If creating content is part of your daily routine, the process has likely become as natural as breathing.

You get your cup of coffee, sit down and start plugging away writing posts that would give Shakespeare a run for his money. OK, so that might be a little over the top, but wouldn’t it be nice to have the process flow that smoothly?

It may get difficult at times to find a source of inspiration or even get a good read on what your audience is enjoying. Sure, seeing the count on your social media buttons go up on certain posts can be a fairly useful indicator of performance. But, as we know, social is volatile and finding a coherent pattern for posts achieving success may not be that easy to figure out.

That’s where analytics come in.

A colleague of mine, Andrew Hanelly, had these wise words to say about analytics, “Analytics is like a two-way mirror because you can watch how people are interacting with your content in real life. Analytics lets us see exactly how people are finding our stuff and what they’re doing with it.” Analytics informs you on what kind of content works and helps to refine and define your strategy.

Here are three tips to help inform your content creation strategy using Google Analytics.

1. Investigate organic keywords.

Organic keywords are terms people are searching for through search engines that lead them to your site—and they add up to account for the majority of search-driven traffic.

Knowing your top keywords can be very useful in learning what people are interested in and what you could be ranking for.

If you see some long-tail keywords, phrases composed of three or more words that are more specific, this is good stuff! For one, the more specific the phrase, the better chance you’ll rank in search engine results. Also, these visitors will bring in more quality traffic, which leads to more conversions and/or more dedicated readers.

Takeaway: Finding new, authoritative spins on long-tail keywords relevant to your brand can help you create content that will improve your site’s SEO.

2. Find top articles every month.

Taking a look at the landing pages that received the most pageviews in a particular month can be quite telling of what your readers like. A good question to ask yourself is, “What do these top performers have in common?”  Is it:

• Headline style?
• Article style?
• Subject matter?
• Promotion?

A good trick is to change some “boring” headlines to something a little more click-worthy and SEO-friendly.  Did pageviews, tweets, or likes go up? If so, it may not be the article but your headline that is turning readers away.

Experiment with different styles and see what your readers are perceptive to.

Promotion is an interesting animal. One type of promotion may work for one article or a slew of articles but not for others. Track how you promote a piece, be it on social media, a newsletter, or reaching out to people individually through email, and monitor pageviews and other types of interactions in analytics. Doing this monitoring can help you devise a formula to put forth for future posts—create a little handbook for your own use and even to share with colleagues (it’ll be a good resource for you and others).

Takeaway: Discover what process, article style, and other details that work and improve on it.

3. Try some internal curation.

Rounding up content around a particular topic area to create a more evergreen piece is easy—and people love numbered lists. All you have to do is find a few posts (usually five or more) that you’ve already created on one topic and number the headlines with descriptions. These posts make for awesome resources and you’re spending little to no time at all creating a brand new post.

Not only does this give you a chance to re-promote great content that may have missed the mark on social media, but it breathes new life into posts that didn’t perform that well on their own.

Takeaway: Roundups give content a second life on your site and social media.

Now that you have a few tips, check out analytics and see what interesting trends you find.

Do you have any useful tips for using Google Analytics to create content?

This originally appeared on Engage.