Blogging is one of the best things you can do for your website, whether you’re looking to improve SEO, bring visitors back more frequently, or increase leads and sales. If you’ve been blogging for a while, it might be time to look back over your blog posts and spruce things up. An excellent first step is a content audit.
Identify your keywords
Identify the most important keywords for your business. Click through the posts below for step-by-step instructions on how to identify the right keywords.
If you like spreadsheets, this is a great time to use one. If not, at least write down your list. Choose somewhere between 10 and 50 keywords, depending-on the size and strength of your website.
Map your keywords
For each of your important keywords, identify the page or post at your website that ranks for the keyword. The screenshot below shows how Spyfu will help with this part of the content audit by showing you the keyword with the page and its rank. You can also get this information from the Google Search Console. Don’t try to guess by typing your keywords in at Google.com, because you will see personalized results.
What if you don’t have a page that ranks for one or more of your important keywords? Then that’s a page you need.
Another type of mapping is to identify content clusters: groups of posts relating to a primary keyword. Click through the linked post below to learn how to do that. If you can see that you have several posts that work together but they don’t have a central hub of a post for the primary keyword, that’s another article you need to have written.
Make a content plan
Now that you have identified pages that you need, set up a content plan. Your goal should be to have a page that ranks for each of your important keywords. How can you accomplish this?
- Identify a post for that keyword that doesn’t currently rank well, and improve it.
- Have your blogger write a new post for that keyword.
Either way, plan to track your post and make sure that you end up with a post that Google will show to people searching for that keyword. Use your spreadsheet to track your rankings.
Make a content calendar
Your content calendar might be a literal calendar showing the posts you need to have written on the specific days you intend to publish them. The screenshot below shows Edit Flow, a WordPress plugin designed for this purpose.
It might be more of a to-do list. There are a number of tools that will provide you with forms to fill out. Monday.com lets you build customized content planners like this one:
The best tool for you depends on your workflow and your personality. If you write your own blog, you might choose something different from the person who delegates to one blogger, who might choose something different from the team that gets together for content management planning every month.
Spruce it up
As you’re identifying posts that need improvement and posts that need to be written, you can also weed out the posts that aren’t pulling their weight. This is also a good time to update the format of your blog posts, especially if you notice that you have changed your formatting over time.
There may be posts that still have good information, but which use images that are no longer on target for your brand — or maybe they just look dated now. That’s an easy fix. If you have many posts needing polishing up, add a section to your content audit records that lists those posts. You can delegate the fixes or schedule them out gradually.
This may be a solid afternoon’s work…or it may be a long-term project. You can be sure that it will pay off, however. Use your Google analytics to note on your spreadsheet the current traffic to each of the posts you list, and check back in a few months to see how they’ve improved.
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