Analyzing your article’s performance and keyword rankings is crucial if you focus on organic traffic and expect to drive your audience organically.
When you’ve just released a guest post, you should keep an eye on how Google treats it. If your guest posts have good rankings for your target keywords, you can drive more traffic to your website: not only organic traffic coming directly from SERP, but referral traffic coming from your external articles as well.
Using Post Tracking, you can assess your article’s performance in a click and track your keyword rankings day by day.
How can this be done?
- Go to Post Tracking and set up a project for your domain.
- Next, add your article’s URL to start tracking its performance. You can add up to 50 articles (your blog posts or your competitors’ articles) to analyze them all in the same place.
- You’ll see the number of social shares, backlinks and estimated reach the article has.
- Click on Keywords and add up to 5 keywords you want to track rankings for. The tool will suggest keywords the article ranks for, identify your article’s position in search results for a keyword and show you keyword volume.
- When you’ve added keywords, click on the URL to track daily ranking changes, backlink trend and social media shares trend. Pay attention to the visibility trend — here you will see how your article’s position changes for a keyword day by day.
Next Steps
When you’ve analyzed your article’s performance and keyword rankings, here are some next steps to take:
- If your article doesn’t gain positions in the top 100 for your target keywords after a couple of weeks, this may indicate that your article is badly optimized for search engines. Use SEO Writing Assistant to get actionable SEO recommendations and rewrite it. Then ask the website owner to update your article.
- If your article is in the top 10, don’t delete the URL from your project. Check your positions once a week, so you can take action and update your article if it loses its position.
While not an obvious tactic, it can also be useful to gain backlinks for your guest posts. Here are several examples when link building for your external articles can represent a valuable asset:
- You don’t have your own blog and you drive traffic to your website or social media account from third-party platforms.
- Your website is new and your articles are not ranking well yet, but you have the opportunity to publish on third-party resources with high authority. You can promote your publications on these websites in order to win positions in the top 10 search results and drive referral traffic to your website or provide higher visibility for your brand.
- You want to promote articles that talk about your products (this may be user generated content or articles written by your authors and published on third-party blogs). It will be beneficial for you to improve their rankings. If you praise your own product on your blog, it doesn’t look credible, but positive reviews published on third-party resources will definitely have a good impact on your online reputation.
You can find backlink opportunities for your articles and optimize your outreach process by using Semrush tools and App Center apps:
- SEO Content Template: type a keyword and get a list of domains to acquire backlinks from for your target keyword.
- The Brand Monitoring app by Prowly: track mentions of your brand, competitors, and more across the web — unlinked mentions can be converted into backlinks.
- Link Building Tool: upload your list of domains and use the automated outreach functionalities to contact the website’s owner.