Why Content Audits Are Worthwhile

transcript

#SMX #14C1 @iPullRank

Perfect Startsby Michael King (@iPullRank)

Content Audits

Are Worth it.Let’s find out why

People Hate Content Audits

NO ONE EVER SAYS “I WANT TO CATALOG THOUSANDS OF PAGES”

Marketers Kinda Hate Strategy

NO ONE EVER SAYS “WHAT DOES THE CONTENT AUDIT SAYS IS WORKING FIRST?”

Content Is Not King

QUOTE ME ON THAT.

The Consumer is King

THE CONSUMER IS KING.

Knowing What to Create

EVERYONE LOVES CREATING, BUT FEW PEOPLE LOVE BEING STRATEGIC

Audits are Essential

THE AUDIT TELLS YOU WHAT PERFORMS ALREADY AND WHERE THE QUICK HITS ARE

“Multichannel custom publishing.”

YOU ARE

Audits Help Find the Holes

HOLES IN YOUR USER JOURNEY LEAD TO LOST OPPORTUNITIES

Audits Help Find the Holes

LEAKS IN LINK EQUITY THAT SUPPORTS ORGANIC SEARCH RANKINGS

Audits Show the Money

AUDITING CONTENT HELPS WITH BUSINESS CASES

Audits Make for Perfect Starts

CONTENT AUDITS HELP YOU ANSWER THESE THREE QUESTIONS

“What is already performing?

What can perform better?

What is missing?”

Inputs for

Content AuditsWhat you should have before you get started.

Business Objectives

YOU WANT TO BE CLEAR ON THE GOALS OF THE MARKETING EFFORT

Personas

MARKET SEGMENTS ARE A KEY INGREDIENT IN AN ACTIONABLE CONTENT AUDITS

Journey Maps

WHAT STAGES DO YOUR USERS GO THROUGH

Analytics

YOUR CLICKSTREAM DATA

Style Guide?

SURE, IF YOU WANT. CHECK OUT WWW.VOICEANDTONE.COM IF YOU HAVEN’T

Quickest Way to

Build PersonasLet’s give y’all a quick and easy data-driven approach.

Get Your Mailing List

STEP ONE

Run It Through FullContact

STEP TWO – USE THE PERSON API TO APPEND DATA TO THE LIST

Here’s What That Looks Like

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A MAILING LIST WITH DATA APPENDED TO IT.

Use DemographicsPro

UPLOAD YOUR TWITTER FOLLOWERS FOR ANALYSIS

Here’s What That Yields

DEMOGRAPHICSPRO GENERATES A 20+ PAGE REPORT ON YOUR TWITTER LIST

Upload Your Mailing

List to Facebook’s

Audience Insights

The Audience Insights tool is incredibly robust

and offers a ton of insights on Facebook users

based on implicit and explicit data collected on

https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights/

Or Just Use Audience Insights

WITH 1.2 BILLION PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK, IT’S A DAMN GOOD RESEARCH PANEL

Segment Your Data

AUDIENCE INSIGHTS LETS YOU SEGMENT ON DEMOGRAPHICS & PSYCHOGRAPHICS

Acxiom’s Personicx Segments

FACEBOOK’S TOOL CONNECTS TO ACXIOM’S DATA FOR MORE CONTEXT

Acxiom’s Personicx Segments

http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/news/documents/2014/02/03/see_p_240_PersonicX_Binder.pdf

Check Against GA Data

IF YOU’VE GOT DEMOGRAPHICS & INTEREST REPORTS ENABLED, USE THEM.

Build Your Personas

PULL THE DATA TOGETHER INTO USER STORIES

User Journeys

What stages do your users go through

in their process of becoming a customer?

What’s a Journey Map?

A SERIES OF STAGES OR NEEDS THAT FOR USERS

Building User

Journeys

USER JOURNEYS ARE BUILT BY AN ITERATIVE

ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH PROCESS

Or You Can Use the CDJ

YOU CAN USE ANY JOURNEY MODEL THAT YOU’D LIKE

Content Per Need State

DIFFERENT CONTENT TYPES SERVE DIFFERENT USER NEEDS

User Journey Example

HERE’S THE OUTPUT OF THE DATA THAT WE COLLECT AND TURN INTO A JOURNEY

Find Gaps in Your Content

CONTENT IS ULTIMATELY SEGMENTED BASED ON THESE DIFFERENT NEED STATES

User desires

travel, but

doesn’t quite

know where

to go.

