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Content Marketing

5 Content Auditing Practices To Maximize Marketing Performance

Content marketing is one of the most vital components of marketing strategy today.

U.S. marketers spent $10 billion on content in 2016, and 68 percent rank it among their top five priorities, according to Forrester research.

But despite the priority placed on content marketing, many companies aren’t tracking the performance of their content.

Thirty-seven percent of content marketers never complete a content audit, a survey of 10,030 marketing professionals found. This helps explain why 95 percent of content fails to generate engagement, as Beckon research shows.

Investing in content marketing without auditing your performance risks wasting money. It also robs you of the opportunity to improve your marketing efficiency and boost your return on investment.

Here are five best content auditing practices to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts.

Determine the Goals of Your Content Audit

When you are done with your content audit, you should have a list of all your content pieces’ URLs and titles, along with an evaluation of each piece’s performance and a determination of which steps to take next.

Possible next steps can include leaving content as is, removing it or updating it.

Before conducting a content audit, you should first clarify the purpose of your audit, advises Single Grain CEO Eric Siu.

Content audits are usually undertaken for two primary reasons:

  • One reason is to evaluate your site’s search engine optimization performance by comparing your page rankings for your target keywords against on-page SEO factors to make improvements. In some cases, you might be evaluating your site’s SEO to remove technical problems such as broken links.
  • The other major reason is to evaluate content marketing performance factors that measure user engagement, such as page visit metrics and social shares. You can also include both of these goals in your content audit.

Take a Content Inventory

With your goals in mind, the next step is to take a thorough content inventory.

Crawl all indexable content, or if you are doing a technical SEO audit, all crawlable content, says Inflow director of marketing Everett Sizemore.

This will provide you with basic information about your pages such as URLs, titles, descriptions and on-page metrics. You should then gather any additional metrics you need, such as information about internal links, backlinks and traffic.

Prepare for Ecommerce Optimization

Tools such as URL Profiler can assist you in collecting the data you need and exporting it into a spreadsheet. You’ll also find it easier to take content inventory if you use a good ecommerce content management system to upload and manage your content.

For instance, Content Analytics provides online retailers with a single interface for managing product page content and ecommerce product page optimization across sites, while also providing you with built-in analytics tools to see how your pages are performing.

Display Your Data as Actionable Information

The next step is to take your raw data and display it as actionable information.

This involves supplementing your data with a performance evaluation for each piece of content, along with a prescription of what next steps should be taken to improve, apply or eliminate that content.

Do this via your content management system or on a spreadsheet or dashboard tool.

Apply Your Findings

With your data displayed in a useful format, you can begin reviewing individual items and determining what next steps to take.

For example, you might begin by looking for SEO issues that could cause an algorithmic or manual penalty to be applied, such as quality, duplicate content or relevancy issues.

You can then present your recommendations in a report for your team to take action on.

To get the most out of your content audit, consider auditing your competitions’ sites as well. This can help you identify where your competition is outperforming you, as well as any weaknesses they have that might represent opportunities for you.

Categories
Content Marketing

The Essential Content Audit: 7 Ways To A Successful Content Marketing Review

Content marketing has become a ‘go to’ option for online businesses in a bid to outdo competition and maximize earning potential and build brand presence.

This certainly sounds appealing and demonstrates its value, but does it always work out as intended? No, and the reason comes down to many enterprises being unable to pinpoint what works and what does not.

Let’s take a look at what is required to have a comprehensive content audit done on the business to ensure things are up to scratch.

Content Audit Process
Courtesy SearchEngineWatch

The following seven ways are going to guarantee the total content review is completed as required and all details are being assessed prior to tweaks being made. You should not be making changes until everything has been sifted through as required. This is a big part of what is required.

“A content audit is an accounting of all currently published web content and a cornerstone of content strategy”

1) Be Clear On The Site’s Direction

What is the site’s direction (overall goal)? What do you want your existing and new content to actually provide for you? Ultimately, how/where/what will your audience consume?

