When looking at how to improve SEO, doing a quarterly content marketing audit is essential. While this may be a new term from some people, it has been an important part of online marketing since day one. To get the most out of your website, experts recommend doing a quarterly audit of your content. If you are looking for content marketing services in Canada, the professionals at Unwired Web Solutions have the tools to make sure your content is helping your SEO.
The performance of any content website follows an 80/20 rule which means that 80% of traffic is a result of just 20% of content. This means that only a few articles are the ones pulling traffic and creating conversions. The trick is making sure your 20% is performing well and keeping up to date information.
Why You Should Do an Audit
A well-performed content marketing audit can provide deep insights into your marketing strategy in terms of the blog articles and content that are performing the best. Most people tend to write content and never go back to it once it is published. However, over time it may become outdated or completely irrelevant.
This is why it is a good exercise to keep revisiting your content quarterly to keep check on its usefulness and make sure all the information is up to date.
By performing a well-executed content audit, you will find out which pages or blog posts are your top performers. You will also find which topics your audience most engages with, and it can give you a chance to find any posts that have exceeded their expiry date. Your audit will provide insights that will enable you to increase the focus on future efforts to increase sales, provide lead generation, and give you details about your marketing progress.
Before starting your quarterly audit, it is necessary to define your objectives. A content audit is not an easy task and can strike fear into the most experienced marketers. By clarifying your business needs you can objectively look at your content and see if it covers what you want to achieve.
By defining your business goals, you will be able to select performance parameters and list the best content classified into 4 categories. These categories include:
- Engagement metrics
- User behaviour metrics
- SEO metrics
- Sales metrics
Create Content Inventory
Before deciding on how to audit your content, it is important to decide what type of content you need to review. Internal content such as blogs, news, product reviews, landing pages, or external content can all be part of your audit.
Once you have decided where you will put your focus, you can start your inventory. Collecting the URLS’s of all the webpages you want to analyse is called a link analysis. This will provide a list of all pages that need to be checked for your audit.
As you analyse each page, recording your data in a spreadsheet will provide a quick and easy way to reference each one later in time. This will also allow you to get the full picture and draw inferences about your site by looking at your metrics as a whole.
Assessing Your Content
By evaluating each piece of content, you will be able to place them in one of three categories.
- Keep: This category will contain pieces that perform well and will be kept as part of your future content marketing strategy.
- Update: This content needs to be updated to make it more efficient or relevant to future searches.
- Delete: This is content that is beyond improvement and updating it will take too much effort. This can contain content that was set up for seasonal marketing that has since lost its purpose.
While performing your content marketing audit it is necessary to keep your long-term marketing strategy in mind. By finding your successes and failures you will be able to understand what changes need to be made to reach your target audience and get better conversion rates.
In today’s fast-growing world, performing an audit regularly is necessary to stay relevant and improve your online engagement. A frequency of 3 to 4 times is recommended, though you can adjust this to suit your company. Performing a content marketing audit is no easy feat, and many people need content marketing services to help them perform the task. If you want to make sure your site is up to date and at peak performance, contact our experts at Unwired Web Solutions today. We will be happy to assist you with your audit to make sure you are getting the SEO exposure your business deserves.