User is

looking to

book a

complete

itinerary

User is

planning out

everything

they need to

do for the

User is

traveling

from their

home to their

custom

itinerary trip.

User has

arrived at the

destination.

User is

enjoying

their trip.

User is

heading

User has

had an issue

during their

User wants

to share their

trip with

friends and

family.

EXPLORE BOOK PREPARE TRAVEL ARRIVE STAY DEPART PROBLEM REPORT

How do I find a

place to go?

How do I find all

the features of

the trip I want

and book it?

What do I need

to get ready for

this trip?

How to do I get

to the airport?

What if my flight

is canceled?

What do I do

once I land?

How to find the

things in my

itinerary?

How do I get

back to the

airport? Can I

take this stuff

How do I get help

when I’m on a

Where’s the best

place to share

my experience

online?

Trip.Me had no content for

any of these phases in the

user journey

Filling Gaps Assists Conversion

TAKE THE HOLES OUT OF YOUR USER JOURNEY AND GET MORE CONVERSIONS

Sample-based

vs. Full Audits

Deciding how much of

the site you need to look at

Sample vs. Population

POPULATION SAMPLE

YOU DON’T ALWAYS NEED TO LOOK AT THE ENTIRE SITE QUALITATIVELY

Calculating Sample Size

A LOT OF CONTENT STRATEGISTS USE THIS, BUT IT’S NOT THE BEST WAY TO DO IT

Total number of

pages/piecesSample size

<5,000 Review all

10,000 5,000

25,000 7,000

50,000 8,000

100,000 9,000

>1,000,000 10,000–16,000

Use A Sample Size

Calculator

Use a Sample Size Calculator And Evenly Distribute

the Number of Pages Reviewed Throughout the

Different Sections of the Site

https://www.checkmarket.com/market-research-

resources/sample-size-calculator/

Qualitative vs.

Quantitative AnalysisThe two different types of analyses that you’ll do

Quantitative Metrics

THIS IS THE EASY PART AND SELF-EXPLANATORY

QUANTITATIVE METRICS

PAGE VALUE TWEETS

CONVERSIONS LIKES

CONVERSION RATE +1s

TRAFFIC PINS

ORGANIC SEARCH TRAFFIC TIME ON SITE

SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC BOUNCE RATE

READABILITY SCORE WORD COUNT

SENTENCE COUNT READING TIME

# IMAGES # VIDEOS

MAJESTIC LINKS AHREFS LINKS

MOZSCAPE LINKS PAGESPEED

MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS TITLE

TITLE LENGTH META DESCRIPTION

META DESCRIPTIONG LENGTH URL

CONTENT ID CONTENT FORMAT

RESPONSE CODE LINKEDIN SHARES

Qualitative Metrics

THIS IS THE TIME CONSUMING PART

QUALITATIVE METRICS

SECTION CATEGORY

WHAT IS IT? REDUNDANCY

TIMELINESS VOICE AND TONE ADHERENCE

QUALITY ACTIONABILITY

LINKWORTHINESS SHAREWORTHINESS

CONVERSION NOTES SUGGESTIONS

TARGET PERSONA NEED STATE

Tools.What you can use to get the job done.

Screaming Frog

THE OTHER USE CASE FOR SEOS’ FAVORITE SPIDER TOOL - WWW.SCREAMINGFROG.CO.UK/SEO-

SPIDER/

SocialCrawlytics

A SPIDER FOR SOCIAL SHARES – WWW.SOCIALCRAWLYTICS.COM

BuzzSumo

AN INDEX FOR CONTENT BY SOCIAL SHARES – WWW.BUZZSUMO.COM

DeepCrawl

THE WEAPON’S GRADE SPIDER FOR HUGE SITES – WWW.DEEPCRAWL.COM

URLProfiler

THE PERFECT CRAWLER FOR CONTENT AUDITS – WWW.URLPROFILER.COM

SEOTools for Excel

PLUGIN FOR EXCEL THAT LETS YOU PULL QUANT METRICS – WWW.SEOTOOLSFOREXCEL.COM

SEOGadget for Excel

ANOTHER PLUGIN FOR PULLING SEO METRICS DIRECTLY IN EXCEL – http://bit.ly/1L5DVq7

Content Audit for Wordpress

FOR WORDPRESS USERS THERE IS OF COURSE A PLUGIN FOR CONTENT AUDITS

Content Audit for Wordpress

https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-audit/screenshots/

Auditor by Kapost

LEAD GEN TOOL BY THE KAPOST TEAM https://app.kapost.com/auditor/

Content Auditing

WorkflowLet’s bring it all together

Determine Size of Audit

“Am I doing a sample-based audit or a full site audit?”

