Too many organizations still publish content without clear goals and KPIs.
In order for organizations to go beyond “just publishing content,” they need to think differently.
They need to reflect on their past work, think critically, and ask for access to performance data they can use to assess content performance, including traffic, crawls, and generated links.
I know what you might be thinking: “Wait, are you implying that the content team is asking for log file data?”
Yes, but I’ll do better: I want content teams to start asking for real-time log file insights.
For those familiar with traditional, time-consuming log file analysis, let me tell you this is different.
Times have changed, and content teams can now leverage log files for valuable insights.
Let’s change that mindset with the following four steps.
Step 1: Content teams begin to think critically
It’s rare for content teams to say, “I want to get search engine discovery the same day, crawl it within three days of launch, index it within a week, and drive 200 organic visits and two monthly organic visits three weeks after launch. potential customers.”
Unfortunately, many organizations still only publish X amount of content per month because “this is the way we’ve always done things” or “we need fresh content to keep our SEO performance going.”
After publication, they quickly moved on to the next one. By the end of the month, they had achieved their goal of releasing four pieces of content and were “done.”
They do not reflect how long it takes for search engines to crawl their newly published or updated content, how long it takes to get indexed, and how long it takes for articles to start ranking and drive organic traffic.
This is a terrible shame.
Why?
Because this old way of doing things is unlikely to actually drive things.
Of course everyone is busy and I’m sure it will do something good, but the content will never live up to its potential. That’s a waste of money.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand why this happens.
It’s a combination of doing what has worked (or could have worked) in the past and lacking a centralized place where content teams can find all the insights they need to effectively reflect on their job performance.
Critical thinking means content teams are asking themselves:
- Why did Article X start attracting meaningful organic traffic almost immediately after publication? Why climb so fast? Has it been reported by the media? Has it spread on social media?
- Do we see very different behavior when comparing the content performance of part A vs. B of the site? Will it recrawl more often? If so, why?
- Are there more internal and external links to Section A? Does it have better content in general?
Where can they find answers to these questions?
Step 2: Master Log File Analysis Insights
Getting log files is notoriously difficult. There are various challenges.
For starters, they may no longer be available. Even if they’re still available, they’re a pain due to the red tape associated with the PII (personally identifiable information) issue.
You will find that this is a slow and painful process in most cases. There’s a reason most organizations only perform traditional log file analysis once or twice a year.
This is where Content Delivery Network (CDN) example CloudFlare, CloudFrontand Akamai Come in.
Today, many sites use CDNs to provide visitors and crawlers with fast-loading sites.
The beauty of CDNs is that they serve log files in real time, and you can easily extract the logs and make sure they don’t contain any PII data.
Step 3: Provide content teams with easy-to-understand insights
Log files also provide valuable non-technical insights for content teams, even if their information needs differ from those of technical SEO teams.
Content teams need easy-to-understand, content-centric insights, and they need real-time insights as they make changes and touch many different things throughout the day.
It takes a walk in the park so they can answer the following questions:
- Does Google crawl these newly published pages? So what about these pages that we recently updated?
- How often does Google crawl pages in section X of your site? How does this compare to Section Y?
- Does Google crawl a page when the page title tag is wrong? or when they contain broken link?
Understanding the crawling behavior exhibited by search engines is crucial to improving your SEO performance, because (re)crawling pages is a Google’s crawling, indexing and ranking pipeline after discovery.
When content teams can answer the above questions, they can begin to connect the dots and understand how their work affects search engine behavior on the site.
They can even calculate and improve:
- Average crawl time.
- Average time to index.
- Average ranking time.
- Average travel time.
Zoom out, which also provides great input for SEO traffic forecasting!
Step 4: Map Insights to Content Inventory
The final piece of the puzzle is mapping these useful insights to your content inventory, which also tracks all your changes to your content.
Also, we want to stay away from putting these manually in spreadsheets – you want a forever latest content list Your log file insights are automatically bound to this location.
Off-the-shelf solutions provide all of this, or you can build your own custom solution.
Both are good. What matters is that you empower your content team!
Expert Tips: You can even integrate with Google Search Console URL Inspection API Determine if the content is indexed!
pack things up
When content teams ask all the right questions and reflect on their work and have everything they need to answer those questions and reflections, all their hard work goes a long way.
You’ll see that working on improving your website’s SEO performance is more accessible to everyone involved. It will be more interesting and management will probably embrace it sooner.
Empower your content team and be amazed by their contribution to website SEO performance!
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Featured Image: KonG/Shutterstock
