Four Key Performance Indicators for Your Business Blog

What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? And how does it help you as a business owner in managing your blog content? Let’s briefly explore four key performance indicators to answer that question.

Bounce Rate As a Key Performance Indicator

Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that come to your website and leave without looking at any other pages. For example, if your bounce rate is 60%, that means that 60% of the people who come to your website leave after only briefly viewing the page they entered on. What this tells you is that your site is not retaining its visitors beyond their first initial impression.

The first thing clients usually want is more traffic to their website. Check! That is a matter of content development strategy and old-fashioned hard work. We can do that all day long. However, getting people to your website and keeping them there – or converting them there, is just as important as serving your site to more visitors.

The first step in figuring out how to do this, and to measuring the effectiveness of whatever strategy you take for retention is consistently reviewing your site bounce rate. You can check your bounce rate by using Google Analytics.

When you first log in to Google Analytics you will get an average bounce rate. This one is important, but you also want to look at each area of your site more specifically. Drill down into your content! ( Content > Site Content > Pages )

While you are reviewing individual pages’ bounce rates, take a look at your traffic sources too. This view will tell you what activities (search, social, etc) bring the most visitors to your website as well as their respective bounce rates. Does Organic Search drive more or less traffic than social for instance? Moreover, which one of those sources tends to stick around longer? This approach to traffic analysis is what truly leads to actionable KPI’s for your business blog.

How do you improve your bounce rate? Here are some ideas:

• Add links to more pages within your website in your content
• Go beyond just product pages
• Add links to content everyone will love to your sidebar
• Improve and customize your content
• Give the visitors to your page accessible links to your social media profiles, newsletters, or other online properties.
• Contact Us for a Content Development SEO strategy. We provide custom SEO and content marketing plans for law firms. They are turn-key and will give you a step by step plan to get on top and stay on top of Google in your field.

Website Impressions vs. Clicks

Click Through Rate = Clicks (time) / Impressions (time)

What is the difference between an impression and a click?

An impression is a view of your site through various mediums (banner ad, a random button, or especially a search result listing).

Any time your site appears on a computer screen (in link form or ad form), it is considered an impression. A click is how many times someone has clicked on the image or search result to be taken to your website. These factors combine to form a click-through rate.

Using CTR as a key performance indicator will give you an impression of how well your content is optimized to speak to the people it is being presented to.

For example, imagine you are a VA disability attorney. Your website is getting 10,000 impressions per month and 155 clicks from those impressions. Your click-through rate is about 1.55% (155 clicks / 10,000 impressions. This means about 15 people click on your search result for every 1,000 people that see it. You can do better – but you probably need help.

Whomever you end up working with to create, optimize, or rescue your website and SEO – requiring that they use CTR as a key performance indicator is a must.

Pages per Visit

Pages per visit refers to how many pieces of content (web pages) a user or group of users view on a single website-visit. The pages per visit calculation is an average derived from the total number of page views divided by the total number of visitors.

If your pages per visit are not as high as you would like there are few things to check:

• Navigational elements: If your site is difficult to navigate, readers will give up and go elsewhere.
• Content: If your content is poorly written or doesn’t have enough information, this too will make readers go elsewhere.
• Search functionality: If this is poor, visitors may be forced to click to look for more information. If it is good, it may reduce the number of pages viewed.
• Marketing efforts: Poorly targeted marketing efforts cause visitors to be less likely to view many pages.

Exit Page

An exit page is the last page accessed during a visit to your website. There are two types of exits: natural and unnatural. Natural exits are when a visitor leaves on the final page of your website.

Unnatural exits are when a visitor suddenly exits on a random page. When an exit rate is high (with unnatural exits), it shows that the page’s content is not keeping visitors there to continue browsing through the website.

By running an exit rate percentage analysis you can get answers to the following questions:

• Is page content having a direct impact on visitor conversion?
• From which page of the conversion path are visitors leaving the site?
• If there are exits on key pages, then what is causing your visitors to exit?
• Is there a channel or device that causes your visitor to leave your site early?
• Are different types of visitors exiting the site from different pages?

Gaining insight into visitor departure can provide useful information that will not only affect your conversion rate but allow your visitor retention metrics.

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