Start with Screaming Frog

LET ‘ER RIP.

Hand it off to URL Profiler

IMPORT THE HTML URLS INTO URL PROFILER

Import it to Excel

YOU’LL GET A TON OF DATA. ONLY KEEP WHAT YOU NEED

Color Code Your Quant Sheet

MAKE THE DATA LITTLE LESS DAUNTING

Perform Qualitative Review

YOU SHOULD PROBABLY LOOK AT THE COMPUTER, UNLIKE THIS LADY

Build Your Insights

MAKE A SHEET WITH THE QUANT AND QUAL DATA AND FIGURE OUT THE TRENDS

Fishing for InsightsHow to turn all this data into actionable insights

Pivot Charts FTW

THE BEST INSIGHTS COME FROM CROSS-TABULATION

Page Value is the Best

THIS IS POTENTIALLY THE MOST VALUABLE METRIC TO USE

Page Value vs. Readability

IS YOUR LOWEST YIELDING PAGE HARD TO READ?

$50.00

$100.00

$150.00

$200.00

$250.00

$300.00

$350.00

$400.00

Fairly Easy Difficult Easy Standard Fairly Difficult Very Confusing

Page Value by Reading Difficulty

“Keep doing pivots until your data

tells a compelling story.” – @iPullRank

Combinations I Like

SOME CROSS-TABS TO GET YOU STARTED

COMPETITIVE AUDIT METRICS

PAGE VALUE VS. FORMAT PAGE VALUE VS SOCIAL SHARES

# IMAGES VS READABILITY SCORE WORD COUNT VS TIME ON PAGE

# VIDEOS VS TIME ON PAGE TIME ON PAGE VS READING TIME

TIME ON PAGE VS SOCIAL SHARES PAGE VALUE VS PAGE SPEED

LINKS VS QUALITY FORMAT VS LINKS

SECTION VS ACTIONABILITY RESPONSE CODE VS LINKS

REDUNDANCY VS. SECTION LINKS VS. DIRECTORY

# VIDEOS VS WORD COUNT PERSONA VS. CONVERSION RATE

Competitive

Content AuditingBecause you want to know what to steal.

Only Difference Is…

YOU GET NO TRUE QUANTITATIVE ANALYTICS ON COMPETITORS

COMPETITIVE AUDIT METRICS

TWEETS LINKEDIN SHARES

LIKES WORD COUNT

+1s READING TIME

PINS # VIDEOS

READABILITY SCORE AHREFS LINKS

SENTENCE COUNT PAGESPEED

# IMAGES TITLE

MAJESTIC LINKS META DESCRIPTION

MOZSCAPE LINKS URL

MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS CONTENT FORMAT

TITLE LENGTH CONTENT ID

META DESCRIPTION LENGTH RESPONSE CODE

SECTION CATEGORY

WHAT IS IT? REDUNDANCY

TIMELINESS VOICE AND TONE ADHERENCE

QUALITY ACTIONABILITY

LINKWORTHINESS SHAREWORTHINESS

CONVERSION NOTES SUGGESTIONS

TARGET PERSONA NEED STATE

BuzzSumo is Enough

ISOLATE YOUR COMPETITORS’ TOP PERFORMING CONTENT

ApplicationsHow you can use these insights

to get off to a perfect start.

Business Cases

USING DATA ON EXISTING CONTENT YOU CAN MAKE CASE FOR NEW CONTENT

#SMX @iPullRank

Content PlanningLEAD GEN TOOL BY THE KAPOST TEAM https://app.kapost.com/auditor/

Measurement

Planning

YOUR CONTENT WILL HELP YOU IDENTIFY HOLES

IN YOUR ABILITY TO MEASURE

Conversion Rate Optimization

READABILITY WILL HELP YOU QUICKLY IDENTIFY CONVERSION IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Your Doggie BagYour parting gifts

Content Auditing Template

GET YOU SOME MIKE KING TO GO – http://bit.ly/ipr-template

Wrapping UpA word from my sponsor

We Do This Stuff

IF YOU NEED HELP FEEL FREE TO REACH OUT

“That’s all I’ve got.”

– ME, AGAIN

#SMX @iPullRankGAJAH ANNUAL REPORT 2015 | 86

Michael King, Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant

HIT ME UP!

mike@ipullrank.comipullrank.com @iPullRank

DECK: http://bit.ly/perfect-starts TEMPLATE: http://bit.ly/ipr-template

@IPULLRANK

Michael King