they are on your site? How are they interacting with the information on your page? Knowing how your users interact on your page will help you see what topics led them to take particular actions.

This type of tracking focuses on user behavior, what the users actually do when they land on your site. You’ll learn how far down the page the users scroll and at what place they stop viewing or decide to leave a comment, subscribe, or make a purchase. Studying their behavior will help you give users what they’re most interested in and make changes accordingly. One of the best services to measure user behavior is CrazyEgg.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is a great tool to track and study user behavior and interactions. With CrazyEgg, you can see exactly where people click on your page and see what actions are taken. You can also compare user activity from multiple incoming sites. You can see how users coming in from different search engines compare to those who came to your site from Twitter or Facebook.

Successful blogs reach their targeted audiences, contain interesting and relevant content, build brand awareness, and result in customers taking action. That’s the plan, now how can we be sure our blogs are successful? Measuring blog post search performance is necessary for blog success. If you’re blogging without measuring search performance, you’re wasting time guessing what information and products readers are interested in learning more about.

To succeed, regularly measure the performance of your blog to keep up with which blogging strategies are working well and which topics your readership cares the most about. It doesn’t have to be time consuming or overwhelming.

Just remember to keep your goal in mind and let tracking services like CrazyEgg, Spring Metrics, Google Analytics, and Technorati take care of measuring the number and type of visitors, visitor activity, and user behavior on your website for you so you can focus on creating more successful blogs.