Today’s digital world is overflowing with content. Figuring out how to stand out among the hundreds of other search results can seem overwhelming. But by measuring content quality, you can make your website rank higher amid the competition.
Developing a clear outline for analyzing your content marketing plan will allow you to create meaningful and relevant posts that grab the attention of your target audience.
Concrete strategies, such as generating an engaging landing page, establishing a loyal social media following, and writing highly curated blog posts, will also help you improve both the quality of your content and your content marketing return on investment (ROI).
Common metrics for content quality
There are a variety of search engine optimization (SEO) metrics that search engines analyze when determining content quality. Three main factors to keep in mind when developing content are web traffic, lead generation, and social media engagement. Tracking these content marketing metrics can help you analyze your website’s performance and increase conversion rates.
How does tracking web traffic help you measure content quality?
Your site’s traffic is a key performance indicator (KPI) for engagement.
Visitors are potential customers. Understanding a user’s path to your site can help you identify aspects of your website that need improvement.
For example, a high bounce rate can mean that your landing page is not engaging or may be difficult for visitors to navigate. Redesigning the layout of your website or updating the content on this initial page are two potential solutions for decreasing the bounce rate.
You can also use Google Analytics to gather additional information on your website’s traffic. Along with measuring your content and marketing campaigns, you can compare your site’s traffic across search engines.
Collecting this data can also help you develop ideas for new content creation. Knowing how and why your visitors are coming to your site will allow you to cater your content to users’ search queries and needs.
How does tracking lead generation help you measure content quality?
Examining lead generation provides a window into the customer experience. Lead generation can indicate whether your content is performing well for your targeted audience or when it is time to rethink your marketing initiatives.
First, check your website’s performance metrics. This will help you determine whether a given marketing campaign, blog post, or newsletter is achieving the desired impact.
When it comes to leads, emphasize quality over quantity. High-quality leads are more likely to turn into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Understanding your target audience can help you develop curated content that engages visitors and generates quality leads. When you have quality traffic—visitors who connect with your site—you will organically improve your marketing ROI.
How does tracking social media engagement help you measure content quality?
Engagement is the umbrella of social media marketing. Likes, comments, and shares fall under this category.
By tracking how your customers’ social media accounts interact with your business’s account, you can analyze your content and data quality.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter each have their own analytics tools you can use to collect data on your website’s social media accounts.
High engagement metrics indicate that your content is performing well with your customer base.
To measure content quality through social media engagement, examine the post engagement rate. This ratio compares the number of interactions with a single social media post to the number of total followers on the account.
Essentially, it shows how your followers are interacting with your content and whether they find it appealing. A high ratio indicates that your content interests them enough that they want to engage with it.
It is also important to keep in mind that benchmarks for post engagement rates vary across different social media platforms. For instance, Instagram often has a higher benchmark than Facebook and Twitter.
Benefits of measuring the quality of your content
Content creators who measure the effectiveness of their content will drive more traffic, leads, and conversions. Content quality also provides insight into your overall marketing strategy. When you measure how your content is performing, you can discern gaps within your content marketing effort.
How can measuring the quality of your content help you identify weaknesses in your marketing?
Oftentimes, poor content quality is an indicator of a marketing strategy weakness.
By calculating content marketing ROI, you can identify whether your marketing initiatives are generating revenue. A poor ROI can indicate that your content is not effective in connecting with your identified customer base.
Content scoring is another way to determine whether you are effectively communicating with your visitors. For example, content above the reading level of your designated audience can increase bounce rate, as visitors will leave a site that they do not understand.
Your content score will also measure the extent to which your blog post or article is optimized for search engines. If your content has a low score, your post will not rank well. A low ranking will reduce the visibility of your site.
How can measuring the quality of your content help you refine your marketing strategy?
Analyzing whether your site’s content moves visitors through the next stage of the buyer’s journey is the first step in reexamining your content marketing effort.
How your visitors navigate your site reveals which pieces of content are driving conversions. When you understand quality measures, such as the type of content your visitors best respond to, you can make better-informed marketing decisions.
This data can also be used for editing content that fails to convert traffic and turning it into high-quality content.
Avoid relying on vanity metrics for content-related decisions, as these performance measures are inflated. Relying solely on measures such as email reply rates and subscriber counts can distort the effect of your marketing efforts, preventing you from identifying areas that require improvement.
How can measuring the quality of your content help you increase productivity?
High-quality content establishes brand awareness and drives conversion rates. These two KPIs impact productivity.
Measuring the effectiveness of your content in achieving these marketing goals will ultimately increase productivity.
