Guest posting is a powerful tactic that can help build authority, earn high-quality backlinks and attract new audiences to your website. While content creation and outreach require a lot of resources, it’s very important to track and assess your external articles’ performance.
By analyzing key metrics such as social media engagement, reach, backlinks and referral traffic coming to your website, you will be able to identify relevant guest posting platforms to focus your efforts on them. Doing this can also help you reveal opportunities, highlight failures and understand what kind of articles work best in terms of your goals.
The Post Tracking tool equips you with the needed data.
How can this be done?
- Go to the Post Tracking tool.
- Type in the URL of an external article you want to analyze, add up to 5 keywords to track.
- Get the information about the article’s performance: estimated reach (the number of potential people that this article has reached based on a domain's traffic value and big-data analysis), social shares, backlinks, and keywords the post is ranking for in the top 100.
- By connecting Google Analytics, you can track referral traffic from each publication.
- Click on the number and “View changes” in each column to track how your article’s performance changed over time.
Next Steps
Once you know the key results of your external blog posts, you can:
- Compare your guest posts by referral traffic to understand which topics and content types are more likely to attract new audiences to your website.
- Analyze the number of shares and backlinks to identify guest posting platforms that generate the highest engagement.
- Analyze the historical data (in “View changes”) to understand which of your publications bring long-term results. If an article continues to receive social shares and brings you referral traffic more than one month after the date of publication, give a higher priority to this content type.
- Find top influencers who shared each of your articles by clicking “Top contributors” in the “Shares” column. People who are sharing your guest posts can be interested in sharing your blog articles as well. Influencers can also have their own blogs, so you can try to reach out to them and find new guest posting opportunities.