If you’re in business and have an online presence or hand out any type of marketing material, you have content. If you’ve been in business for a while, it’s likely you have a LOT of it. Content can get unruly if it’s not managed and in order to position your company as a leader in your market you need to have a 360° view of where your content is, what it continues to tell your audience and whether it is doing its job.
Content is a product your company can capitalize on.
You want to find some things out about your content:
- Are there redundant items?
- How high is the value? (Does it say the right stuff, and reach the right audience?)
- How much is outdated?
- How much could become valuable again with a little improvement?
Understanding ‘why‘ you should perform a content audit makes good business sense. It’s the ‘how‘ that keeps most companies from conducting a thorough audit (do I hear a ‘sing it sister!’?). If you don’t know what your content is telling your audience, or if you don’t know what is even out there; your bottom line will be suffering.
Know the quality of your content. (How it performs for your marketing goals.) Know the quantity of your content. (The numbers of content products you have published, a catalog of content.)
A content audit can be a little intimidating. So now that you know it’s good practice, here are two great tools we’re using for clients to take the drudgery out of the whole process whether you have a ton of content or just a few pages on a website or a blog.
Your toolkit to get a grip on the most unruly content:
You’ve heard about SEO (search engine optimization) and how powerful it is. Screaming Frog SEO spider is a robust tool that doesn’t miss a thing:
From their site: “Screaming Frog will spider website links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches key onsite page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data how you see fit by exporting into Excel. You can view, analyse and filter the crawl data as it’s gathered and updated continuously in the program’s user interface.” (It’s free!)
Site map generator from XML Site Maps lets you create a site map that is Google friendly but gives you the flexibility to create an HTML site map too.
From their site: “A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the URLs and the data under each section. Previously, the sitemaps were primarily geared for the users of the website. However, Google’s XML format was designed for the search engines, allowing them to find the data faster and more efficiently.” (It’s free!)
Any questions? Feel free to comment or contact me.
Cheers,
Cindi
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