The interests of the corporate blog are multiple: finding new customers, building reader loyalty, improving brand awareness...

Yet many companies are still reluctant to invest time and resources in it.

If the ROI (Return On Investment) of a blog post was difficult to define and measure a few years ago, it is no longer the case today.

Tools exist to accurately assess its impact and methods exist to improve its content.

What is the ROI of a blog post?

How to evaluate the impact of a blog post on the overall activity of the blog and more generally of the company ?

Is the energy that goes into writing and publishing the article justified ?

Of course, you won't magically turn a first-time visitor into a ready-to-buy prospect desperately asking to buy !

But defining key indicators at each stage of the process will allow you to measure the performance of your blog post, and thus its ROI !

• The article's ability to improve your site's SEO
• The article's ability to generate traffic
• The article's ability to convert visitors into customers (CTA = Calls to Action)

1 - Measure the impact of the article on website SEO 

• Keywords/Referencing: One of the main benefits of a professional blog lies in improving your website's SEO. Half of all website access in France is via a search engine, and the giant Google is responsible for more than 90% of those visits. Thus, during the month of April, 50.1% of visits to a website were made from a search engine.
• Inbound links, or backlinks: if they contribute to the success of your SEO, inbound links can also allow you to distinguish the blog posts interesting enough to justify links from other sites. Indeed, to get natural backlinks it is obviously necessary that your content of your pages is interesting and encourages to be mentioned by other webmasters (Which is a guarantee of quality).

2 - Measure the impact of the blog post on traffic generation 

In this part, the guideline is to show that a well thought out blog post has the ability to build a loyal audience and expand it, allowing for potential new customers.

• Number of visits/New subscribers to the blog : easiest way to measure the success of your content is the traffic it generates. You should check the number of unique visitors on a weekly or monthly basis to get an idea of the traffic on your articles. Since each blog post is hosted on its own web page, page views give you an idea of how many visitors have viewed a given post. This gives you valuable information about the types of content (topics, formats, etc.) that capture the attention of your audience.
• Number of shares/views on social networks/Number of comments: these metrics indicate the article's ability to increase your followers and brand awareness. The number of mentions and shares are indicators of content performance.
• Scroll depth : This indicator, by measuring the rate at which the page is scrolled, provides a clear picture of the relevance of the content to the article's readers. An article with a good scroll depth is a testament to content that is worthy of interest and targets the right people.

3 - Convert visits into future customers 

The long-term goal of a blog is to convert a simple reader into a future customer who will buy from the website. Precise performance indicators allow to evaluate the contribution of an article.

• Article bounce rate :This is a marketing indicator that measures the percentage of internet users who entered a web page and left the site afterwards, without viewing any other pages. If this one is high, it can reveal the dissatisfaction of visitors due to poor targeting, poor quality content, a suffocating layout, a page that takes too long to load, a lack of Call to action...
• Lead generation : this is l key objective for most marketers doing content marketing. The purpose is to attract and qualify prospects (leads) to the advertiser's site. The ROI of the blog post is highly dependent on the customers it will generate. A good blog post helps to attract future buyers.
• Conversion Rate: this metric tells you how many qualified leads were generated for each item that then translated into sales. The lead conversion rate is the number of leads converted divided by the number of site visitors. In other words, it is the percentage of visitors who have reported to you through your site. This indicator provides information about the quality of the conversion tunnel. To optimize the lead conversion rate, it is advisable to improve forms, call-to-actions and landing pages.

The ROI of a blog post depends not only on the quality of its content but also on how well it is marketed by the marketer. A study by Hubspot showed that 46% of their leads from the blog were generated by 30 articles (out of 6,000 published articles) which led them to optimize their articles by regularly reposting the most effective content to generate more traffic.

Content art and a strategy for optimizing the work already done should therefore be an important part of the blogger's job.