How Content Monitoring Can Improve Your Content Strategy (+ Expert Tips)

How Content Monitoring Can Improve Your Content Strategy (+ Expert Tips)

I Love Content monitoring! Well, not as much as chocolate or cake or chocolate cake… But when it comes to work-related processes, it’s one of my favorite things to do.

Why? Because it helps me analyze what Is And is not Work. I can then use these actionable insights to develop or improve a content strategy.

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Honestly, I love content monitoring so much that I want you to love it too.

And that’s why I’ve included as much of my knowledge on this topic as possible in this article. I also gathered other key insights from other content specialists.

On the latter, I would like to thank everyone in advance who shared their insights below. Seriously, dear reader, know that you are in the best hands when it comes to content monitoring. With that said, let’s get started.

Table of contents

What is content monitoring?

Content monitoring is the process of benchmarking and tracking content performance over time to ensure it meets key performance indicators and goals.

You can apply a content monitoring process to all digital platforms and content types. For example, you can monitor how well your online content – ​​blogs and landing pages – is performing.

You can also track the success of your LinkedIn content or the performance of your email campaigns. You can then use the performance data to improve your performance Content marketing strategy.

Full disclosure before we continue: My specialty is SEO content. So, this article is mainly about monitoring online content performance. This is in contrast to other content types such as social media or email.

This is where my expertise and the expertise of my professional network – especially SEOs – offer you the greatest added value.

The benefits of content monitoring

Not sure why content monitoring is important? No dramas.

Below, some incredible SEO specialists and I share the top benefits of incorporating this process into your content marketing strategy.

Monitoring and benchmarking content performance

Um 13% of marketing managers cite content strategy as their biggest challenge.

I highly recommend content monitoring. It will help you overcome common strategy problems such as: E.g., knowing what content you need to produce to move the needle, or what content you should prioritize for “maintenance.”

As Ben Goodeythe founder of Spicy margarita contentsays the main benefit of content monitoring for SEOs “is to monitor content performance.”

Goodey explains what this can look like in practice.

“For example, closely tracking improvements/decreases in keyword rankings gives a good indicator of whether you are on the right track, need to rewrite the content, or take a different route, such as building backlinks.”

I would also like to add that conducting an initial content analysis (i.e. determining what is already working and what isn’t) as part of your monitoring will give you a benchmark to use throughout your strategy.

Understanding content performance at the beginning and throughout the process can help you adjust and refine your roadmap as needed.

Clarity about where and how you spend your time

With 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketingThe competition has never been so fierce. To stay competitive in your industry, you need to develop a strong content marketing strategy.

However, there are only a limited number of hours in the day. This means you need to know how and where to allocate your time.

Luckily, your friend and mine, Mersudin ForbesA Portfolio SEO Director and agency consultant, reminds us that content monitoring can be an incredible asset here.

“If you’re working with more than 100 pages of content, it’s important to know which parts of your site need regular maintenance from a content relevance perspective,” says Forbes.

Having worked with large e-commerce sites, I can tell you from experience that without content monitoring, the overwhelming amount of data can be downright crippling.

Before you know it, you’re looking at 10,000 product collections, a wealth of blog content, and a ton of product categories and asking yourself, “Where do I even start this month?”

Even if you work on smaller websites, I recommend using content monitoring as part of your strategy. Long story short? You can spend your time optimizing what works and improving what doesn’t – If It makes sense to allocate resources there.

But without data as a starting point, you don’t know if an activity is worth doing.

Control over the frequency of changes

Having worked in eCommerce for much of my content career, I’ve seen firsthand how quickly search demand and results can change. With each coming season, the performance of your top pages can change drastically.

An example comes to mind here: When I was working as a content manager for a website, our “Christmas rush” began in July. Call me naive, but wouldn’t I have monitored the performance of our online content?

It would never have occurred to me to trigger content updates for Christmas product collections so early in the year or to start producing content for Christmas-themed blogs to support product collection pages.

(I know what a sweet summer child I was!)

Aside from seasonal changes, you also need to consider search volatility dictated by the Google gods. Algorithm updates and AI overviews alone have caused major disruption in 2024 (to say the least).

Content monitoring allows you to identify these changes and stay ahead of them.

Mersudin Forbes agrees that content monitoring is crucial to controlling the frequency of changes.

“By setting change frequency requirements by content type, asset, and priority, you can set up a system to monitor and update your content throughout the year and plan in advance when the content might become outdated and require corrective updates. “

Content accuracy updates

This control over the frequency of changes results in another advantage: the accuracy of the content.

