How to Optimize Your Marketing Funnel From the Top Down

I’ve always been a data nerd at heart. Words like “audit” and “A/B testing” don’t scare me. Still, when I set about refreshing more than 10 years’ worth of organic keyword rankings and branded content to bring The Content Strategist up to date with our current web optimization and search standards, I knew I had my work cut out for me.

We started publishing original content in 2011—back when Facebook fan pages and Klout scores were the marketing trends of the moment. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. Our brand, product, and company have evolved along with our ideal customer. Marketers' needs, budgets, and priorities have shifted. And our market landscape is more competitive than ever. Just to name a few things. Just to name a few things.

No matter how much budget we poured into paid campaigns, we were seeing diminishing returns across our website. I had an insight that our marketing messaging and tactics were misaligned with our audience's needs, pain points, and media preferences. Working alongside our growth marketing team, we conducted a series of experiments to test this hypothesis. The results confirmed my suspicions; our marketing activities were going in the wrong direction (away from our ICP)!

After doing a full-funnel conversion analysis, I identified opportunities across our marketing lifecycle journey to optimize performance. While we were tempted to focus on resolving our issues at the bottom of the funnel first, as a brand built on the success of content marketing, realigning the top of our marketing funnel with our audience and the market was a priority we could no longer ignore.

To do that would require strengthening our organic search performance, which meant that we needed a data-backed strategy and action plan for revitalizing a decade's worth of organic content as relevant as possible in 2024 and beyond.

While the process was more complicated than I anticipated, the journey was incredibly educational and, dare I say, even a little fun. It revealed valuable insights about content longevity, SEO, and how our audience has evolved.

Here’s what the exercise taught me—and what I think other content marketers can learn from my experience.

How to refresh content: Our process

When we set about auditing The Content Strategist, we quickly realized we had a larger, more complex problem on our hands—one that wouldn’t be fixed with a quick SEO scan of our blog content. The more we dug in, the more we found we had a fundamental issue with our top-of-funnel marketing strategy. As I put it to my team, we were trying to catch a fish with a hole in our net.

There was no easy way to fix this. Even though it would be a huge undertaking, we needed to conduct a simultaneous content and search performance audit to figure out what was broken and where.

This was a three-part process involving:

1. SEO and keyword analysis

We knew we weren’t ranking as high as we wanted to for our main areas of expertise and that we needed to retool our SEO approach. So, we started out by conducting a comprehensive keyword and competitor analysis.

First, we used Contently StoryBook—our proprietary content strategy tool—and Contently Analytics, along with third-party tools like SEMrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to determine the strength of our organic keyword distribution and rankings. We audited the keywords we were currently ranking for to determine if they still made sense for our brand and audience.

We also conducted an SEO competitor analysis against companies who offer similar solutions to Contently. This audit revealed that our competitors were outranking us in several key areas. While we had been busy being the most well-known CMP in market, our competitors had gotten scrappy, creating mass amounts of content to help them rank for a wide array of keyword variations, often with lower search volumes. We needed to take back some of that space they had acquired.

2. A comprehensive content audit

In conjunction with the SEO audit, we thoroughly assessed all our existing content. This revealed a disconnect between the type of content we’d been publishing for the past three years and the topics that are the most interesting, valuable, and searched for among our target audience.

We categorized our existing content into four main buckets:

1. Relevant topic, quality content, needs SEO
2. Relevant topic, not high-quality content (e.g., out-of-date or misaligned)
3. Quality content, misaligned topic, misaligned SEO
4. Content that no longer served any purpose

This categorization helped us understand the scope of the problem and prioritize our efforts.

3. Gap analysis and strategy development

Based on how much of our content fit into each category, how it was ranking, and the keywords we were targeting, we were able to begin pinpointing specific areas in which our top-of-funnel marketing activities had come out of alignment with our brand and target audience.

If I could put out a PSA to other marketers recapping what I learned from this process, it would be that having an integrated marketing strategy is incredibly important—every activity, whether paid, owned, or earned, needs to be coordinated and aligned. In our case, misalignment led to a compounding effect: Because our strategy was off base, our keywords were out of sync, our content was missing the mark, our rankings were falling, and our audience was finding what they needed elsewhere.

Post-audit actions to update content

To address these issues, I set to work developing a multi-pronged strategy to revitalize our content, improve its performance, and strengthen our keyword rankings.

Here’s what we did—and how other content marketers can apply these learnings to their own strategies.

