You are a small business and have multitudes of pending jobs knocking on your door. You have recently started your website and are learning about the right kind of content for it. You are simultaneously packing your orders and reading about tools for running your small business. It’s a LOT happening together and you are happy about it.
The pandemic has ensured that the value of small businesses is propelling by leaps and bounds now. It’s a great time to be noticed by the right kind of audience and leaving a permanent impact on them. But how do you do that?
Understand that there are many small businesses in the market like you. A lot of them would be targeting the same set of customers too. And interestingly, the goals of most small businesses are nearly the same. The question now is how do you set yourself apart.
You want to be a thriving business and are playing by all the rules in the books. Be it writing the right kind of content or learning about Facebook marketing tips for your small business. There is no point in the application if you do not check up on how effective it has been.
There have been instances in the past where a certain trick is garnering a lot of attention. Marketers promptly make use of the same to join the bandwagon and not miss out on the cake. However, what most marketers fail to check is how effective it is, based on their specific business. This is why tricks work wonders for some and are worthless for others.
Similarly, business blogging is just an aspect of any business but a highly beneficial one at that. Unless one knows how well one’s business blog is performing, one cant know what changes to make. It’s important to not just measure results, but also to keep in mind a whole range of metrics too. However, this can scale up to a disaster if one doesn’t know the right set of metrics for one’s business. It can be confusing and equally irritating to see complicated metrics resulting poorly, in the long run.
So, here is a list of 5 critical metrics for measuring the success of your small business blog:
1. Your SERP ranking:
SERP stands for Search Engine Rank Page. This may not technically be a measurable metric but tells you how well your content is ranked. It means the rank you show up on when someone looks up for something relevant to your business. This summarizes that search engines think of your content as the solution for the questions or searches audiences put up. That is, if Google likes it, it ranks it well. Try a couple of different combinations and see where your content ranks. Your target is to eventually go up in ranks.
2. Time spent on Site:
Where do you like spending your time? It could be a certain coffee shop or a certain salon in the corner of your town. This specific place may not be a complete hit with everyone but vibes well with you. That’s the reason you go back to that place, spend time there and believe that space.
It’s the same in the digital world too. People stay on websites they vibe well with and that’s how businesses are surviving this Pandemic. It could be the kind of content you write, your business ethics, your products or a mix of it all. You want more people to vibe with your website and spend more time there. Staying in a shop or a website longer increases the owner’s chances of converting you into a customer.
3. Measure your leads:
At the end of the day, if your business blog isn’t bringing in leads, it ain’t doing something right.
If you are not able to generate leads through your business blog, understand that you are missing out on a huge chunk of opportunity. Every business in the book is on the web to gain leads for itself. You might see that certain blogs on your website get you a lot of traction and traffic. At the same time, there could also be a certain blog that was not visited by a lot of people but got a lot of leads. Any layman would dismiss a lowly visited blog as a bad performing blog. However, it is not necessarily the same case. Check your metrics thoroughly and understand which blogs get you traffic and which gets you leads. You can focus on curating content accordingly.
4. Measure Subscribers:
People subscribe to what they like more and to what they want to stay connected to. FOMO or the Fear Of Missing Out is real! I personally do not like missing out on any blogs on effective decision making, I do terribly in that section. Similarly, your audience wouldn’t want to miss out on updates from your business if it’s really interesting. Your updates could be about any new product launch, a SALE or just a “How to” blog about your product maintenance.
The number of people that subscribe to your email or to your RSS(Really Simple Syndication) shows how well planned your blog is. This shows the quality of the content you are producing and also the consistency with which you are doing the same. Understand that your subscribers can make or break your deal. They can either unsubscribe or pass on the word to more people.
5. Track Inbound Links:
This is when some other website links to a certain page on your website. You must be wondering why would another business do that for you? The answer is simple actually because that particular blog is information-rich. Businesses like citing links that are of value to their audiences. Everybody likes being associated with someone who knows a lot. It could be while writing your IT assignment or while presenting to a group of investors, citing resourceful pages is crucial. For your business, it means that you are creating content that is found to be of value even by others. Search engines use inbound links to determine how you rank and how your pages look. See how many inbound links your blogs are attracting individually. You can design a content strategy for your website accordingly.
Keep a close track of all your goals and KPIs of your business blog. This will enable you to see the weaknesses your content has and take remedial action immediately. Change your strategy and include more of what works in your favour accordingly.
Author Bio: Mary Jones is the co-founder and editor-in-chief at TopMyGrades, which focuses on career counselling for university students in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Mary is a proofreading help expert in her free time.. She has extensive content editing experience and has worked with MSNBC, NewsCred and Scripted in the past. She has also authored blogs on Lifehack.org, Wn.com, Medium.com, Minds.com and many more digital publications.