Forbes explains: “If you set rules about what you monitor, why, and in what order, you won’t suddenly find that your capital gains tax page has incorrect numbers and percentages.”

As I mentioned above, you can also ensure that seasonal or “special occasion” content remains accurate as search demand increases at different times throughout the year.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Um 40% of marketers Measure the success of your content marketing strategy based on sales. More specifically, more than one in three marketing leaders use conversion rates as the top KPI they prioritize when tracking content.

However, the average conversion rate of all e-commerce websites is is only 1.8% in 2024. Meanwhile, two out of three marketers report an average landing page conversion rate of less than 10%.

In reality, 10% is pretty good, depending on the broader context (e.g. how important the landing page is to your service/product offering, or what niche you operate in).

Still, CRO is crucial because many marketers of all website types want to increase sales with their marketing efforts. Content monitoring is a way to identify sales-critical, poorly performing pages.

You can then look for ways to optimize for conversions. This can be anything from improving copy to adding testimonials as social proof to on-page SEO changes to improve search visibility.

Pro tip: I’m a big proponent of using Voice of Customer (VOC) data to optimize online content for conversions. Simply put, this means incorporating the language of your customers and prospects actually use to describe your products, services or related topics in your online content.

For context, here is an example of a product landing page I wrote for SKINIKERS. I have highlighted some of the VOC inspired areas in yellow.

An example of using Voice of Customer data on a sales landing page.

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To collect VOC, consider setting up a social listening process to monitor how your audience talks about your product or service online. You can use this language to optimize your sales landing pages for conversions.

Customer testimonials are another great source of VOC data.

How to monitor content

Below, I’ve put together an eight-step process to help you monitor content.

Although I’ve geared this towards monitoring online content performance, many of the basics – like setting your goals and choosing performance metrics – are similar across different content types.

So even if you don’t care about SEO, you should (hopefully!) can gain some insights from this process. However, the details and examples are heavily focused on online content.

1. Choose your goals.

Before you start content monitoring, I recommend you first clarify why you are doing it in the first place.

Otherwise, you’re more likely to waste time and resources monitoring false content. You may also be choosing the wrong performance metrics.

Additionally, I suggest aligning your content goals with broader business goals. The sticking point? The fruits of your labor should drive the company in the direction stakeholders want it to go.

It’s also a lot easier – notice I don’t say easier simply – to gain buy-in and therefore the all-important buy-in from decision makers to implement strategy when budget allocations are competitive.

Example

I remember an e-commerce project (just a heads up, I’ll stick with this specific example throughout) where I was the content manager.

The CEO wanted us to focus on improving product collection performance. More specific goals within this broader goal were to increase rankings, traffic, and conversions.

A little context: Before I took the role, we already had over 1,000 existing product collections, so there was a fair amount of data to analyze and analyze.

For this reason, we initially wanted to improve and expand high-performing existing collections as well as those with potential. We also wanted to create new product collections.

Based on these goals, I divided the content strategy for this project into two phases:

  1. Updating/updating the existing product collection (Capitalize on what has already worked.)
  2. Creating new product collections (Use of content gaps and potential.)

2. Define your key performance metrics for monitoring online content.

Once you’ve established your content monitoring goals, the next step is to select your most important metrics to track content performance. These differ depending on the desired result and sales funnel.

That is, new HubSpot data highlights what marketers say are the most important web metrics to track. Sales/leads/conversion rates rank first at 31%. This is closely followed by the total number of monthly visitors at 30% and the click-through rate at 28%.

an example of the most important metrics for content monitoring

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To be honest, the order of importance doesn’t surprise me. As marketers, we are not sales in the true sense, but our efforts should, if possible, increase sales. However, in order for people to convert, they must first visit the website.

While conversion rates will likely be your most important metric, you also need to track search performance. Search performance metrics can include rankings and page views.

Pro tip: Ben Goodey reflects the focus on conversions while adding a metric you might miss. Once your content starts receiving traffic, he recommends monitoring metrics like conversion rate and scroll depth to help you understand your article’s user experience.

He adds, “If readers aren’t converting or scrolling far, you may need to restructure or reoptimize parts of your content.”

Example

Going back to my previous example from Step 1 (Choose your goals), I kept it simple when defining my metrics during the benchmarking phase.

When I focused on the “updating/refreshing existing product collections” part of the content strategy, I needed to know what was already working and which product collections had the most potential.

To detect this, I monitored the following:

  • Impressions
  • Traffic
  • Clicks
  • Conversions
  • Search engine rankings

3. Benchmark the performance of existing content.

Once you’ve set your goals and defined your key content metrics, it’s time to set a benchmark for how your existing content is performing.