You have to be willing to have this in mind immediately.

It will guide the audit and ensure you are looking for specific things during the process.

If the goal is to rank better, SEO is going to be heavily playing into all actions taking place.

Are you looking for conversions through the site? This should be taken into account during the audit then.

When you have a direction to focus upon, it will make things that much easier.

The audit requires direction to drive home results and be meaningful.

2) Scan The Site

Begin to scan the site. You can use a manual approach, but make sure to combine that work with tools that spider your site too. You may have forgotten about old content that is ready and ripe for review and re-purpose.

The first time around, don’t start picking out flaws. Just collect, store and then read through and see if there are any severe mistakes – or opportunities you’ve missed.

Some of this content may have been published in the past, but you forgot to read through it as a reader & consumer. This is essential to determine what is good and what is not.

This has to be completed beforehand to ensure the content is relevant, and that the architecture (navigation, access points) flows as nicely as it should. After this is done, you will have an audit trail in hand of what has to be fixed.

Create a checklist of changes – things like new titles, re-write, different format use (for example PDF to HTML) and distribution points.

3) Perform Keyword Research

It is essential to take a look at what keywords have been used in the content and which ones are lacking. Comprehensive keyword research at this stage is important. Often old content will benefit from an ‘upgrade’ in the keyword selection and nomination for use.

The idea is to start working on related keywords that will fit in with the content you have written.

This makes it easier to replace over optimized keywords which have been ‘spammed’ into the content either on purpose or by mistake.

4) Focus On Removal And/Or Rewriting

You will have three options to choose from.

You can leave the content, remove it, or rewrite the parts needing change.

If the content is not relevant now (users, search engines) for certain keywords and topics, you could easily rewrite it and make positive changes. This will help drive traffic in especially if you replace the old keywords with newer ones.  Remember, it’s about the reading value and experience also – don’t just think about keywords.

Check for duplicate content in copyscape, one of the tools at your disposal.

The content you leave should suit the direction of the site, be optimized well for keywords in and topics within your niche, and be easily consumed. Also, remember that you may find that existing content could be repurposed into PDFs, Videos, and Audio. Leverage all channels appropriately. Find out what your audience likes, and provide that too.

5) Assess Content Gaps

There are going to be certain ‘content gaps’ you will have to assess during the audit.

You may have content that needs a tighter integration within the topic. These are potentially missed opportunities from the past, or you were not aware of them. Use a tool like Google Keyword Planner (within the Adwords interface) to see what existing and new topical groups might be. Add value within the gaps.

6) Analyze Traffic

Where is the traffic going? What pages are driving in the best results? Which ones are converting the best? Are there correlations between pages that are converting compared to those that aren’t? And, are there pages driving traffic, but the bounce rate is too high?

You should be able to pinpoint all of this information by running a comprehensive web traffic analysis. Patterns will start to develop whether it has to do with incorrect keyword usage and/or poor content.

Whatever the case may be, it is important to determine opportunities and fix them as soon as possible after the audit is completed.

7) Pinpoint Accuracy And/Or Viability Of On-Page SEO Work

When content is being put up for the first time, it is easy to make silly mistakes with regards to on-page SEO (visible and non-visible content/code).

Whether it comes in the form of URLs not using keywords, headlines and HTML tags being over optimized, or the content simply not being written as a user would expect it.

Make sure to assess all of these details during the audit to see which pieces have to be tightened to reap the rewards of on-page SEO.

These seven ways are going to make a substantial difference in the long-run.

The business will be able to maximize its potential with relative ease as long as the content audit is done perfectly. No one is going to get it right the first time around and that is a given.

It takes practice and those who are willing to put in the hard yards are going to get fascinating results. Those who don’t are going to struggle and that is always difficult. Run a content audit as soon as possible to see how things are moving along. The results can often be surprising to those who were not as prepared as they should have been.

Take the information you are getting and make the necessary tweaks to help bolster the business. It is all about paying attention to details and learning from one’s mistakes because everyone is going to make them from time to time.

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