Imagine a business blogsite that has a primary objective - to help existing customers with product support. One might argue that the the fewer the visitors to that site, the better. Or, the fewer comments, the better. In contrast, if your objective is to sell real estate, a business blog that has increasing numbers of [new] visitors is good; a falling number is bad.

Unfortunately, most analytics tools are designed assuming one measurement axis; up is good, down is bad. So it's important to create and sustain a business blog measurement approach that fits the objectives of your business blog. SearchEngineWatch has a forum post by a member named "randfish" that exposes a number of measurable SEO factors that are relatively easy to find and sustain on a monthly basis. It's a pretty good list, but it should be further shaped to accomodate your specific business blogging objectives.

Dependencies

It's important to note that most metrics are rarely based on independent variables; a good example is new prospect leads. But this is true about all aspects of search optimization - it's typically never one thing that achieves success or causes failure. Imagine a blogsite designed to expose your company's thought leadership and expertise in hopes of gathering new sales prospects through greater organic findability. Since organic search recommendations are based pages that can be recommended, it stands to reason that lots (and lots) of pages in the search index is one of many possible [important] measures worthy of tracking. A high incidence of page acceptability into the search index is good; a low number of pages in the search indices is bad. This seems to be a reasonable indicator of content indexability as a whole - indeed, the reason that smart companies websites avoid walling in their web sites with a Flash application on the root of the domain.

Some people are reluctant about index footprint as a measure of achievement. Imagine you are competing with a company that has one page in the Google index, and your company has zero pages indexed. In this scenario, the number of pages certainly matters a great deal; your competitor is infinitely more likely to get a search recommendation than your company. You can set the stage for alternate scenarios, but one thing seems pretty clear -- the more pages indexed, the more likely prospects will find you when they search for that special page and discover it is your page. This is even more pronounced if your Internet marketing strategy includes a goal to get long-tail findability - the idea that many pages can produce just a few clicks from people that are hyper-qualified and truly interested in your company or your message.

Prime Objective

But the true measure of your business blogging initiative is not about index penetration or any single metric for that matter - it may be about sales, or it may be about customer satisfaction, but in any case, it will most definitely have dependencies. For example, there are many dependencies on sales; good sales people are just as important as the leads handed to them; leads are dependent upon traffic, and traffic is partially dependent upon search recommendations and possibility your entire online marketing strategy. It is the dependencies that we often overlook when measuring performance.

Scenario

Your blogsite has relatively low traffic from organic search recommendations. Who (or what) is the problem? Before you can determine this, you need data and a good starting place is to ask a simple but fairly obvious question - "Is your content indexed?". It's reasonable to start with this question because if the content isn't indexed, it's not going to produce any recommendations. This is one of many dependencies that need to be isolated to determine where the problem exists given this scenario.

Another dependency comes into focus where search referral traffic is good but conversions are low. Conversions depend on the visitors and why they happen to be on your site. If they arrived there from a search referral involving a query for an upcoming NASCAR race in your community, and you sell luxury sailing yachts, the conversion rate will be predictably low; aside from the fact that NASCAR fans are unlikely to be luxury yacht buyers (no disrespect intended - I'm a NASCAR fan), there's a fundamental disconnect between the published upcoming event and your line of business. Again - this is another small but important dependency on the performance of your blogsite. As such, one question useful for measuring success is "How are people presently finding my content? What search terms are they typing to arrive here?".

Biased Data

Many business people make a fundamental mistake with this question - they assume that the queries used to find their blogsite (or website) are the things that people care about most.  This is only partially true - the search queries being tracked in your analytics program are biased. They are already tilted in favor of what you've previously written about. If you sell real estate and you've written a lot of content about colorful geraniums and lots of people searching for colorful geraniums have found your blogsite, it doesn't mean that lots of people that want to buy real estate also want to read about colorful geraniums. It only proves that you have the ability to shape the types of visitors that land on your blogsite and your efforts have attracted people looking for information about colorful geraniums. This story about Jack and Jill, two real estate agents drives this point home pretty well.

Approach

To create a more scientific approach to your content strategy, consider working backwards from your objectives.

• State the objectives
• State the dependencies on those objectives (i.e., what must happen for the stated objectives to be realized)
• State the dependencies on the dependencies (i.e., at each dependent level, what criteria must exist for the plan to work)
• Repeat the process until you've created a details dependency map

The most important benefit in this approach is that you'll quickly realize lots of things are required to achieve the stated objectives and one very key dependency is the type of things you write about. Working through this exercise will help you shape your content while developing the ideal measurement dashboard.