There are many ways to do this: Ultimately, it depends on your available tech stack, your budget, and your goals. I’ll tell you how I achieved this in a moment.

In the meantime, I’m very happy to share with you some tool recommendations from Mersudin Forbes:

Whichever tool you choose, remember that benchmarking doesn’t have to be complex. Content monitoring and data can already be overwhelming.

And you’re really looking for an efficient way to track the performance of existing content based on the metrics you choose.

Example

Lastly, we left my eCommerce product collection example with my selected content metrics. As a reminder, these were impressions, traffic, clicks, conversions and rankings.

My first step was to set a benchmark for content performance. To do this, I went to Google Search Console and exported a report to Google Sheets containing all product collection URLs from the last 12 months.

I chose one year because this time frame takes into account seasonal trends and provides a more complete picture of performance.

The report included the average “clicks,” “impressions,” “CTR,” and “position” of each page (also called collection URL). I then reordered the table to show highest to lowest clicks and impressions.

I also filtered out branded and non-branded clicks.

As a rough example, here’s what this type of report looks like. This is based on an export of one of my – unfortunately – abandoned personal websites *cry*:

How Content Monitoring Can Improve Your Content Strategy (+ Expert Tips)

4. Prioritize the importance of content for monitoring.

This gives you a bird’s eye view of the situation thanks to your monitoring process and tech stack. Huzzah! Now is the time to prioritize content for performance monitoring.

Mersudin Forbes recommends making your cornerstone content (aka: the most important pages on your website.)

“Cornerstone content should be prioritized for accuracy, relevance, and trending,” says Forbes. “You can set these up and plan changes in advance,” and you can also “set priorities based on traffic contribution and user journey importance.”

Forbes also recommends prioritizing “surface performance of content.” To do this, you can “set up tools like Search Console and GA4 to monitor the performance of your content.” He also suggests SEO Stack, which “does a great job of automatically making this visible to you.”

An example of content monitoring capabilities in the SEO stack.

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Pro tip: According to Forbes, you should pay attention to declining searches/traffic posts and dwindling engagement signals. Why? Because it could show that your most important content is not resonating with users.

Example

Back to my example! To recap: I now had my handy Google Sheet full of product collection URLs, ordered from highest clicks and impressions to lowest.

At this point there was no organized content plan. Since there was no strategy, I had to reverse engineer both the core content and the meaning of the content.

My Google Sheet was ideal for this. It gave me a great initial overview of which product collections I should work through from a bird’s eye view. For context, I have prioritized content updates by importance as follows:

  • High impressions vs. low clicks: This indicated potential.
  • High impressions vs. high clicks: This highlighted existing successes that we were able to capitalize on – If It made sense to change the collections. (I think the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies more to marketing campaigns than we’d like to admit.)

5. Set up automatic notifications to monitor changes by importance.

Once you’ve determined the most important content to monitor, you’ll want to set up automatic notifications at a frequency of your choosing.

Long story short? This will help you stay agile and responsive with your content strategy. For example, if the ranking of a top revenue generating page suddenly drops, you will receive a notification. This will allow you to examine the changes and possible impacts sooner rather than later.

Pro tip: Make sure there is some balance here. You don’t want to mess with tracking metrics, especially when Google Core updates can impact search volatility. In this case, it is always better to wait and see if the SERPs balance out naturally after the update is complete rather than reacting immediately.

Example

I Think yesYou can use most, if not all, of the tools already mentioned in this step-by-step process to set up content monitoring alerts for your most business-critical pages.

However, as part of my monitoring process in my eCommerce content project example, I focused on tracking SERP positions.

I used this for this Serp robots to monitor keyword rankings for our top collections in real time. In the next phase of the content strategy (creating new collections), I would set up these alerts for the pages with the most search potential.

6. Set up monthly content monitoring reports.

For most content projects, monthly content monitoring reports are sufficient.

This will give you enough time to recognize any changes in your efforts, while also helping you maintain that all-important balance between them surveillance performance and obsessed about it.

I think this balance helps to stay calm answer to substantive problems as soon as they arise react harms them and does more harm than good.

In the reporting phase, you want to highlight content performance in order of importance. This means you need to report on your most business-critical aspects first and foremost. But you can also use these reports to identify “rising stars.”

(So ​​if you’ve created new pages in the last few months that are scoring high in search performance.)

You can then design an action plan to build on the success of the new site. This could be internal linking of existing pages to further strengthen the authority of the new page, or creating new supporting content to achieve this.

