Content marketing has grown from a few random videos and a handful of blogs to an entire universe of promotional potential throughout the last two decades. Now, this form of marketing has turned into an advertising powerhouse that 90% of marketing managers use.¹

These marketers have seen the impact of content marketing, and 70% of them believe this is an effective way to educate an audience.² Another 60% agree that content marketing generates leads and builds loyalty with current clients. Isn’t this what you’re trying to accomplish with your autism treatment center’s marketing strategy?

But results like these don’t just happen. They’re born from careful planning, rigorous work, and continuous testing to achieve a desired outcome. Most marketers are fairly good at the first two, planning and execution, but too few actually test out their content marketing.

How is Your Content Performing?

Your autism treatment center depends on your work to connect your therapists with patients and families who need their services. Testing your content marketing strategy is the best way to ensure that what you do makes a difference. Here’s how to check the performance of your content marketing efforts.

Step 1. Look at Page Performance

Start by looking into page activity on your blog articles and other relevant content pages. Then move on to checking total page views, total entrances, organic page views, organic entrances, and total time spent on page. All of this information is readily available on Google Analytics.

Note that there’s no fixed rule for what these numbers should be. They’ll be entirely different for every autism treatment center based on the center’s size, market composition, and how well-established their blog and other content marketing pieces are.

Look at these numbers over time and determine a high and low range for your content. That’s a reasonable place to set your initial expectations around your content’s performance.

Also, keep in mind that 73% of people just skim articles.³ So measure how long the average person takes to read your articles to develop reasonable expectations for total time spent on page.

Many of these metrics will not only measure the performance of your content marketing, but also your SEO. The top three most common SEO metrics are organic traffic, time spent on page, and keyword ranking.⁴

Step 2. Analyze Keyword Quality

Keywords aren’t just an essential part of SEO. They’re an important contributor to your content performance as well. If your keywords aren’t right, then your prospective patients and their families who need to find your content never will, and your page performance metrics will suffer.

Start analyzing your keyword quality by measuring how many page 1 and page 2 keywords your content ranks for on Moz.⁵ This information reveals the likelihood of your pages being returned as a search result.

Also make sure Google has indexed your content pages. Do this by visiting Google’s Search Console and searching your URL.⁶ If the pages aren’t indexed, they won’t appear in search results. Period. And this happens more often than you think—20% of most websites aren’t indexed by Google.⁷ That means that if there are 100 pages on your website, only 80 are recognized by Google.

Step 3. Evaluating Engagement

Engagement is another essential part of content marketing success. But like page performance, these numbers are subjective. To confirm your content is hitting the mark, evaluate your calls to action, click-through rates, bounce rates, and exit rates.

And don’t forget to take a look at your backlinks, too. You should determine where they’re coming from and identify the leads that may have resulted from them. Usually, the more backlinks your page has, the better the page will rank on Google.⁸

Also, evaluate your social media presence. How many shares, likes, and comments did your content earn? Are you able to track leads that were a direct result of that engagement?

Of course, the answers to these questions, although telling, don’t always paint the whole picture—but they’re a great place to start evaluating the results of your content marketing strategy.

Interested in designing a robust content marketing plan for your autism treatment center, but not sure how to get started? Dreamscape Marketing can help. Call us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session today.

 

For a list of references, please contact us.