Following from our SEO path and the introduction of topic clusters, comes one of the most common content marketing questions clients ask is, “how do I measure the success of a piece of content?”

The answer to this question is complicated because for the most part it’s not a great idea to evaluate the success of your campaign on an article by article basis. Just looking at the success of one blog post is difficult at best, but more often than not the definition of success is too narrow to account for its indirect benefits.

A good example of this would be brand-driven content. The focus here isn’t around generating sales or even capturing email addresses, but instead around elevating the brand, attracting new talent, or even earning backlinks or press coverage.

Luckily, this problem can be solved by evaluating success on a topic cluster level instead.

Measuring the entire topic cluster against all of your core business metrics will enable you to include residual benefits coming from content that doesn’t align with direct conversion goals.

Let’s say one of your blog posts is a research study with original data that gets thousands of backlinks -- this page will pass on authority across all the pages in the topic cluster and grow the search visibility across the whole topic cluster. That’s difficult to measure in isolation, but can be done on a topic cluster level.

Using this framework for measurement, you’ll be able to understand the following:

• Which topics perform better at driving traffic to your web properties
• Which topics earn you the most leads
• Which topics drive the most revenue to the business
• Which topics earn the most backlinks/coverage

So for now, that's topic clusters in a nutshell. Need some further help setting these up, give us a quick call to see if we're the right fit for each other.