Everything in marketing is a unicorn or a trick, said Larry Kim of Mobile Monkey.
Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media agrees. “It's amazing how the top 1% of your content gets out-of-the-box results, while the bottom 90% gets nothing," he says. “We have to find those unicorns and then go make baby unicorns.”
How? Andy explained in his recent ContentTECH Summit presentation his How to Test Your Content Marketing Using Google Analytics.
In this unicorn search, you'll discover paths that will lead your content to better results – more traffic, increased engagement, better conversions – and avoid all content. that scam.
Andy divides unicorn and unicorn content into four categories:
- Champion
- Potential Champion
- Falling stars
- Better mousetrap
I'll walk you through Andy's process of discovering these categories and what to do based on what you find.
1% of your #ContentMarketing gets outstanding results, while the most part achieves nothing, @crestodina says. Here's his tip for creating more of these content unicorns via @AnnGynn @CMIContent @Conductor. #ContentTECH Click to post
Champion
Your champion pages attract organic traffic Great .
Finding these most valuable pages, says Andy, requires you to go beyond the Google Analytics All Pages traffic report.
Instead, he recommends using Conversions > Search Console > Landing Pages. Remember to set a date for the period you want to explore. This report shows you the URLs that drove the most organic traffic during the time period you specified.
Next, find a way to guide visitors to these pages deeper into your site or get them more engaged. Andy offers the following suggestions:
- More call to action .
- Consists of link to product or service pages.
- Mention and link to related articles that already have a high click-through rate or high conversion rate.
You should also consider adding new content like video to the page or create an adjacent related post.
If you're wondering how to find your high converting pages, don't worry – I'll share Andy's advice for finding them later in this article (see the “best mouse traps” section). ").
Look for ways to get search visitors into your #content or get them more engaged, @crestodina says. More tips in posts via @AnnGynn and @CMIContent @Conductor. #ContentTECH Click to Tweet
Potential Champion
Potential champion pages have low search traffic but rank well, which means they have the potential to rank higher. These pages need a little more work to find.
Go to Conversions > Search Console > Landing Pages. Filter for mean position greater than 10, then sort in ascending order.
The results list provides clues, says Andy, not to the statistics. He suggests you pick one of the catchy phrases and put it in the Google search bar to verify the ranking range. Now you know your URL rank for the keyword.
(Some SEO software can do this faster, pulling keywords and page URLs at the same time for your site and your competitors.)
Now go to the page and do a Control-F search for the term. That simple check will tell you if and where the phrase appears. Including it in the title, title, and body is usually the most relevant. You may see keywords or phrases that don't even appear in the page text.
TIP: A keyword used in an in-text link is not considered by Google for the original page because it refers to content on another page or website.
So what now? To improve ranking of the article please provide more juice:
- Add keywords or phrases if not available.
- Add a section for keyword topics.
- Search for semantically related topics and keywords (using the Google Search related phrases feature or Reply publicly website, showing all the questions people ask) and include content about some of those findings on the page.
All these techniques indicate relevancy when Google crawls your site for search rankings.
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Falling stars
As the name implies, your falling stars are content that used to attract a lot of search traffic but is now dwindling. Andy says: Don't wait until you see a sudden drop in site traffic to diagnose the problem. He checks Orbit Media's falling stars weekly.
Don't wait until you see a significant drop in your page traffic before you diagnose the problem, @crestodina said via @CMIContent @Conductor. #ContentTECH #SEO Click to Tweet To uncover your failure stories, go to Conversions > Search Console > Landing Pages and add a filter for organic traffic. Set a date range for a few months and click “Compare to previous period.”
Scroll down to the results to see how traffic to that URL has changed, looking for the biggest drop.
So what now? Turn that content into a rising star. Rewrite, edit, add links in it and with it. You can include a link to the part in a guest blog post . But whatever you do, don't change the URL, otherwise you won't benefit from its original star state. Redirects are not made 100% equity.
Andy says Orbit has made a big profit when they rewrite at least 80% of the content without changing the URL. Nearly half of their articles are complete rewrites of older, authoritative articles.
TIP: Create evergreen URLs. If you add numbers, you cannot update or rewrite that content if it turns into a falling star.
“You don't need 1,000 articles, you just need 100 really great articles,” says Andy.
Rewrite to optimize content with reduced search traffic – just don't change the URL, says @crestodina. See why in this post from @AnnGynn and @CMIContent @Conductor. #ContentTECH #SEO Click to Tweet
The best mousetrap
While the previous three categories focus primarily on traffic, your best mousetrap sites have the highest engagement and/or conversion rates.
To find these unicorns, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Filter by the “blog” folder if your site is set up that way. (If you haven't set up your directory that way, you can still follow this process, but it will take longer to determine the blog's URLs.)
Switch to a comparison view to see which pages better attract people who spend the most time on the site, and which pages lead the most convert .
Andy recommends drilling even deeper. Follow the path Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goals. On this screen, you can see the page the converted person visited before they reached the final step (i.e. the target page). The data also shows how many times a visit to the page resulted in a conversion.
TIP: Set up a thank you page for every action you ask your website visitors to take. That way, you have a unified view of each final “goal” landing page.
Now, you have the raw numbers, but that's not enough, Andy said.
Think about it. If you see 100 conversions, you'll think it's a good performing page. But what if that page has 100,000 unique viewers? That's a 0.1% conversion rate. Now, what if the page has 1,000 unique viewers? The conversion rate would be a whopping 10% – and that's the page you want to promote because it does a better job of getting visitors to convert.
This conversion rate requires some calculation. Take the conversion number for the page and divide it by the unique views for that page. (ONE Google Analytics Add-on for Google Sheets can help automate this process.)
So what now? Advertisement High converting content. Link to it from other relevant articles, especially your high-traffic content. Include it in your newsletter. Write a guest blog post with a link to it.
Follow your unicorn WILL
Google Analytics data can be overwhelming for even the most experienced content marketers. Follow Andy's advice to narrow your focus to your champions, potential champions, falling stars, and your best mousetrap. You'll save your sanity, maximize your content development efforts, deliver improved results – and push those content donkeys to the curb.
All tools mentioned in the article are identified by the author. If you have a tool to recommend, feel free to add it in the comments.
Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute
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