When it comes to content strategy, most businesses know that they need to be publishing fresh content regularly. Without any further strategy in place, you will end up with masses of blog posts and not much else. How often do you take the time to consider what you already have on your site? How often do you check if resources can be updated or refreshed for a new audience?
Auditing your content is a great way to refine your content strategy and ensure your efforts are aligned with your goals in 2019. Auditing your content can be time-consuming, so it’s essential to put a plan in place before you start to stay on track.
Define your goals
Before you can decide if your content is aligned with your goals, you need to know what those goals are. Your goals don’t have to be singular, and you can have different types of content for different types of goals. For example, if you want to drive more conversions, you might publish how-to guides aimed at people in the information-gathering stages of the buyer journey. If your aim is to boost SEO, you might publish a useful resource that naturally attracts links. And if your aim is to boost traffic to your site, you might publish keyword-driven articles based on audience intent.
Take an inventory
Once you have defined your goals, you can categorise your content based on these goals. The easiest way to gather a list of all content on your site is to look at your sitemap. You can also use a site crawler like Screaming Frog to crawl your website.
Make a note of things like word count, content type, topic, customer journey stage, title, H2 tags, target keyword and date of publication. All of this information will allow you to see at a glance what is missing and what could easily be updated or redistributed. If you haven’t always been very stringent with SEO practices in the past, this is also the perfect opportunity to quickly optimise your existing content.
Look at the stats
What kind of content performs the best and why? There is no clear cut answer to this question. Instead, the answer will be unique to each individual website, so there’s no use following other people’s advice about what kind of content to produce. Instead, trust your own readers to tell you what they want more of.
Head to analytics and select a decent date range to give you a good indicator of success. Around 3 months of data should suffice, but feel free to select a whole year’s worth of analytics if you want to understand seasonal trends in your website content traffic.
From here, click on “behaviour” and then “site content”. If you want to see what kind of content is driving new traffic to your site, you’ll want to consider the “Landing Pages” section and then filter by Organic traffic. If you just want to see which content on your site is the most successful, you’ll need to look at the “All Pages” tab.
In order to see your blog content, you’ll need to filter the results. If you don’t have “blog” or “news” included in your URL structure, this will be more difficult. Instead, you might want to download all of the data and then sort through the website pages from the blog posts. Look at metrics like “average time spent on page” and bounce rate to determine the most successful content.
– A blog post with a high bounce rate and low time spent on the page suggests the content isn’t hitting the mark. Consider updating it to make it more comprehensive or helpful. Look at the top search results for the main keyword you are targetting. Now make sure that your content is more comprehensive than that.
– A blog post with a high bounce rate and a high time spent on the page suggests that users are finding what they are looking for but then leaving your site. Look at the design of the page and see if there are opportunities to add a call to action or links to other relevant content.
Keep, update or delete
Once you know what content you have on your site and how well it performs, it’s time to make some decisions about what to delete, update and keep.
Content should be deleted (and the URL temporarily redirected to the main blog page) if it no longer serves a purpose on your site. These posts might be company updates that are no longer relevant, job postings that have now expired and content which cannot be easily updated. For example, if you have a blog post explaining how to use a WordPress Plugin which is no longer available, and no one visits the page, you can safely assume the internet will survive without this.
When it comes to updating content, look for things that can be expanded and refreshed to bring real benefit to your audience. This is a great way to turn old blog posts into evergreen content. For example, if you previously published a post about how to use SEMRush for legal professionals, you might want to update the resources mentioned and expand it for a new audience.
Some content will be up-to-date and require no edits. Don’t be afraid to leave content as it is if you are happy that it is converting customers. Remember to come back to the goals you set out in the beginning. Does your content still help you to achieve these goals? If not, make changes until it does.
Work with us
If you need help defining your blogging strategy for 2019, trust the Auburn team to help give you direction. We can help you to identify the high-intent keywords you need to target in your blog posts in order to generate more traffic and conversions.