Pro tip: Most SEO tools have monthly reporting options. Therefore, it’s worth reviewing your existing tech stack before investing in a separate reporting tool. There are also a ton of reports you can create with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to help you continuously monitor content.

(Stay tuned, folks, as Zoe Ashbridge will share a few GA4 examples in the Best Practices section soon.)

Example

When I was working on my e-commerce project, I was lucky Emma Russell, the founder of Oxford Comma Digitalas an invaluable external resource to turn to at this stage. She created the most beautiful “live” Google report for me, which also includes conversion tracking.

This meant that after the initial benchmarking via my Google Sheet, I could easily create monthly reports as part of my ongoing content monitoring. With this data, I could then analyze exactly what was happening with the product collections and figure out how – or if – the most important ones should be improved.

I also knew which product collections to prioritize each month for ongoing monitoring.

7. Use content performance data to inform your strategy.

Whether you’re creating an initial benchmark to start a project or monitoring a long-term project, performance data should inform your content strategy.

For example, if your rankings or traffic are generally declining across the site, your content tracking and reporting should highlight this. You can then analyze business-critical pages and identify potential problems.

Example

From my perspective as a content manager, one of the key areas of improvement was the actual content written on the page for the product collections.

So I’ll talk about that.

(Although the broader team working on this project did an incredible job identifying and improving other areas, including technical fixes and removing irrelevant products!)

After prioritizing existing collections for improvement, I discovered that many of them had thin on-page content. In response, I created a process for the team to identify, create, and add new relevant section text to existing collections. Based on this process, I also created a product collection template for the team.

In many cases, the descriptions of the collections also had no direct connection to the products. So with something like “pineapple sticker designs” the content was about pineapples instead of how you might use pineapple themed decals.

Because of this, the text confused Google and miscategorized the collections.

To avoid this in the future, I have put processes and guidelines in place and trained authors on how to use them Google Natural Language tool. We then added the Google Natural Language category and rating as part of the content approval process.

8. Continually improve your content monitoring process.

As key business priorities change, your content strategy will likely need to pivot.

This means that specific content and even metrics that were crucial last year may not be insignificant this year. The knock-on effect? Your content monitoring setup is likely to change.

That doesn’t mean you have to scrap the entire process. However, you may find yourself reprioritizing the content and metrics you track or reevaluating the tools you use to monitor content.

You may also discover better ways to present and visualize your monthly reports to make the results clearer to non-technical stakeholders. In any case, it is important to remain flexible where it is relevant to your content monitoring process.

Example

The report Emma Russell created during my sample content project was (unfortunately, not sadly) a “game changer”.

The fact that results were displayed in real time, rather than static results from exported data, made a huge difference. It was also easier to share data between internal departments and external resources so everyone was on the same page.

Crucially, this report continued to evolve throughout the project. For example, we were looking for more granular ways to monitor conversions and gain insights into user behavior.

Content monitoring best practices.

You’ve heard enough about me; Now it’s time to hand the mic back to some incredible SEO talent in my network.

As a heads up, I recommend referencing these best practices when building your content monitoring process. If any tips would improve a particular step (or steps) in the above process, I will highlight them throughout.

Think of content monitoring as asset management.

Note: The following best practice would be an incredible guide for the “Choose Your Goals” step.

Portfolio SEO director and agency consultant Mersudin Forbes recommends adopting a critical mindset throughout the content monitoring process. “Instead of monitoring content for changes, think of monitoring as an asset management solution,” says Forbes.

“Just like you would care about physical real estate, you want to make sure everything you create on your website is high quality and in line with the trends your users need.”

He adds, “So you almost have to ask yourself two questions: What am I monitoring for change and what am I monitoring for not changing.”

Divide your website assets by seasonality, interest and performance…

Note: The following two best practices would be an incredible reference point for the “Benchmarking the Performance of Existing Content” steps. and “prioritize the importance of content for monitoring.”

In the “Benefits” section, Mersudin Forbes mentioned identifying “which parts of your website need maintenance.” He recommends making this easier “by dividing your website assets based on seasonality, interest, and performance.”

Forbes gives the following “seasonality” examples:

  • Finance/budget related content that would be outdated with new changes
  • Annual industry changes in compliance
  • Current reference versions of the tools and products used
  • Displays products by seasonality at the category level

…Then identify key points during the year when areas of your website need to be changed.

Forbes recommends using your favorite SEO tools and processes “to stay ahead of necessary monitoring and change requests.”

As a practical way to manage these changes, he recommends going beyond a standard editorial content calendar and creating “an asset management calendar with key differentiators by content type.”

Monitor search intent.

