MY CONTENT SUCKS! WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE IT BETTER?

Last week I blogged about how you can build relationships with your with prospects and clients automatically, by utilising some clever email marketing tools and I put it out there that you might want to consider doing a CONTENT AUDIT as part of that process. 

Well good news, this week I am going to outline for you exactly how you can conduct that content audit as well as providing you with a template to help make this job a little easier. 

SO WHY DO A CONTENT AUDIT?

An audit can help you collect the information you need to:

• Review how people currently interact with your website
• Your are upgrading your site look and feel
• You need to assess the quality of your content
• You are revisiting or developing a CONTENT STRATEGY and need to understand how your current content fits into that strategy (as it may not!) 

HOW TO DO AN AUDIT 

1. DECIDE ON YOUR GOALS BEFORE YOU START

Depending on how old your site is and how large your site is, the process you are about to embark on will take time - and to be perfectly honest will be a little on the dull side! So you need to be clear about what you are hoping to achieve from the exercise.

Think about

• Who am I talking to?
• What are their pain points?
• What are their questions?
• Am I answering their questions?
• Am I providing solutions to their problems?  

Talk with a few people in your team so that you are clear before you start what you want to achieve by review and looking at the flow of your content as you do this audit. You will no doubt get a few surprises from your team in how they feel your site should work and behave vs how content built up over time may not be delivering on those assumed business goals.

This first step may take some serious thinking time  

2. GET A PAGE LIST

This is where the first bit of tedium can come into play!

You need to get a full list of ALL pages at your website and to do this properly, you should also include the following information if you have this

- URL. Page Title, Page Description, who updates the page regularly, create date, last update date

To help you with this process, I have attached an excel spreadsheet that will form the foundation of where you can store all of this information. It has columns that you can move around to suit your business as well as prompts to track what you are hoping to achieve.  Feel free to share this around.  

Download our free Content Audit template here 

3. COMPLETE THE AUDIT

This part of the audit ( the real nuts and bolts) is best done with a few people if your site is very big. 

Whilst you do need to get a consistent approach, this part of the process will take quite a bit of time to do well and you need to have the same thinking across how the auditting of each section and each page of your site. Take your time to review each page and all its components as per the spreadsheet so that you can accurately assess whether the content on each page is contributing to meeting your business goals or not. 

4. ACT ON YOUR DECISIONS

Be honest and ruthless. 

If the page does not fit into your strategy - GET RID OF IT! Nothing like a good de-cluttering.

If it needs to be tweaked, then note what needs to be done and by whom in the spreadsheet and move onto the next page.  

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? DIVE IN NOW!

If you find the thought of a content audit too overwhelming or time consuming, then we are here to help. 

Why not contact one of our digital specialists so that we can do the hard work for you and help turn that sucky content into content that sings?