So you’ve created an editorial strategy informed by your expertise, keyword research, and an understanding of your reader; and you’ve written and formatted posts in Organic Content using schema-enabled content blocks, engaging and revenue-boosting commerce blocks, and metadata. Now, the next crucial part of your editorial process is to measure your results and build upon your success. There are many analytics tools available on the market, both free and premium, that can track your results and highlight areas where you might focus on optimization. Here are a few solutions that are easy to use in conjunction with Organic Content.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an industry standard and trusted tool for many digital editorial teams, and integrates easily with sites on Organic Content. Google Analytics offers real-time analytics but is most effective when used to track traffic trends over longer periods of time. Use the dashboard to pay attention to which stories are receiving traffic and from which sources, and look back in historical data to forecast which seasonal or evergreen content might appeal to readers at points in the future to inform any editorial maintenance of old content.
Use Organic Content’s internal taxonomies to give your teams more data to draw upon and leverage more of Google Analytics’ functionality. Out of the box, Organic Content offers taxonomies of Category, Tag, Author, Internal Tag, and Content Type. Consult with your IT team or outside vendor to configure your Google Analytics instance to recognize these taxonomies as custom secondary dimensions to allow your teams to measure the popularity of content types and adjust your editorial strategy accordingly.
Chartbeat and Parse.ly
Analytics platforms that specialize in real-time analytics, like Chartbeat and Parse.ly integrate easily with sites on Organic Content to give editors, marketers, and business leads information about how users behave during high traffic events in order for edit teams to react quickly by adjusting cross-linking and recirculation efforts on high-traffic pages. However, these platforms can also provide information about how users behave across different variables (new vs returning or subscribed vs unsubscribed), campaign insights, and highlight opportunities to fill gaps in your content library to reach more users.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a powerful tool for measuring performance across Google search results, Google Discover, and Google News. It can provide insights into the top search queries that bring users to your site, giving content teams a window into how your site is positioned in search results pages.
This platform also offers a section devoted to page experience, and ranks your site on mobile usability, and Core Web Vitals, which includes metrics like CLS, LCP, and other factors. Along with your scores, you’ll also find recommendations from Google Search Console on how to improve sub-standard scores. These solutions often involve some engineering, and can be prioritized by your in-house or third-party engineering shops to help your content rank higher in search.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs has many tools and reports that can help SEO and editorial teams analyze your own performance and compare your growth to that of competitors in order to identify new opportunities. For instance, use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and view the Organic Keywords report to find keywords for which your site ranks, then compare that to the rankings of a competing site, or track your most important keywords using the Rank Tracker functionality.
Keeping a close eye on how your competitors are faring can help you understand how your content rates within your category, and can also help you understand how trends, search algorithm updates, or seasonality may be affecting other sites, thereby contextualizing your own traffic patterns.
There are many analytics tools available to help editorial, SEO, and marketing teams draw insights about traffic patterns, real-time events, longer historical trends, and site health factors that impact SEO performance. Leveraging Organic Content’s tools and schema-enabled content blocks and themes to act on insights about user behavior and content gaps can help teams continue to improve their SEO strategies over time.