
By Amy Derksen on in Content, Strategy
Keep, fix or turf: Improve content performance with a content audit
A content audit, like any audit, doesn’t sound like the most fulfilling thing you’ll do this year. However, if you find that your site traffic is flagging or you just aren’t getting the prospect behavior you’d like, it’s time to put your content under a microscope.
1. Know your goals
What do you want content to do for you? Show people that you’re a legit business? Move decision makers toward consideration and a decision? Perform better in searches for specific key phrases? You can waste a lot of time and money on content if you don’t know where you want it to take you.
2. Create an inventory
Capture all of those old printed brochures. YouTube videos. Web pages and promotional sites. Webinars. Company descriptions on GlassDoor and who knows where else. Articles in other publications, online and off. Research and reports. What have you got? Time to dust off all that content you’ve forgotten about.
Gain the easy wins first—things that don’t need entirely new content, a full brief or a lot of sign-offs—so you can start to see the impact quickly.
Create a spreadsheet and track it all, including every page on your site. You can use a sitemap generator, your own CMS or Google Analytics to avoid doing this manually. In fact, if you plug your home page’s URL into a Google search box, you’ll get a list of all the pages they’ve indexed, which can help you find orphan pages that have fallen off the radar.
Name/Description | Date | Type/ Format | Author | Purchase Stage | URL |
Welcome brochure | 10/2019 | Brochure | Consideration | ||
3 ways to cook rice | 02/2020 | Recipe | V. Salt | Awareness | http://url… |
Compare features | 07/2021 | Video | A. Gloop | Decision | http://you.. |
Be sure to add attributes that are important to your business, based on your goals in step 1. You may want to include:
- Authors, especially if you have a lot of SME or blog posts and want to make sure you’re not carrying around content by people who have made a name somewhere else
- Publish date lets you know what’s ready for an update
- Browser titles and meta descriptions can help you see if you’re repeating these and hurting your search performance
- Purchase stage can be a big help later, when you’re trying to figure out where you’re light on support for the buyer journey
- Audience is a must if you have multiple key segments.
- Products or services may help you see which of your offerings need more content
Finally, insert a column on what comes next—Keep, Update, Expand, Delete. This will be necessary as you move forward.
Note that this process focused more on content marketing, rather than an SEO inventory. If you want to go the SEO route, you’re going to want to track H1s, focus keywords, image tags, links and much more.
3. See what’s working
Google Analytics and social metrics such as YouTube data will tell you where people are going and how long they’re spending there. You’ll also find out which assets are being downloaded most often, and whether you’re doing better with gated or ungated content by journey stage.
This will help you see what needs to happen next.
- A two-year-old blog post with a gazillion impressions (or your version of a gazillion—it’s all relative)? Fact check and leave it up, then supplement with (and link to) a completely new-and-improved update.
- Recent activity on old pages? Give them a quick refresh.
- Your biggest performers? See how you can make them work even harder. Update. Add CTAs. Link here from other places on your site. Turn them into videos, brochures or media bylines.
- Poor performers? Delete and, if it’s important information, take another run at how this information is presented.
- Lots of downloads? Make sure that content is searchable on the site.
4. Triage and dive in
Nothing gets done without an action plan. So start a list and get fixing. Gain the easy wins first—things that don’t need entirely new content, a full brief or a lot of sign-offs—so you can start to see the impact quickly. Make sure anything likely to spike seasonally or annually gets done in time for its next round of interest.
Content marketing is one of our core capabilities, and we’ve done it well for some great brands. Find out how we can help you draw more attention from key targets and guide them through the buyer journey. Pop a note to FATFREE today.