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. 

digital marketing blogs

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.