Sara Fraser, Director of Business Development, presents on the topics of how your company can do a content audit, as well as how you can develop and implement a content strategy. This presentation took place at Manufacturing Marketing Innovation 2013. #MMI2013
8. Excel Setup
List pages vertically.
Horizontal columns for the information
you’ll analyze. • URL
• Type of content
• Photos
• Links (in and out)
• Video
• Meta data
• Page purpose
• Pattern
Give a brief overview of the presentation. The focus of this presentation is content audits: What they are, why you should do one, and how you execute them. This will be a broad overview, but it should give you enough to get rolling with your own if inspiration strikes.
The point of an audit is a full cataloging of every single piece of “stuff” that you have on the site. It’s also a way to find patterns in your content, to determine if your content is working/if its good, and to know what to keep, what to toss, and what to add.Define content: Everything includes every piece of content on your site.
Business goals, goals of website.360-degree view – who contributes, what docs governObjectives – what is you goal for the site? You can’t evaluate without a goal in mind.
DON’T PANICSome of it can be trashed, some needs to be updated, some needs to be reorganised to make it more findable, and some of it sparks useful ideas.Content Matrix:Filling the top of your funnel with inbound leads. This is done by building awareness of a problem and aligning this problem with business issues, while at the same time making a buyer aware of your company and how it can help resolve each of these issues.Speed up the buying process and increase the conversion rates between each stage of it. This is done by crafting targeted content that is intended to help each buyer through each stage of his or her journey, which will hopefully keep the buyer moving through the journey and ensure that they have learned the key factors about your product that resolves their issues.Arm you marketing and sales team with a tool that tells them which pieces of content should be shared with specific buyers at a given point in the journey. This will help increase the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts and create an audit trail to determine if different pieces of content are not very effective in the process.
Humble spreadsheet: easiest way. Unless you have a massive site. Still might be easiest way. Tools & templates online.Tools for SEO audits in particular like Alexa. Let’s look at what you put on a spreadsheet.
You’re not just looking at individual content piecesYou’re looking for relationships and patterns across the content.
Relevance – does your audience really need the content on this page?Currency – is the content fresh?Quality – is the page well written?Style – is it consistent with your business’s branding and tone of voice?Traffic – do users visit the page? Metadata – does the page have a relevant title tag and description? Placement – is the content happy in its current home?USE ROT TEST (redundant, outdated, trivial)
After cataloguing comes the analysis:Content you want. Content users want. Content that exists.Find the sweet spot.