Most companies leverage blog content on their website to build topical authority.
Some of this content performs well. But almost all sites have content assets that don’t maximize their SEO potential.
So how do you know what works and what doesn’t? And how can you tell which pages convert traffic into meaningful results (i.e., leads or sales) and what topics engage visitors the most?
The answers lie in conducting a blog content analysis. We’ll show you how below.
Table of Contents:
Benefits of Analyzing Blog Content
Blogs often underperform because they were created with a limited set of data. Even with keyword research and SERP analysis, a lot of content is still written based on assumptions and gut feeling, rather than performance data.
Blog content analysis is a way to uncover pages that didn’t “hit the bullseye” yet - assets that didn’t convert, get any clicks, or generate any meaningful engagement - and use real data to identify how to improve them.
What to Evaluate When Conducting Blog Content Analysis
Analyzing blog content reveals quite a bit about how your efforts align with business goals.
The most effective blog content attracts leads, drives new business, and positively affects the bottom line.
A blog content analysis determines the overall effectiveness of your content, and allows you to set up benchmarks to monitor improvements.
For example, with blog analysis, you can evaluate the following:
How Well Your Content Aligns With the Needs of Your Audience
Evaluating top-performing content helps you understand what topics engage your audience the most. This insight shows you what to double down on, where to allocate most of your efforts, and what content gaps to close with upcoming content assets.
What Questions Your Audience Wants Answers to (And Which Ones They Don’t)
Insights on the questions your audience wants answers to also come from analyzing what pages perform well and which ones don’t seem to engage your readers much.
How Authoritative Your Blog Content Is
Following Google’s Helpful Content Update, it’s more important than ever to create authoritative blog content.
Recommended Reading: How to Get (and Stay) Ahead of Google’s Helpful Content Update
To analyze content for authoritativeness, conduct keyword research to gather insights on the search volume, keyword difficulty, keyword intent, and traffic potential of the blog’s ranking keywords.
Content that clearly addresses popular search queries that match the intent of the blog’s topic showcases authority on the subject.
Including internal links to other blogs within the same topic cluster will also help build topical authority.
What Drives Audience Engagement
Metrics such as time on page, bounce rate, conversion rate, and engagement with media (i.e., how many times your videos get viewed, etc.) help determine the audience’s overall engagement with your content.
When analyzing our own content, we evaluated which blogs received high clicks and good engagement. After reviewing the content on those pages, we noticed that they all featured multimedia elements. As it turned out, those videos greatly affected how long people stayed on our pages.
How to Conduct Blog Content Analysis
Every company analyzes its blog content differently and will focus on slightly different insights depending on their overall content marketing goals
That said, there are several core steps included in a blog content analysis.
Step 1: Conduct a Thorough Review of Blog Content Performance
Reviewing all content-related data to evaluate various relevant metrics and KPIs is the first step in blog content analysis. When completed manually, this process is typically very time-consuming.
To save time, you can use an SEO platform to monitor relevant sections of your site. seoClarity, for example, allows you tag any section or collection of URLs and access performance metrics for those pages.
(Page Tags dashboard in seoClarity)
Rank Intelligence delivers the most accurate ranking data to show you how well your content performs in SERPs.
(Keyword rankings dashboard in seoClarity)
Step 2: Review Blog Content on a URL Level
Many companies often merge this step with the overall content review. But, the two processes are actually quite separate.
Rather than evaluating the overall content’s performance against various business objectives, a page review aims to uncover:
- Pages that perform exceptionally well and drive meaningful business results
- Blog posts that are on the verge of breaking through
- Content that significantly misses its objectives
Once again, the analysis process revolves around reviewing various traffic and engagement-related metrics such as overall traffic levels, clicks and impressions, bounce rates, time on page, and more.
Page Clarity is a complete on-page SEO analysis tool within the seoClarity platform. With this capability, you can conduct a comprehensive analysis of every content asset on the site - See a complete view of the page’s performance, from target keywords, various KPIs, down to recent on-page changes, and more.
(Page Clarity data in seoClarity)
Step 3: Draft Content Revision Plans
The goal of all this research is not just to evaluate and understand the content’s performance. The data you collect can also help you identify the reasons for both exceptional and poor performance, and collect ideas for improvements.
We suggest using a predictable content framework to guide your strategy for each stage of the content lifecycle to improve your content’s longevity and ROI.
Here’s how to utilize our content optimization framework to create content that generates traffic long after you publish it:
- Plant: Develop content by first understanding how your audience searches for information.
- Grow: Expand the range of keywords that your content ranks for by optimizing it and providing more in-depth information on topics.
- Decay: Safeguard your rankings by “pruning,” aka identifying irrelevant content, and refreshing content through updates and optimization.
This content refresh and optimization playbook will help you manage the final step of this framework.
Tools to Help Analyze and Optimize Content at Scale
To speed up and scale the process of blog content analysis and optimization, consider utilizing these helpful solutions.
Page Clarity with Sia Integration
We already talked about Page Clarity's ability to help you conduct a full analysis of all the content assets on your site. But with Page Clarity's recent integration with Sia, our intelligent AI-powered SEO assistant, it also automatically generates optimized page titles and meta descriptions.
Rather than analyzing competitors, identifying patterns, comparing existing content, identifying gaps, and then rewriting a new title or meta description, page clarity gathers all the necessary information to suggest an optimized rewrite.
Simply click the lightning bolt icon next to your page's title or meta description and receive a well-optimized rewrite to review, adjust, and deploy in a matter of seconds.
Search Analytics
Search Analytics delivers all the data you need to uncover your pages’ real performance in Google.
By leveraging the bulk GSC integration, users have the ability to analyze up to 10x more search data than they would with Search Console alone.
Within seconds, monitor multiple sections of your site to gain insights such as:
- Which keywords drive traffic to which pages
- Opportunities for new content based on definite performance
- Differences in performance on desktop and mobile
- CTR over time and how it correlates to changes in schema or metadata
Content Fusion
Content Fusion, seoClarity’s AI-driven content analysis tool allows you to conduct a complete topic and SEO content analysis to:
- Understand the audience’s expectations for your target keywords
- Create highly-detailed and relevant content briefs
- Identify semantically-related topics to include in your content
- Analyze topics like a subject-matter expert to create new content for your target audience
View this video to see Content Fusion in action.
Interested to see seoClarity in action? Schedule a demo and see how the platform can help you take your SEO to the next level.
>>> Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2023 and has been updated. <<<
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