How do you know if your website content is hitting the mark? Is it interesting and relevant to your audience? Or does it fail to inspire? Answering these questions is critical for content marketing to drive revenue.
To understand how your content is performing, you’ll need to conduct a website content analysis. From this evaluation and your content analytics, you’ll gain tremendous insights into what’s working and identify new opportunities to spur engagement.
Pro Tip: Before getting started with the content analysis, I would recommend doing a full site analysis for foundation SEO. To get this done, our friends at Adogy have a free website consultation tool that provides you with a PDF report of action steps. This will make sure your site is not the problem when analyzing content success.
What Is a Website Content Analysis?
A website content analysis, or content audit, describes the process of looking at all the content from your website—pages, posts, videos, landing pages, and more—and determining its strengths, weaknesses and current status. An effective content audit delivers key insights on where you’re performing well and where you have work to do.
Purpose and Objectives
Before you begin your analysis, you need to define your purpose and objectives. Here are some examples:
- SEO: Auditing for SEO is critical because if you aren’t optimizing keywords, your content is unlikely to be found. Not only do you need to know if each of your pages and posts have been optimized correctly, but you also need to know if you’re using the right keywords. Trends change and new challenges arise in every industry, so what was a high-volume keyword 12 months ago may not be so anymore.
- Topic analysis: No matter who your buyer is, there are many relevant topics that relate to their problems and your solutions. A website content analysis will provide you clarity on what topics you’re covering well and where there are gaps. Further, based on the performance of the content, you’ll know which topics are most meaningful to your customers.
- Audience reception: You may also analyze your website content to understand how your audience is receiving the content. Do they share it? Do they spend a considerable time on the page? Does certain content make them more likely to convert? Unlocking these metrics helps you understand if your content is impacting your audience.
- Governance: With the ever-increasing volume of content being created today, the challenge of maintaining it (a.k.a. content governance) is growing alongside it. Performing a maintenance audit on your website content as either a primary or secondary goal should definitely become part of your web content team’s regular duties. This process helps to ensure that your website content is accurate, current and still achieving the objectives that it set out to accomplish.
Performing Your Content Analysis
So, let’s get down to it and talk about how to conduct your content analysis. You may at first feel a little overwhelmed, especially if you have a massive amount of content. But it’s absolutely worth it to do this audit. It will help you determine if you’re aligned with your content strategy and give you ideas for how to fill your content calendar going forward.
Based on the types of audits above, you want to answer five main questions:
- Is my content still accurate and up-to-date?
- Is my content SEO optimized?
- Which types of content are performing the best?
- Which topics are the most popular?
- Which subjects aren’t represented enough?
If you use a content marketing software platform, your content analysis will be much easier because you will have a record of all your content and its performance in one hub. Ideally, you’d have a repository of all your content with details like format, topic, keywords, and performance.
Whether you do or don’t use a tool, you’re going to need to gather a fare amount of information about each piece of content on your website. A website content analysis often includes the following:
- Page title
- Target keyword
- Organic rank and/or SEO score (an SEO tool will be needed for this)
- Meta description
- Image alt tags
- Date published or updated
- Format
- Topic or campaign (could be tags or categories for blogs)
- Page entries and exits
- Page bounce rate
- Average time on page
- Broken links if applicable
- Social shares
- Call to action with link used
- Conversion data
- Target audience or buyer persona
- Buyer stage
You don’t have to include all this information for your analysis. It depends on your goals, but you can learn a lot from all of these data points.
Which Data Inputs Deliver Insights for Each Objective?
Now, let’s circle back to those objectives and identify which data points are valuable.
SEO Objectives
For SEO, you want to look at all data points around keywords, rankings, sharing, and engagement. You can quickly determine which pages have SEO challenges in a few ways.
- If your meta data is not within the character limit and doesn’t have the keyword, that’s a problem.
- If your alt tags on images are blank, that’s an SEO red flag.
- If your SEO tool (ex: Yoast SEO tool) isn’t giving you the “green light”, that indicates you haven’t followed best practices by either overusing or underusing the keyword.
At this time, it’s also a good idea to look back at the monthly volume of some of the top keywords you are using to see if they are still of importance.
Engagement Objectives
If you are trying to understand if your content is engaging, then you’ll want to look closely at behavioral metrics within your web analytics platform (ex: Google Analytics).
If pages have high bounce rates, low page views, and almost no social media interaction, then there’s a good chance that the topic or the angle just isn’t compelling to your audience. It could also be the format. You may find your audience doesn’t have the attention to read long-form content but loves videos and infographics.
You may also start to see trends around the topics that matter and don’t matter. When you look across all the pages or posts that are specific to one topic and see high engagement, then consider new ways to spin that topic or repurpose it into new formats.
Topic Objectives
Topic objectives overlap engagement somewhat, but what you really want to focus on with this objective is what you’re missing. This requires some analysis of external data about what’s going in your industry.
While you are probably always staying on top of things and adding new subjects to your content calendar, go ahead and do a few hours of investigating competitors and industry publications to understand what topics are of the moment. Then compare that to your topic analysis to detect opportunities.
Governance Objectives
The simplest, or “low-hanging fruit” approach with the content governance objective is to filter your analysis down to the oldest pages (look at the published date or last updated date) that still get a good amount of traffic (entrances and page views). Focus on these pages first and ensure all elements are current. Check your SEO, check all links, and make sure your CTA is sending visitors to the best possible conversion point.
Once these top pages are reviewed, you can start working your way down to lower volume pages. When you get to the point of your analysis where very old pages are getting next to no traffic, consider removing them or look for ways to repackage or repurpose the content.
Taking What You Learn and Creating an Action Plan
After you’ve gathered all the data, and analyzed it based on your objectives, create an action plan for how you’ll improve your content. This plan could include updating your content strategy, doing a meta data audit and cleanup, adding more topics to your calendar, or changing up some of the formats of planned content.
Ok, now you’re 100 percent ready to do some analyzing. Want to do it faster and reduce the manual work? Check out DivvyHQ—the award-winning content marketing software platform that helps content marketers get more done!