The Best Free Tools to Monitor Your Blog’s Performance

How much engagement is your blog getting on your website?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, then you might be in trouble. Many small business owners spend hours and hours every week writing the perfect blog that will get them clicks. If you’ve followed me in the past, then you know I am hugely in favor of this! Having a blog on your website is one of the best ways to keep it active and updated regularly. It also gives you lots of material to work with on social media and through email marketing.

But here’s the thing: If you’re putting up blogs in a vacuum, not knowing how one performs over another, then you aren’t going to be reaping their full value. Some topics get more engagement than others, so it’s crucial that you focus on those rather than the ones that lay forgotten in your blog archive. But how can you measure a blog’s performance? It’s easy with these simple and free tools to monitor your blog!

Google Analytics

This is one of the most used free tools to monitor your blog engagement online, and for good reason. Not only does it provide you with detailed statistics about your website, but it’s also completely free!

To use Google Analytics, all you need is a Google account. Once everything is set up, you want to bookmark your blog and leave Google Analytics running for a month or so to measure engagement. It can be frustrating to wait, but this is the kind of thing that takes time. With this tool, you will be able to see how many people visited your site/blog, where they came from, if those visitors were unique or repeats, and much more.

Generally, the metrics you want to track are, a) your blog’s traffic, and b) the user experience. If you discover that one of your blogs has an unusually high engagement level, it’s worth examining it to figure out precisely what connected with the reader. If you find one that people either ignore or click on and then click away from, then that might be a topic best forgotten for future blogs.

Check My Links

There are countless useful and free tools available on the Chrome store. One of them, Check My Links, can help you quickly track down one of the biggest sources of frustration for small business websites: broken links.

If you have dozens, or even hundreds, of blogs on your website, there is a chance that some of those links are broken for whatever reason. If that’s the case, then there is no way for your customers to get access to them. Going through them individually is a pain in the butt and time consuming, but thankfully, that isn’t necessary.

Check My Links will quickly go through your webpage to find any broken links, then report them to you. It’s that simple and easy. Of course, then you need to actually go into your website to fix them. Potentially an excellent job for a virtual assistant?

Website Grader

This tool is really cool. You simply need to plug your URL into it, and it will scan your entire site, giving you a score out of 100: 30 for performance, 30 for mobile, 30 for SEO, and 10 for security. Knowing your website’s “grade” will give you a better idea of the user experience, which might be keeping your blog’s traffic down.

For performance, it will check your average page size, requests, and speeds to see how user-friendly your site is to visitors. For mobile, it checks how responsive your website is on mobile devices. For SEO, it will check the length of your page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and your sitemap to determine how easy the site is to use. Finally, for security, they will check your SSL certificate to make sure your website is trustworthy.

After you do all this, you have the option of starting a 30-day trial, but there is still tons you can do with this free information, especially if you have someone on your team who knows how to rebuild websites from the ground up.

Found SEO Audit Tool

If you want to get a little more in-depth with your website’s SEO, this UK-based site will do the trick. Figuring out if your site has SEO problems may help you with your blog engagement issues.

Again, just plug in your URL, and you will be treated to a ton of information, ranging from on-page link analysis, keyword analysis, metadata analysis, and tons more. If you need any help figuring out what all of this information means, please feel free to contact me!

You May Already Have Free Tools To Monitor Your Blog

Many web platforms, such as Hubspot or WordPress, already have built-in analytic systems. Whatever web platform you chose, it always pays to take a look around at the various tools offered. You might only use a fraction of them, but it’s still good to know they’re there. Plus, if you hire a web developer or a virtual assistant, they might know how to use them effectively!

Developing a content marketing strategy that utilizes blogs is well worth your time and effort. Monitoring the engagement you get with blogs might be a little more work, but it can really pay off. Once you’ve accumulated some data about which blog topics and styles strongly connect with your audience, you can refine your content strategy.

There might be other reasons why your blog doesn’t have the engagement level you’d like. Maybe you need to refine your social media strategy or start up an online newsletter to get word of your blog out there. Or perhaps you just need some new ideas! If you’d like some help coming up with an editorial calendar for your blog, or you don’t have time to write and research the topics yourself and need a copywriter, contact me today! Together, we can create blogs that will capture your audience’s attention and engagement!

If you’re still not sure that utilizing a virtual assistant is for you, check out my free workbook. In it, I will tell you exactly what you want to look for from a virtual assistant to make sure you pick the best to work at your small business.