25,602 Points of feedback - How we performed KlientBoost's content audit.

At the end of October, I announced over Twitter and LinkedIn that my team would be offering 60% off content audits for a small group of 10 people.

As part of the offer, we were going to look at:

?? Competitive keyword opportunities

?? Gaps in your own keyword strategy

?? Minor website fixes with big potential

?? Content suggestions on how to win these opportunities

?? Key areas for improvement on top-performing pages

?? The best demos, keywords, geos, creative, and time of day to find your ideal customers through paid ads.

The response was immediate, but one particularly exciting case was Johnathan Dane, Founder of Klientboost.

Today, KlientBoost employs 90 people, has a monthly MRR of over $1 million, and works with clients such as Airbnb, Upwork, SAP, NPR, and many more (in fact, they have the most published case studies of any agency on the internet and over 200 five-star reviews on G2, so you know they’re legit).

Compound that with the agency only being founded in 2015, and you can get a sense of just how much these guys hustle.

KlientBoost is not your average agency.

But when Johnathan and I first crossed paths in 2016, KlientBoost was a one-person operation. I was still the only full-time marketing hire at Shopify Plus, and we both had something to prove.

He proposed something I’d never heard of - a “gifographic” - about Google’s wildly misunderstood Product Listing Ads for the Shopify Plus blog.

The idea was so unique, I couldn’t pass it up.

To this day you still don’t see content like this, so you can imagine how excited I was to tackle this audit now that KlientBoost is all grown up.

1,400 points of detailed feedback on transactional pages

- Lead by Tommy Walker, formerly marketing at Shopify Plus and Global Editor-in-Chief at Quickbooks

KlientBoost, one month away from the launch of their new website, wanted to keep what was working while finding opportunities for improvement for their updated site.

Our goal was to work within their desired timeline to provide insights pre and post-launch. 

To kick off the audit, we started by digging into Google Analytics to find KlientBoost’s top two transactional pages.

We then used Wynter.io to assemble a panel of 20 B2B professionals per page to provide granular feedback on each of the seven key areas of the page.

Those questions included: 

Additionally, each panelist answered four additional questions leaving their final impressions of each page. All told, we received 1,400 points of feedback.

We used a combination of personal observations, heuristics, and user feedback to evaluate the following:

Tone: What is the overall feel of the pages?

Positioning: How are you presenting against competitors?

Clarity: How well are you communicating your offer?

Persuasiveness: Does that offer drive people to want to take action?

All told, this included 6,700+ words of detailed feedback, 42 screenshots, and 35 recommendations on how to improve in each of the four areas listed above.  

200 articles + lead gen pages | The blog and content audit

I then personally read every word of the top 10 and bottom 10 most trafficked articles within each of their top 10 categories.

The KlientBoost blog is a meaty publication filled with hard-won insight infused with humor that makes complex subject matter incredibly approachable.

Take for instance this 13,163-word behemoth where they share 163 real-life Facebook ad examples along with a dissection of each.

“Ben and Jerry’s is well known for taking a strong stance on social issues across the board.

Their use of illustration here makes the topics more approachable and easy to understand, but they’re still doing a great job in informing audience members and taking action.”

After getting intimately familiar with their blog and its evolution over time, I provided my feedback.

This included specific examples of:

• Strengths
• Recommendations for improving word economy 
• Media formats to explore to make their robust content more easily consumable
• Ways to capture more leads
• Data-backed opportunities

After this was complete, we provided a prioritized list of items to start, stop, and continue to provide direction for the coming year.

24,088 keyword opportunities | The 106 point SEO Audit 

- Led by Jeff Davis, former Head of SEO at QuickBooks, and current Co-Founder of Invown.

Given this audit alone included its own 20-tab spreadsheet and a separate 42-page report, I’ll give you the highlights.

The SEO audit included:

Current benchmarks

We took a snapshot of the current site to provide a health check on current standings for strengths and opportunities.

Tools 

We looked at their current stack to see if there were opportunities to use new or different tools to better monitor all of the different areas of SEO.

Competitive analysis

We compared the KlientBoost website against their top 3 competitors and identified 24,000+ new keyword opportunities.

Site architecture

We reviewed the layout structure of the KlientBoost site and the internal linking profile to identify broken links, duplicate content, and to ensure the site’s most important pages had links pointing to them. We laid out a new site structure to improve their authority on broader topics.

Technical

We reviewed the site speed, security, and other off-page elements that affect the site’s performance in search.

Image optimization

We analyzed how images are being used, their format, and their impact on site speed.

Mobile

We reviewed KlientBoost’s mobile presence, including navigation, site speed, and overall friendliness.

On-page elements

We reviewed the page structure, looking for the proper hierarchy of headers, titles, and meta descriptions, as well as the full page optimization for target keywords.

Keyword analysis 

We reviewed their current ranks for top keyphrases and phrases they were looking to target.

User experience 

We performed a qualitative review of their top pages and used Google’s Customer User Experience report to provide further on-page performance metrics.

Backlinks

We analyzed the historical growth of their backlink profile and the most valuable inbound links.

On-page analysis

We discovered what it takes to get to the top positions for targeted keywords (incorporating Google Natural Language Processing) and recommended new content to rank.

In total, we identified 24,000+ keyword opportunities and 180+ broken backlinks from external sites and drew the top 21 SEO-optimized pages from a list of 75 to launch the newest site redesign with confidence. 

All of the recommendations were prioritized by effort/impact and backed up with transparent data and the latest SEO tactics along with relevant education for all topics. 

Email, Social, and Google Analytics | The data audit

- Lead by Josh Bennett, Data scientist at QuickBooks

Finally, we reviewed KlientBoost’s Google Ads data governance, email and social performance, and Google Analytics.

Instead of providing templated recommendations, we did an exploratory data analysis, looking at all of KlientBoost’s channels to discover strengths and opportunities unique to KlientBoost.

We then analyzed the data layer of all of KlientBoost’s major channels to find new opportunities for the way KlientBoost tracks and measures their ad performance and offered suggestions to incorporate those learnings into ongoing campaigns.

We also analyzed the email data to provide suggestions to increase open and click-through rates, analyzed social media data to improve engagement and found the most effective content types on the website. 

Through the use of machine learning we found:

• Success indicators for email campaigns, including subject line length, tone, presentation, and targeting
• Which kinds of content drive subscriptions and user activity, as well as those that don’t
• Optimal email send frequency and social post frequency, including optimal weekdays 
• The types of content that have the highest performance and click-through rates in search
• The types of social content that drive the most engagement
• Data-driven strategies and tactics to increase user engagement and traffic
• Opportunities for efficiency and cost savings through implementation of organizational strategies and processes
• Opportunities for implementing best practices and longevity planning

The result was a cost-efficient and actionable list of items that could be used to improve measurement, as well as a framework for rapid analysis that can be used in the coming year and into the future. 

How did KlientBoost feel about the content audit?

I’ll just leave it at that.

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If you have an MRR of $1MM or above, send me an email at [email protected] and we can discuss our methodology and how we can perform a content audit for your team.