We all know the 80/20 rule — where 80% of your results come from 20% of your content. It’s kind of a disheartening rule. But, cheer up! Rules are made to be broken, and we’re going to help you break that rule (and maybe a few more) with today’s Read.
Nope, this isn’t’ a “create quality content” blog post. It’s more of a “take what you’ve got and make it a heck of a lot better” blog post. You can do that by performing a content audit. Unlike when the IRS audits you, this one is actually fun (although a little time consuming).
The first step to conducting your content audit is to get organized. Break out a spreadsheet. You’re going to want separate sheets that detail:
- Content that attracts visitors from search
- Content with declining search traffic
- Content that has search ranking potential
- Email campaigns that attract visitors
- Measuring the engagement of visitors from email campaigns
- Content that gets the most social shares
- Content that converts visitors into leads at the greatest rate
Note: Links above have all the deets on how to find those stats (we couldn’t fit all that info in this email).
Alright, so you’ve got yourself a neat little report, right? Now it’s time for action. Reports don’t do anything by themselves.
- With your “traffic champions,” you’re going to want to entice those visitors to stay on your website longer, or get them to opt-in to an email list. Link to your highest converting pages from these traffic champions.
- Your “potential champions” might just need a quick refresh, or a new title, to get people to be more interested in them.
- The “falling stars” might need a more serious overhaul. Add anything that improves quality. This could be more details, images, video, contributor quotes, or question/answers.
- Your “better mousetraps” are the pages with high conversion rates. Promote the heck out of these. Link to them from other blogs, add them to your homepage, try using them in native advertising. The list goes on and on…
