SEO metrics

The 3 Metrics That Matter for Content Marketing Success

by SEO Savvy August 21st, 2014

On July 22, SimpleReach, a startup that helps marketers and publishers measure the effectiveness of their content and ads, announced that it had raised $9 million in Series A funding to meet this demand and measure content, as reported by TechCrunch. That’s big news, since over 90% of marketers are not confident in how they’re measuring content, according to Contently. Currently, SimpleReach says that The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post and The Atlantic all use their product to measure the effectiveness of their native advertising programs and that brands like Intel and Xerox use it to analyze and promote their own content marketing.

While nearly every company today has its own company blog, far fewer have a concrete distribution strategy or even a clear measurement system in place for evaluating ROI, according to Contently. In theory, that’s what SimpleReach will do, and should help you to answer the questions: What metrics should your content marketing team measure? Is content marketing effective, and if so, how can this be measured?

If you’re wondering how to measure content marketing, you’re not alone. Here’s what you need to know about the three metrics that matter most for content marketing.

#1: Engagement. 
This is all about “stickiness”, specifically how much and how often prospects return to your site and engage with your content. Keep an eye on the following metrics:

• Unique visitors
• Page views
• Average visit duration
• Return visits
• Bounce rate

#2: Amplification.
What makes content “go viral”? Take a close look at your amplification metrics, specifically the number of shares, re-tweets, likes, etc. Consumers are more likely to talk about and re-share information about products they find personally and emotionally relevant. Look for a correlation between an uptick in SEO and organic traffic and shares, tweets, etc. For example, you may notice that one blog post is re-tweeted over 1,000 times on Twitter and that there is a simultaneous bump in site traffic. That’s a clear sign your content is resonating with your target audience and being amplified appropriately.

#3: Leads. 
In the B2B world, content marketing is designed to drive leads to your sales team by building awareness, attracting interest, and cultivating relationships. In many cases, your content serves as an “entry point” for the first interaction that leads may have with your business. The metrics that matter here are cost-per-lead, cost-per-new-name, and cost-per-opportunity.

Tying revenue to content marketing can be incredibly difficult, but SimpleReach is working to make this possible. Don’t get caught up in revenue numbers alone, however. When it comes to analyzing the success of your content marketing efforts, engagement, amplification and lead metrics are just as important.

Domain Authority as Website Quality Metric

by SEO Savvy August 12th, 2014

Domain Authority (DA) is a website quality score first developed by Moz as a holistic measurement of your site’s important SEO metrics. The greater your domain authority, the higher the quality of your website and the more likely it is that your site will rank in organic search. However, given all the changes to Google’s search algorithm, including the push towards semantic search, is domain authority still an important SEO metric?

While it may not be the final word on your site’s ranking potential, domain authority is a very useful gauge to analyze the quality of a website. Below, we’ve answered three basic questions about domain authority so you can better understand what the numbers mean for your website.

1) What is domain authority?

“Domain authority” is a quality score that roughly determines how well a website will perform in organic search results. Fundamentally, domain authority is meant to approximate how competitive any given site is for ranking well in Google search results. Since Google takes a variety of different factors into account when calculating organic search rankings, so too does domain authority. Domain authority is measured on a scale of 1 to 100; the higher your score, the stronger your domain authority and, by extension, the more likely it is that your site pages and content will rank in Google organic search.

2) Does domain authority matter?

Yes. Even with Google’s recent algorithm changes, domain authority is a valuable metric for analyzing site quality. Since domain authority is made up of an aggregate of different metrics, it’s an important view of your website’s overall quality and SEO performance. A low domain authority score means you have to improve the quality of content and backlinks to your website as well as improve on-page optimization. Quality is the key and that takes time and effort to build into a website. For example, if you are still looking for shortcuts to organic rankings and obsessing over the perfect keyword density, or buying spammy low-quality exact match anchor text backlinks, you may want to rethink this. Your DA score will thank you later.

3) How can I improve my website’s DA?

First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that it is extremely difficult to gain a DA number of 100. Only the most popular of sites, such as Facebook and Google itself, are able to do so. Second, unlike some metrics, like page views, conversions or visitor time on site, domain authority is difficult to influence quickly with a single tactic. It is a holistic view of your website’s quality.

Keeping this reality in mind, you should ensure that all your technical on-page SEO is in place. This means that your site URL structure, meta tags, header tags, alt image tags, internal linking and keywords are working in harmony with one another. Once your technical SEO is strong, focus on generating quality links through the creation of linkable content, also known as content marketing. Nothing has a more direct impact upon domain authority than having plenty of amazing, original and highly sharable content that is linked to from multiple