What is the difference between engagement and traffic?
Engagement is a broad term for the actions readers take on your blog. It could be more traditional actions, like commenting or retweeting, or nontraditional things, like clicking on links in your article or watching videos you’ve embedded. The goal with engagement is to create a discussion; if people are commenting and sharing your articles, you’re reaching an audience interested in what you have to say.
Traffic refers to the total number of visitors to your blog. As with engagement, this can come from traditional methods like search engine optimization or nontraditional ones, such as social media. The goal with traffic is to attract an audience interested in what you have to say, but it’s much more challenging to quantify a blog’s effectiveness than seeing how many comments you’ve received on a post.
How can I check website traffic and engagement?
If you want to know how your website is doing and what kind of traffic you are getting, here are some great tools that can help you with that.
SEMRush
A powerful tool for competitive research and keyword analysis. It gives you a comprehensive overview of your competitors’ keyword rankings, traffic, social media, and more. You can also utilize it to track your website performance and get ideas for new content, which helps create a content marketing strategy.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb offers similar features as SEMRush but with a bonus: You can see how much time users spend on a specific page or website, what devices they use most often to access it, and which pages they visit afterward. You can also see which sites send the most referral traffic to your site, valuable data if you’re trying to build new relationships with other websites.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool that provides insights into your website’s traffic, including where your visitors come from and what they do on your site. It also includes basic reporting on the number of impressions and click-through rates for each keyword. It’s not the most sophisticated tool, but it gets the job done if you have limited resources.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a tool that lets you search for long-tail keyword phrases related to your business and find relevant keywords you may have missed in your research. It helps uncover new ideas for blog posts and content marketing campaigns, but it’s also great for seeing what competitors might use as keywords in their content.
Conclusion
Monitoring your analytics can be tedious, but it can also be gratifying. Track engagement and traffic, compare results, and use the information to improve your marketing strategy. It’s not a foolproof system, but if you don’t take action on what you learn here, at least you won’t be out of the loop on what’s working on your site.