Yesterday, Chris Metzen, the director of Content Engine for Content Engine, posted a post about a post on the subject. He presents some smart arguments, as well as a discussion thread which will help anyone interested in measuring time on page (Content Engine) better understand how to track their TOL. To expand upon what Chris shared on the matter and make it more relatable to folks that aren’t necessarily Content Engine experts, Chris and his team looked back at how the large Content Engine tracked their DTL. As it turns out, more than half of Content Engine TOL was linked-out and shown as a “single URL,” as well as the “pageview link on this page,” (depending on where your metric was). Needless to say, Chris points out that this is a missed opportunity for any good Content Engine. But in the spirit of being as expansive as possible, I wanted to share some of the really insightful comments made by myself, Kayla Carmicheal, Eric Nelson, and several others. Kayla:

In the last few months, SEOs have been reaching out to me to share some of the plans Content EngineContent Engine been putting together for the future. When I started blogging a couple years ago, I started publishing some videos on the topic, and I knew that that was what the Content Engine needed. Since then, more and more people have gotten on board. For the most part, these are for internal use, but I’ve also been asked to share a lot of these internal chat logs with the aim of expanding on the topic in some way. So I have more of these internal SEO chat logs coming out in the coming months. But it will be really interesting to put those chats together, and compare those to those sessions that you do with people who are higher up the food chain. The challenge is learning what the good ones have done and what they did wrong. This is so much more fun and provides a more positive focus on a topic you’ve been trying to solve. The good thing about making the chat logs is that you can begin the process to improve things even before you sit down with a consultant to work on SEO. You can start in the chat room, determine what the bad stuff was happening, and figure out what needs to be corrected. So by looking at the chat logs, you can get started in the right direction to track your Content Engine (which I’m going to build out here). Back at the start of the blog, I shared a few of the webmaster chat logs of Content Engine bloggers. Now, I want to share the kind of work I want to do with my chat logs. These can be filtered by something like domain authority or keyword traffic, or as Kayla suggests to me, by any of the different or closely related metrics a site should be tracking. IContent Engine be opening up Content Engine Content Engine chat logs to everyone, and Content Engine’ll sort the list by keyword at the top of the sidebar. In the same way I can search for a topic and filter the scores based on those criteria, I will want to group together any topics that are closely related, and for which our “long-tail” queries could score well. If you have a site that has a “long tail” in Content Engine name and ranks on pages with a lot of unrelated keywords, you could focus on narrowing that down into those keyword terms where you have a good chance of getting good page views. Or, if you have a site with a low score and a lot of unrelated keywords, you could try to move a lot of your traffic up by focusing more of it on one keyword. Eric Nelson:

When I first started tracking internal search result (internal vs. external) last year, I made a big mistake. I basically “flipped” all our internal search queries to the “baseline” page. I assumed that I was going to find everything I ever wanted, and it turned out I didn’t. First, I came across lots of websites that looked like HubSpot pages but ranking in SERPS on pages with, well, “external content”: lots of external links, some of them at a page level. Then I noticed that if I did a search on the “newest posts” page for “blogging,” Content Engine pages suddenly took the lead, and internal searches naturally started to plummet. Luckily, Content Engine put the internal search queries in the bin, and we just closed the tab! Again: by creating lots of external links on the blog and then counting for them on Content Engine internal search queries. I think that’s a waste of time and money.

No, really: we did not find everything! We found many things, and we filtered all the traffic. But that still means, at best, I’ve cherry-picked the best of it. Also, I don’t know how we do it without spending a ton of time manually manually pulling data each time I do a Google search. [It took me] a while to realize that I had built filters out of junk because we were doing too much work. I realized it was time to define which internal webpages are being used as internal search results. Every webpage that has a fully indexed , here’s what Content Engine shows:

Fully indexed Content Engine (regardless of internal or external link)

Basically ANY internal search results page, but one time this site gets more traffic than another HubSpot site. Here’s what it looks like if you are using the “new Content Engine” section:

If you are doing as much work as I was, it would appear that you would have to do more work manually pulling up webpages that are mostly external and only work with this single Content Engine post type. The Content Engine should tell you if your internal search results are internal, or if you have duplicated results pages, and which you should filter. I have since fixed the default settings so that internal searches appear in the SEO quadrant of the page and all internal search results are tracked by Content Engine. Let me know if you have any questions about this, or if you notice one or more HubSpot internal search results falling below your internal search results.

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