Content marketing should engage, educate, or entertain, but more importantly, should elicit action. This is what separates content marketing from content publishing.

The goal is not to be good at content, but to be good at business using content. If your content marketing works, it should affect your audience enough to prompt a business-specific behavior. These behavioral actions are the conversions that we need to track in order to see that our content has moved a reader beyond just engagement.

Many desired conversions can be as high-value as lead generation, product purchases, or requests for information. But they can also come in the form of engagement micro-conversions – sharing content, engaging with additional content, exploring your site deeper. What matters is that there are always things you want your reader to do, even if only to continue reading. 

Perhaps the key metric of relevance is how well you actually solve the problems that your audience are experiencing. If your content answers a query in an effective manner, then you are delivering precisely the sort of user experience that search engines want to promote.

How you tangibly measure this will sometimes depend on the query that you are serving. A very simple query can be served extremely quickly with a single page, whereas more in depth queries will require much more detailed, long-form content.

Using another of our internal tools, known as Roadmap, we can start to identify correlations between both known and potential ranking factors, with high search ranking positions. The more strongly that high-ranking websites score for particular factors, the stronger the correlation.

The graph above demonstrates how particular factors, in this case those that are indicative of a strong user experience, with higher search engine rankings, correlate with higher search ranking positions.