Note: The following best practice would be an incredible reference point for the steps “Set up automatic notifications to monitor changes by importance,” “Set up monthly content monitoring reports,” and “Use content performance data to inform your strategy.”

Mark Williams Cookthe head of digital marketing openness and founder of Also askedpreviously discussed shifting search intent on LinkedIn.

I contacted him as this might be relevant to content monitoring. I am very grateful that he was happy to share his thoughts.

“I think there’s a misconception that content stops ranking when it’s ‘old’. In fact, this is often because the intent of the search has changed and the content no longer matches it,” says Williams-Cook.

He explains that there are seasonal examples of this, such as “Halloween,” which is an informational theme for much of the year “before becoming a strong commercial theme in October.” He also shares a longer-term example of “Covid-related” searches.

“Use AlsoAsked’s timeline featureWe showed how searching for Covid was originally about finding out what it is and what the symptoms were, and now many searches are more focused on the minimum legal requirements of what you need to do if you have Covid.”

He adds: “We now have tools like ChatGPT and Screaming Frog where you can.” Set up intent shift monitoring automatically.”

An example of the alsoasked+chatgpt custom Javascript option in Screaming Frog.

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Start heat mapping and recording sessions.

Note: The following best practice would be an incredible reference point for the “Use content performance data to inform your strategy” step.

Next, Ben Goodey, founder of Spicy Margarita Content, shares a best practice related to monitoring how visitors navigate your online content.

“A best practice is to simply set up a free tool like Microsoft Clarity to start heat mapping and recording sessions,” says Goodey. “Watching a visitor navigate your content is incredibly insightful and will likely change the way you approach content creation in the future.”

An example of a Microsoft Clarity website heatmap

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Link SEO content performance to broader marketing and business results…

Note: The following two best practices would be incredible reference points for the “Choose Your Goals,” “Define Your Key Performance Indicators,” and “Set Up Monthly Content Monitoring Reports” steps.

Earlier this year, I had the honor of helping create HubSpot’s Ultimate SEO Guide.

Not an easy task, I can tell you that.

In the article, I shared a number of SEO best practices from some incredible leaders in our industry. Zoe Ashbridgethe lead SEO strategist and co-founder of forank (who also writes for HubSpot!) shared some insights about metrics and tracking in this article that are worth revisiting.

Ashbridge discussed the importance of linking SEO results to broader marketing and business results. To top it off, she also shared some metrics and reports she uses to achieve this.

“It’s true that tracking SEO success can be difficult. Unlike PPC, you can’t point to a conversion and know exactly what search term triggered it. However, a lot can be tracked,” says Ashbridge.

She adds, “Pursuing SEO efforts requires some awareness of marketing and how it works holistically. Although tracking SEO efforts is an imperfect system, it is better than the alternative: blind faith!”

…By using the following specific metrics and reports.

Ashbridge reminds us that the metrics you use to monitor online content depend on your sales funnel. Still, there are some metrics she recommends for monitoring SEO success:

  • clicks and impressions; Separate branded and non-branded clicks. “This is very important. While SEO can do a lot in brand search, its primary role is to drive new users to the site via top and middle funnel content.”
  • Performance of pages built for SEO that don’t attract many branded searches. You can do this by tracking “sales or conversions directly from pages created in response to SEO requests” using GA4’s landing page report.
  • Track sales or conversions from users who also viewed content. To do this, Ashbridge uses GA4’s segment overlap.
  • Organic sales across the site. This is particularly important for e-commerce.

An example of ga4's segment overlap report

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If you’re a service-based business, Ashbridge recommends tracking your leads internally as well. “The goal is to recognize SEO for its sales support,” says Ashbridge.

“If SEO brings traffic to the website, your retargeting campaign and email marketing could convert them. You can identify content that is part of the buyer’s journey based on the (GA4) segment overlap.”

Content Monitoring: The real “hack” is to keep learning

I hope you learned a lot from this article – if not from my insights, then from those shared by leading content experts in our industry.

As for the latter, I’ve been in this marketing game for a few years now and have picked up so much new knowledge from everyone who contributed to this article.

I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I never considered heatmapping as part of my content monitoring process. I’ll definitely take this with me when I monitor online content in the future.

And I love the suggestion to think of content monitoring as “asset management” and integrate this approach into your editorial calendar.

Additionally, I picked up some incredible tips on reporting with GA4, which, as you know if you’re in search engine optimization, has been the bane of many specialists’ lives since the demise of Universal Analytics in 2024.

Suffice it to say, there are plenty of tips, tricks, and hacks when it comes to content monitoring. However, as with many areas of SEO and marketing, the real trick is to keep an open mind. Because learning? Well, it never ends.

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