subject: Using Serps To Measure Your Content Strategy Success [print this page] The content strategy your company is using is not working. Or it may be working beyond your wildest imaginations. For all you know nothing you're currently engaged in regarding content marketing makes any sense whatsoever. Your website may just be receiving traffic willy nilly as a result of random visits generated by any number of online tools, communities, search results, etc. How on earth can you effectively report what's good and not so good quickly and accurately?
One of the first things to get a hold of is that the development of a solid well thought out content strategy will pay dividends sooner or later. If you've got a plan in place for effective content creation, you're ahead of most of your competitors already.
By using social media marketing and tracking techniques you'll be able to know with some high levels of accuracy just what conversations are being made in relation to the keyword phrases you're hoping to rank well for in the search engines. Knowing what your prospective and current customers are concerned with and asking questions about gives you an inside look in how they are behaving when time comes for them to find answers to their questions and concerns.
Using this inside knowledge will focus your keyword research in such a way as to have the advantage of finding terms that are more likely to produce quality, focused traffic generated for free by the search engines. These highly targeted web surfers have questions and concerns that, you can answer with quality content and various other forms of media.
By using any number of free and low cost, easy to understand tools related to keyword research you'll quickly generate lists of phrases that can help you to develop effective content strategies. Well designed content campaigns will eventually produce results that you can easily check by performing your own queries on the popular search engines.
SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages, provide simple, clear cut results for terms that are actively being searched on by the public at large. Few of the many analytics and web traffic programs and services available today will clearly demonstrate how successful your campaigns are performing. If you need to provide your superiors with quick, on the spot proof of how your content is developing traffic to your website, simply do a search on one of your targeted keyword phrases.
If you've developed quality on-page SEO in addition to providing the right answers to the questions being asked for by web searchers, you're proof will show up immediate when the search engine returns its results.
With some additional search queries you can also quickly and easily show how many external websites might be linking to your content pages. There are a number of extraneous tools that can be employed using the search engines own algorithms to provide fast, simple, and relatively accurate information as to the overall success (or failure) of your content marketing strategies.
Don't be afraid to use existing, free tools in ways that might appear out of the ordinary or counterintuitive. You'll find some of these techniques are actually easier to comprehend and provide you with the understanding you'll need to make the changes to enhance your efforts and take your content strategies to the next level.
