The phrase Content is king seems cliché but it hangs around because it’s pretty accurate. Content is what gets your customers interested in your brand—whether it’s through video, imagery, or words. Content is what gets your audience excited, keeps them informed, and builds brand awareness.
Your users engage with your content before ever experiencing your products or services, so it’s important that your content accurately reflects your brand. It’s not uncommon for brands to publish content and forget about it, never to revisit, revise or refresh. This can leave a negative impression on your customer if it’s sloppy, outdated, and flat out wrong.
You can avoid this whole embarrassing encounter by reviewing your content once in a while. It might be a bit daunting to review all 2,000 pages of your site content, but once you create an inventory of all messaging and assets that are out there, it’s much easier to update, modify, or retire content as needed.
Ooh, spreadsheets!
Some of you might not get as excited by that word—frankly, it might give you heartburn or a flash of rage—but a spreadsheet will be your new best friend as you go through a content audit of your site. It’s an organized way to catalog pages on your site, assets, key metrics, keywords, publish dates and revision dates… even authors of content. But you don’t have to do it alone.
Crawl before you catalog
There are SEO tools you can use to crawl your site and give you a baseline of objective information, including URL, metadescription, and publish date. This can be the foundation of your audit, but there are quite a few gaps to fill so you can take action. It’s the soft gooey stuff that is important to your users; the subjective items that make them take action. This is where you want to pay special attention when taking an inventory of your content. These are areas where you can improve.
Be brutally honest
As you’re reviewing your content, make sure to take a no-holds-barred attitude. There’s no room for sentimentality here; you need to be brutally honest when reviewing the quality of your content.
Is it accurate?
First off, you can’t be delivering content that’s not accurate, even in the days of alternative facts. If you’re in tech or marketing, algorithms and products evolve yearly, completely changing the landscape. Or, if your product or services have gone through an evolution, content that reflects an out-of-date set of features or services can be a major ding. Mark anything that needs updating and make a plan to revise.
Is it representative of your brand?
Now that you’ve got the facts, you need to make sure they reflect your overall brand message and tone. Was this written before you established your brand strategy? Was the brand going through its Ziggy Stardust phase? While timeless, you’ll want to make sure your content reflects your latest brand guidelines.
Is it interesting?
More importantly, will this content resonate with your users? There’s no accounting for taste, but your topics and content must be geared toward your target audience. Make sure you ask yourself if this is something your customer would be searching for. Will they find the information valuable? Will it help them in their endeavors? Quality content is first and foremost relevant to your customer, and provides some sort of value, whether it’s to educate them on product features or to delight them with thought leadership.
Is it good?
Now, it doesn’t need to be Pulitzer-level, but let’s be blunt: a lot of writing out there is trash, grammatically incorrect, and or just plain boring (hoping this piece doesn’t fit the description!). Good writing is key to educating users and getting them interested. If it’s shit, clean it up.
Once you’ve answered these questions, set forth a plan to revise and publish updates. If you need a major overhaul, you might want to do all content in one fell swoop so it’s consistent. If it’s a few pages here and there, prioritize the content that gets the most traffic or has the highest conversion rate. Make sure to revisit your content at least yearly to ensure that you’re staying on top of an ever-changing industry.
If you’re doing a major overhaul on your site and brand, this audit will play an important role in transforming your content strategy. Not only does it provide an inventory of all content you’ve created and is at your disposal, it will give you a baseline of performance and ideas for consolidation. Use this as your guiding light to inform architecture, content strategy, and quality to improve site performance.
If you’re looking to do a site redesign and would benefit from one on one coaching and consultation to get the most bang for your buck, drop me a line and see how I can help.