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5 Site Metrics to Use for Comparing Blog Performance

5 Site Metrics to Use for Comparing Blog Performance

5 Site Metrics to Gauge Blog Performance

Part of the process of building your blog is the ability to measure its progress over time. You can’t expect your blog to grow at your preferred rate if you don’t bother to check out its data and insights. Doing so will allow you to determine the things you need to do to get your blog back on track.

For blog owners, installing Google Analytics before launching your blog should cover all the data you need to monitor your blog’s performance. It will reveal to you valuable metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, and customer segmentation, among others.

You can also create goal tracking to keep an eye on particular pages of your blog.

If you need help navigating through the mountains of data the tool offers, you can try out this website tracking audit.  It will audit your analytics and give you insihghts on how to use Google Analytics the right way.

However, what if you want to monitor the performance of your competitor’s blogs? Since you can only access the analytics of a blog if you have access to its dashboard, you are pretty much in the dark when it comes to your competitor’s data.

Are they receiving more traffic than you do? Are their visitors staying longer on their blog pages than yours? Which among their pages are receiving the most traffic?

Instead of beating yourself up with data that you will never get your hands on, there is a way you can take to determine which among your blog and your competitors’ are performing much better. Below are site metrics that you should refer to for comparison and review.

Alexa Global Rank

Alexa is a web analytics tool similar to Google Analytics that provide you comprehensive data of your blog and your competitors’. The tool details the audience geography and their engagement, link profile, and more (especially if you purchase any of their Competitive and On-Site Analytics packages).

However, the most useful metric provided by Alexa is its Global Rank. This refers to your overall ranking among all websites in the world in terms of the amount of visitors. The highest rank is 1, so the farther you are away from this number, the lesser your traffic is.

Comparing your blog with your competitors’ using the Global Rank should give you an idea on how much traffic your blog  is receiving as opposed to others.

Keep in mind that the Alexa Global Rank is just an estimate of your actual score. In fact, the metric is not as accurate as you would have wanted it to be. Nonetheless, Alexa’s Global Rank is a decent indicator on how you blog is positioned online.

Domain and Page Authority

According to Moz, the inbound marketing agency that developed both metrics, Domain Authority “predicts how well a website will rank on search engines” while Page Authority “predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines.” This can be viewed when entering your blog URL at Open Site Explorer.

Both are made up of aggregated metrics from different sources, so it will be difficult to find a way to influence your score from these metrics. Nonetheless, both provide reliable estimates that you can refer to when determining which among the blogs you’re comparing is the best. On the scale of 0-100, the higher a blog’s score on either is, the more authoritative it is.

Link Profile

Referring again to the data provided by Open Site Explorer, it reveals to you the number of backlinks or inbound links from different domains your blog has. Breaking it down further, you will see the backlinks that pass equity down to your blog, and the types of links you have in your domain (internal and external).

Since backlinks are huge off-page SEO factors that help shape its Domain and Page Authorities, blogs with lots of equity-passing links pointing to their respective domains are much more authoritative compared to those with less of this link type.

See Also
aged domain blogging

Social Score

The number of times your blog has been shared on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter reveal to you its popularity in this specific channel. More shares means more people are visiting your site. You can enter your blog URL on sites like ShareTally to show you the number of shares you currently have.

The social score also works as a social proof – the higher your score is, the more it makes your blog more trustworthy in the eyes of visitors.

Overall Metric

This refers to the metric developed by EatonWeb, a paid blog directory that also computes for the blog’s authority online. The Overall Metric is comprised of the Strength (“measures over a dozen individual web metrics collected from a variety of sources”) and Momentum (“measurement of any given blog’s relative growth over time).

Strong blogs that are in fast decline are penalized, while weak (or fresh) blog that are growing are prioritized by the metric.

This is an interesting metric because it provides a fresh take on blog performance, despite not revealing how the metric is computed. This gives you a chance to analyze your blog, which will lead you to finding ways on how you can improve its progress.

Final thoughts: While these site metrics are hardly dead-ringers to the kind of data provided by Google Analytics and other tools that provide more comprehensive data, using the ones featured above provided reliable data that should allow you to compare and contrast your blog’s performance against others. 

More on site metrics:

Your Aging Website: When and How to Get a Web Design Facelift

Should a Blogger Pay To Post Content on a Website?

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