If your content is not executing the desired impact, then it is not adding value to your content marketing effort. By measuring content quality, you can identify which areas you need to revise to increase web traffic and overall productivity.
How to examine your content and its metrics to gauge results
Analyzing your content marketing metrics can provide a foundation for determining the effectiveness of different content forms. By outlining clear KPIs and improving your marketing strategy, you can drive organic traffic.
What factors should you consider when gauging the results of your content marketing?
There are three main components you should consider when evaluating the results of your content marketing strategy:
- The cost of creating your content piece (writer salary and additional outsourced work)
- The cost of distributing your content (paid promotions/ads or any software used during the content creation process)
- The total sales generated from your content
Once you have this information, you can calculate your final content marketing ROI. While there are many ways of doing this, a simple way is to first subtract your investment from your return. Then, divide that number by your investment and multiply by 100.
This will give you your content marketing ROI in terms of a percentage.
What is the role of marketing attribution in gauging the results of your content marketing?
Marketing attribution is an additional lens into the consumer’s journey. It is especially important when measuring the impact of your content, as it determines which specific posts or channels had the greatest influence on conversion rates.
Using marketing attribution as a tool will show, for example, whether a recent newsletter or blog post was the catalyst toward marketing effectiveness.
You can also use marketing attribution for measuring brand awareness by revealing any gaps in the marketing funnel.
What analytics are useful when gauging the results of content marketing?
First, collect data on how long your users are viewing different pages on your site. Longer view times indicate higher-quality content. This can also be a way to measure the readability and results of your website copy.
In contrast, pages that have a high bounce rate show which pieces of content cause visitors to leave your site.
While view-time stats can become skewed because of users leaving their computer or phone open on your site, combining this data point with engagement metrics can create valuable content marketing metrics for you to actively measure.
Social media engagement is another great set of data to use for analyzing content quality and effectiveness. See how often users value your content enough to share it with their followers on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
When analyzing social media traffic data, it is important to focus on trends. Avoid getting lost in the numbers.
Steps to improve content quality
Analyzing your content marketing strategy will help you identify areas for improvement. Once you have outlined your content strategy, there are steps you can take to create quality content.
How should you determine which areas of your content marketing need improvement?
Make sure you have clearly defined marketing objectives. If your content marketing goals are ambiguous, driving traffic will become difficult.
Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that while 80 percent of business-to-business marketers claim to have a content marketing strategy, only one-third of those marketers have actually documented their content marketing plan.
So what are you trying to achieve through your content? Sales? Leads? Brand awareness? A social media following?
Establishing your goals prior to content development will help focus your content strategy and target your audience.
What should you look for in quality content?
Successful content production sets user experience as priority. It both entertains and informs its readers.
Additionally, quality content is highly specific. Blog posts and newsletters that cater to the target audience show understanding of the needs of consumers and provide readers with the answers to their search queries.
Considering readers first and search engines second during the content creation process will help you write valuable content.
How should you determine what type of content performs well for your business?
First, consider your business’s tone. What voice does your company represent? This will determine the style of business writing that best suits your content type.
Second, research and understand what information your consumers need. If you are a skin-care company and your consumers are searching for ways to reduce wrinkles, create a blog post on proper skin care targeting readers above the age of forty.
Likewise, conducting data analytics research on user demographics can help you develop content that is more personalized and engaging for visitors.
Finally, track comments and click-throughs. Engaged readers will often leave comments on a piece of content they find especially valuable and useful. Use these comments as a resource and guide for understanding what works.
Like comments, click-throughs are another great data point to use when examining which types of content consumers respond to best.
Overall Takeaways for Measuring Content Quality
Measuring the quality of your content can greatly impact the effectiveness of your marketing strategy while improving your users’ experiences on your website.
Throughout the content development process, it is important to consider your marketing goals as well as your consumers’ needs. Having both these objectives in mind will help you create highly curated content that ranks well.
Remember, it is also necessary to collect data on user demographics, search queries, and conversion rates. This information will indicate which pieces of content are achieving the desired impact and which pieces of content require revisions and updates.
In terms of actual profit, you can go one step further and measure your content quality by calculating your content marketing ROI. This will ultimately help you determine whether your content creation is generating revenue.
Additional Resources
While measuring content quality using these practices can be effective, it can also be time-consuming and exhausting.
At Elite Editing, we have expert SEO writers and editors to help you create highly curated and engaging content that aligns with your marketing strategies and goals.
For additional information, check out the content writing and editing services we offer for businesses and individuals.
Just can’t get enough? 
