Optimize Your SEO Efforts With Content Monitoring
Contents
What Is Content Monitoring
Content monitoring is actively monitoring how users and search engines interact with your content. You'll want to be aware of many things, like the conversion and bounce rates and the current trend of your content in search rankings.
How To Do Content Monitoring?
In the following four headings, we'll cover various ways you can monitor your content. This list is by no means exhaustive, but these four points will give you more than enough to ensure you are aware of the metrics you need to keep in mind if you want your content to get on top and stay there.
Before we get started, the first thing you need to to learn is how to write quality content that ranks in the first place. So go over to our comprehensive page that shows you exactly how to do that.
What Tools Should You Use To Monitor Content?
When monitoring your content, you need to use tools like GA4 (Google Analytics 4), Google Search Console, Hotjar, and any SEO tool you prefer. Whether that SEO tool is Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, etc., it doesn't matter. Whichever tool you feel more confident in.
What Should You Monitor?
All of the points below are important to keep in mind when monitoring your content.
Content Monitoring & Competitive Analysis
When monitoring your content, you must keep your competitors in mind. This means that for content you want or need to rank for, you'll need to keep tabs on your competitors' content changes. If they add five more sections, two infographics, and a video, you must add more sections with more comprehensive content.
This is arguably the most challenging part of content monitoring because creating quality resources takes work. However, that is why search engines prioritize quality content because, typically, you need expertise, understanding, and resources to create quality content.
Content Monitoring & Your Rankings
When monitoring the rankings of your content, you need to be aware of what changes you're making and how search engines are responding. An industry standard in terms of SEO is to ensure you are recording any changes made to your content, complete with dates, URLs, changes made, etc.
Recording this information is important because when search engines respond to your content positively or negatively, you'll know what changes caused your content to rise or fall in the rankings. Then, once you know what change was responsible, you can make changes based on the data you have recorded as opposed to just guessing.
Content Monitoring & User Metrics
User metrics are an excellent method to monitor your content. For instance, if you use tools like Hotjar, you'll see how users behave on your pages. Tools like this show you where your user's cursors are so you can see what they are looking at, what sections they leave your website on, and so on. Tools like this, and even GA4, Search Console, etc., enable you to gain more valuable data and insight that will help you ensure profitability.
How Often Should You Monitor Your Content?
The frequency at which you should monitor your content depends on the type of content you are dealing with.
New Content
New pieces of content are best if monitored weekly or even daily, depending on the level of competition and importance of a piece of content. The reason for the frequent monitoring is that when a piece of content is new, you want to do anything you can to prove to search engines it deserves to rank. Being responsive to any issues that arise is incredibly important.
Established Content
If a piece of content has been on your website for a long time and has been ranking for a while, monitoring it every month is more than enough.
Competitive Industries & Topics
If you're creating new content for a competitive keyword/keyword phrase and you want it to rank, you'll need to monitor it daily. At the very least, you need to monitor it weekly. The reason for the high frequency of monitoring is that you need to be on your toes and ensure the content sends as many positive signals to search engines as possible.
How Do You Track Changes When Monitoring Content?
Tracking changes when monitoring content can be done manually with tools like Google Sheets or automatically with SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Search Console, GA4, etc.
Regardless of how you track changes, keep all data stored and organized safely so you can use them as required. Any changes made to content without data are simply guesses. To be as efficient and effective as possible, you need as much data as you can gather.
What Benefits Does Content Monitoring Provide?
Below we'll cover six benefits you will see if you take the time to regularly schedule content monitoring windows.
Better Reputation From Search Engines
Search engines will start to see your content as more authoritative and important because you are showing that you care about your content. Search engines don't waste time on content where it's obvious the website owner doesn't even care about it.
Higher Search Engine Rankings
Content monitoring will force search engines to rank your content higher if you do everything mentioned in this article.
The reason search engines will be forced to rank you higher is because the way their algorithms work is to push higher quality, more responsive resources to the top of search results. So, if you monitor your content to gather various data points and make the appropriate changes based on that data, you will have a higher-quality resource.
Improved Content Quality For Your Users
Monitoring your content also ensures that you are creating a higher-quality resource for your users. This entire practice covered in this article helps ensure you deliver an even higher quality piece of content for your users than you initially created.
Improved User Engagement Metrics
When you follow these practices outlined throughout this article you'll ensure that your users will interact with your content in a more positive way. You'll start to notice your bounce rates go down, your conversions increase, and various other metrics associated with user behaviors will also start to improve.
Optimized Performance
Another metric being monitored throughout this process are the page speeds. If you're carefully monitoring your content and making the appropriate adjustments, you'll start to see page speeds will improve as well.
How Content Monitoring & Writing Go Hand In Hand
You can greatly improve your content writing by conducting thorough monitoring and analysis. The best thing you can do for any piece of content you write is to ensure that you are carefully monitoring the reaction you're getting from all sources, users and search engines alike.
How Does Ongoing Competitive Analysis Help Content Monitoring
Ongoing competitive analysis helps content monitoring because you can better respond to anything your competition is doing. Regardless of any improvements or changes they make, you'll be able to make the appropriate changes/improvements to ensure your content consistently remains the most comprehensive resource on that specific topic.