So you have a medical blog in place at your practice or business blog at your company website. Whether you write the content yourself, or you’ve hired a professional content writer, producing regular, high-quality content requires time, money, or both. How can you tell how effective it is? Is your blog doing well, and is your investment paying off?
Organic traffic is a good start.
Organic traffic is a top metric for the overall health of your website. You can see in the image here how one of our blogging clients looked at five months of regular blogging. We optimized their website and you can see a marker when we began blogging services. This kind of steady increase in traffic is what we expect to see for blogging clients.
Beyond traffic
But traffic isn’t the only metric you can use. In fact, it might not be the best sign of success for some blogs.
Ascend2 reports, in their latest survey, that marketers consider traffic sent to their websites the top metric for success. Here are some other signs of success they identified:
- Conversions: how many sales, leads, and similar business goals take place at your website?
- Content downloaded or shared: how many people download your white papers or share your content on their social media platforms?
- Keyword rankings: where do you show up on Google for your important keywords?
- Engagement: how many Likes and Shares do you receive, and how much do visitors explore your website?
- Domain or page authority: how does your blog increase the value of your website as a whole?
- Backlink quantity and quality: how many high quality websites are linking to your web pages?
The screenshot below, from Google’s Search Console, shows links from UC Berkeley, The Economist, Wikipedia, and many more respected websites. The more links of this kind your website has, the better.
Get specific
Your blog might have more specific jobs it can do for you. Google Analytics shows us actions like downloading files or forwarding to email, in the Events report. The number of events of this kind can give us clues about the value of what we’re offering our visitors.
You might want to see whether people who read your blog posts follow internal links to your patient portal. You can see that in Analytics, too.
If you can come up with a specific question that will help you track the value of your blog, you can probably figure out a way to find an answer to that question.
Whatever metric you choose, track it consistently over time. You want to see improvement — like the blog traffic we showed you at the beginning of this post. We did not include the numbers, for discretion’s sake, but you can still tell that blog is doing well.
Whether you need an SEO strategy document to point you in the right direction, or you’re looking to outsource your blogging, Haden Interactive can help you with all aspects of your digital marketing, SEO, and online presence.
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