1. Identify which stories to save vs. toss

The first step involved determining if a story was worthy of updating or if it needed to be removed from the blog entirely. We found that almost all of our content was salvageable in some capacity.

“Saving” content was crucial for a few reasons. In addition to the prior investment—we’d already put effort and dollars into publishing the material—keeping content live helps maintain our domain authority. If we were to remove an article from our site and redirect traffic to another page, it could take Google’s algorithm months to recognize the page no longer exists and deindex us for that keyword hit. So, we opted to update rather than remove wherever possible.

Takeaway for other content marketers: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! Most content—with the exception of niche posts like announcements for long-past events—can be rejuvenated. Evaluating each piece carefully to determine the most efficient approach can save you time, effort, and budget later on.

2. Determine which “saved” stories need to be rewritten vs. refreshed

Some stories needed a full rewrite, while others just needed a minimal refresh—updated cultural references, links, stats, SEO, etc. So, we separated our “salvageable” pile into two categories. On Contently, we created two different story brief templates and workflows for these projects. The “refresh” brief was slightly shorter and didn’t need as much review built in, so those workflows were more streamlined. Tackling these lighter refreshes first gave us a few easy wins and a sense of accomplishment.

Takeaway for other content marketers: Make decisions about whether or not you’ll update a URL slug or how you’ll change your SEO approach before re-publishing.

3. Create new, evergreen blog content to fill gaps

Early in our auditing process, we identified that we were missing some key themes in our content repository. So, for each topic gap, we planned a series of 4-6 net-new stories that would slot neatly into those gaps, complementing our existing content and providing more comprehensive guidance for our readers. We made these stories as evergreen as possible, focusing on adaptable strategies rather than fleeting trends.

Takeaway for other content marketers: Use your audit as an opportunity to identify and fill content gaps. Create new, evergreen pieces that address current trends and user needs. This approach helps ensure your blog content remains a useful resource for your audience long after publication.

Other learnings and takeaways from our blog content audit

Conducting this audit for our content marketing blog was a team effort—there’s no way I could have handled the lift alone. As soon as I recognized the depth and breadth of work involved, I took a look at our budget to allocate funds for support staff, including a managing editor to oversee the content refresh process and an SEO strategist to handle keyword research, SEO optimization, and ongoing analysis of our performance.

Working with our Creative Marketplace team, I staffed both of these roles with experienced professionals. To work efficiently with these team members, I set up some key processes from the get-go, including:

• A robust editorial calendar for tracking progress and noting insights
• Biweekly, recurring meetings
• Regular feedback loops to continuously improve our process

Working with the managing editor, I also developed a scalable pricing model so I could easily plan and budget for the number of content refreshes vs. rewrites vs. net new stories needed each month and quarter.

This flexible pricing plan will prove useful for future content, too. It enables me to adjust as needed if we identify a big opportunity to cover a new cluster of keywords. I can quickly and easily pivot my strategy and prioritize the budget toward the more immediate need.

Takeaway for other content marketers: If you’re already working with Contently, your managing editor or SEO strategist can support the bulk of the tactical day-in, day-out work behind the scenes, freeing up your time to focus on the bigger picture. If you’re not working with us, it’s a great idea to partner with experts who can help you get the most out of the content you have.

So, what’s next? To be honest, we’re still working on it! Content auditing and refreshing is never truly “done”—but now, we have a better system in place and fresh content to work with. We’re committed to maintaining this process, regularly revisiting our content to ensure it remains relevant, valuable, and optimized, and that our funnel stays healthy.

It may be a Sisyphean effort, but my inner data nerd is up for the challenge.

Marketing Maven Answers: FAQs about blog content audits

How long does the content audit process take?

The duration of a content audit can vary greatly depending on the volume of content and resources available. For Contently’s 10-year content audit, it took several months to complete all stages, from initial analysis to implementation of new strategies.

How often should a company conduct a content audit?

The frequency of content audits depends on the company’s size, content volume, and industry changes. As a general rule, conducting a comprehensive audit annually, with smaller quarterly reviews, can help keep content fresh and aligned with SEO best practices.

What specific SEO metrics are likely to improve after a content refresh?

Likely improvements include higher keyword rankings, increased organic traffic, and better engagement rates. They might also include factors like time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rates. That said, the exact metrics will depend on your company’s goals and larger blog content strategy.

This article is a summary of a story that I authored and originally published on The Content Strategist. Read the full article here.