In good SEO nature, SEOs are either supporting or contradicting the timeless quote “Content is King.” It goes without saying that content is the foundation of everything we do with search engine optimization, but it isn’t always about content quotas or capturing every single potential search query in existence.
Content must tell stories, communicate to website visitors that they’ve come to the right place, build trust, display authority, drive conversion; and it doesn’t always have to be a blog or look like a standard page. Content is also infographics, audio, video, different kinds of imagery, and anything we can now conceptualize in the age of AI.
That being said, there’s always going to be content plans or strategies covering evergreen or trending topics, answering new questions – especially in a society that changes as rapidly as ours. Whether it’s content that captures short-tail (vanity/high-intent) keywords or long-tail (questions/FAQs/inquisitive searches), it remains a mainstay for any foundational SEO strategy. We know why we are continuing our content campaigns in 2025, but sometimes we have to take a step back and ask ourselves “Do we always know how it’s doing?”
Understanding True Content Efficacy
Since this conversation is about efficacy – or whether your content is actually working – we need to explore how SEOs demonstrate what they believe efficacy is. Efficacy refers to how effectively your content achieves its intended goals.
For pages targeting short-tailed, high-intent keywords, the goal is to inform but ultimately convert. These pages cover main keywords, geographic keywords, or service-specific keywords. Efficacy here looks like how you’d measure value or conversion and, in some cases, relevance or alignment with search intent.
Blog efficacy, on the other hand, isn’t always conversion-focused. Blogs can be authoritative and informative, and they can be repurposed for many other things like social posts, guides, scripts for blogs, and fodder for video. You typically wouldn’t repurpose a service page for social media or LinkedIn because that content doesn’t vary much (who wants to read content from your main services pages on social media). It’s more aligned with SEO metrics or elements that subjectively benefit the page from an SEO’s standpoint – metrics like bounce rates, time on site, pages visited, and behavior flow from a page to other destinations like about us pages, professional bios, or contact forms.
For blogs, you’ll analyze:
- Time on site
- scroll rates
- Sharing metrics, and
- Potential backlinks, since a really good blog can still attract inbound links – something that almost never happens naturally with service pages unless they’re featured in directories or similar sources.
Moving Beyond Standard Metrics
While many SEOs look at content efficacy (especially main high-intent pages) through standard SEO metrics such as search rankings, traffic, impressions, and related data points, for our purposes, efficacy is about the ultimate end goal: conversions, or quality leads. Many SEOs don’t take the time to look at the entire cycle from an efficacy standpoint, mostly because they don’t have the data or they don’t have the conviction to follow-through with the impact of their efforts.
In the rest of this two-part blog series, we’ll go through the process of examining certain views or angles of data featured in GA4, Google Search Console, and call tracking platforms like CallRail, which we use extensively at Market My Market. We’ll explore their capabilities and features, how they accomplish the pursuit of legitimate efficacy, and how we use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to marry different data metrics together to evaluate what’s working and driving conversions.
Starting with GA4: Page-Level Analysis
To start with GA4 (Google Analytics 4), we need to look at page-level metrics. Many SEO reports aggregate information by channel – organic, referral, direct, social, paid, etc. – and then present metrics like visitors, unique visitors, returning visitors, time on page, and bounce rate. All of this will be considered “Traffic Acquisition” and will look like this in GA4:
To take this a step further and discuss the “funnel”, or if there were actual actions taken from these sources, “Key Events” have to be set up for your first read on efficacy. In this example, it would expand the previous data out into the following:
Now at least we have a read on the number of events (calls, form submissions, chat engagements, etc.) that occurred from each channel, and compared to the traffic, what the session key event rate was, or let’s say conversion rate in more common terms.
But to truly understand efficacy, we need to analyze at the page level because we must understand why some pages perform better than others, especially those outstanding blogs that end up getting thousands of visitors over their lifetime. The only way to do this is through page-level analysis.
GA4 allows us to examine attribution by landing page and set up through our key events. As mentioned before, key event can be triggered on a page level by form submissions, calls, SMS messaging to a direct line, or chat engagement.
These can be set up with most third-party vendors that handle call tracking, chat, or form submissions, triggering an event or goal within GA4. This can be aggregated across all attempt types or broken down further so each page or blog has events categorized by calls, forms, or chats.
This granularity allows you to make strategic decisions. For example, if you’re skeptical about your chat program working and you see that 90% of key events were actually calls and only 10% were chats, you might reconsider that investment.
Here is what you’re looking for in the page-level analysis:
The higher the conversion, the higher the intent skillfully matches the content. 15% may be outstanding for a blog, but it may be somewhat low for a high-intent page. It all depends on the benchmarks that are set for the types of content you have on your site.
Geographical Insights for True Qualification
Another crucial GA4 aspect for measuring efficacy is city- or state-level analysis. If you have a blog that isn’t optimized for any particular geography, it might pull in traffic from everywhere. Without clear call-to-action or transparency about your location or service areas, you might get inquiries from all over the country, most of which would be unqualified.
This affects the efficacy of the content because there are no geographic parameters to filter visitors. GA4 allows you to narrow down all pages coupled with geography, ensuring proximity to where you can actually service potential clients and customers, making adjustments accordingly.
GA4 also helps identify content that’s never received traffic at all. It’s not uncommon for outdated blog content to generate only zero to ten visitors over the course of a year. While our conversation focuses on leads as the end goal, if traffic itself is a goal, this data helps identify candidates for content pruning, paring down, or consolidation – what we refer to as RC or “removal, redirection, refresh, or consolidation.”
In Part 2 of this blog, we’ll dive into Google Search Console insights and how to connect the dots all the way to qualified leads using call tracking platforms and AI assistance. We’ll explain how to marry different data sources to create a complete picture of content efficacy and how to leverage AI tools to process large datasets efficiently.
Maximizing Content Performance for Real SEO Impact
Content efficacy is about more than just rankings and impressions—it’s about driving meaningful engagement and conversions. At Market My Market, we take a strategic approach to measuring content success by analyzing not just traffic but key events, conversion rates, and user behavior. Whether it’s tracking form submissions, calls, or chat engagements through GA4 and CallRail, we ensure every piece of content serves a purpose and delivers value.
Our team goes beyond standard SEO metrics by integrating AI-driven insights and data visualization to refine your content strategy. By leveraging Google Search Console, GA4, and call tracking platforms, we create a complete picture of how content contributes to your business goals. If you’re looking for a marketing partner that prioritizes transparency, data-driven decisions, and real-time reporting, let’s connect. Call us at (800) 997-7336 or reach out through our contact form.
