Tag: Content

How to Run a Content Audit (2022 Update)

Have you lost track of all the content you’ve created? It’s easy to do.

If you’re anything like me, you’re so focused on coming up with ideas and creating new articles that you might lose track of what you’ve already created.

But the truth is the content you’ve already created is just as valuable as anything you’re yet to create, possibly more so. Optimizing it just a little bit could result in thousands of dollars more in revenue.

That’s why you need a content audit of existing pages. In this article, I’ll cover:

  • What a content audit is
  • Why you need an audit
  • Content audit tools at your disposal
  • How to run a content audit step by step

Ready to create an inventory of your assets? Then let’s begin.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s content assets and analyzing them against a set of criteria.

It’s a way of keeping track of the content you have created, seeing which assets need improving, and identifying which topics to tackle next.

A content audit can be as brief or as detailed as you want. You can audit your entire site, just your blog, or even just a category of your blog. They can all offer value and insight. I recommend doing a comprehensive audit, though. The time you spend on your audit now will pay off later.

Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?

You should carve out the time to do a content audit to see where the gaps are and to start creating better content.

Why should you do a content audit? There are a number of reasons a content audit can help your website perform better.

A content audit offers a heap of benefits. These include:

  • Analyzing the performance of your content to help you make data-backed decisions about which pages to improve.
  • Highlighting pages on your site that aren’t optimized for SEO. Some pages may be missing metadata or have a poor heading structure, for instance.
  • Identifying SEO opportunities and content gaps that you can fill with new content.
  • Improving the quality of content on your site to upgrade the reader experience.
  • Identifying content you can repurpose.
  • Creating a complete inventory of content that makes managing your content strategy easier in the future.
  • Improving your content’s accessibility and inclusivity.

Whether or not you see value in running a content audit, there are certain points in the life of your website when running a content audit becomes essential. Consider running a content audit if:

  • Your website is a few years old and you’ve never run an audit.
  • There’s no clear strategy or you’ve inherited a content marketing strategy from another team.
  • You’re redesigning your website.
  • You think you’ve created content on every possible topic in your niche.

Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose

How you approach a content audit will depend on your goals. While you can create a content audit that achieves all of the benefits I listed above, it will be much more effective if you pick one or two goals to focus on.

For instance, if you want to use a content audit to improve your SEO, then you’ll want to focus on identifying content gaps and pages with missing metadata. That means paying particular attention to the technical SEO of each page. 

Overview of SEO issues discovered on a web page.

Given you are reading a digital marketing blog, I’m going to write the rest of this guide as if you were running an SEO-driven content audit. You can still use this guide if you’re looking to improve your reader’s experience or make your content more inclusive and accessible, but just know some of the more technical aspects may not be relevant.

Content Audit Tools

Software tools are an essential part of the content audit process. Rather than go through your website manually, noting each issue in turn, you can use the following tools to automate much of the process.

Ubersuggest

If you’re running a content audit to improve your SEO, Ubersuggest is essential. Running a site audit is easy. Just enter your URL, click “Search,” and click “Site Audit” on the left. Think of this as a quick, free overall look at how your website is doing.

You’ll also get a snapshot of which SEO issues are most prevalent on your site and how critical they are.

Ubersuggest's homepage showing various SEO metrics.

Google Analytics

Do you want to compare the performance of your pages? Then use Google Analytics to find traffic data for each page.

Homepage of Google Analytics.

Note: Be aware that Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, in favor of Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t already, you should make the switch to GA4 before completing your content audit. The faster you switch, the more historical data you’ll have and the easier it will be to reuse your content audit in the future.   

Broken Link Checkers

As you analyze your content, you’ll want to find and fix broken links. Integrity, Ahrefs, and Dead Link Checker can help you there.  

A broken link checker tool named Integrity.

Content Inventory

You could manually pull each content link associated with your website, but that could take far too long and you could risk overlooking some things. Instead, you may want to try a content inventory tool like Screaming Frog or DynoMapper.

A content inventory tool named Dynomapper.

Website Content Audit Steps

It may seem like there’s a lot of work involved with creating a content audit. But it’s easy when you break it down into manageable steps.

#1: Create a List of Your Content Assets

The first step of a website content audit is to make an inventory of your assets. Seeing all of them in one location makes it much easier to analyze content performance, highlight areas to improve, and update each asset methodically.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool is the best way to extract content assets from your site. It’s free to use if your site has less than 500 pages. But you can also use any of the other content extractors I mentioned above.

Whichever tool you use, export your data into a spreadsheet, making sure relevant data points (word count, meta description, target keyword, no. of images, etc.) are included. You may also want to add traffic data from Google Analytics to each page so you can analyze content performance alongside technical SEO metrics.

Creating a list of content assets using Microsoft Excel.

Content Audit Templates

As I explained above, you will want to build a content audit spreadsheet so you can keep all the data in one place. You can build one from scratch, download one of the following templates, or use these as a launching point and customize your spreadsheet.

Keep in mind the goals we discussed earlier. There are lots of stats or data points you could pull alongside each content. However, some data is going to be more relevant to you than others.

If you are using this audit to improve your content marketing engagement, you will want to check information about clickthroughs, social media engagement, comments, and so on.

If your goal is associated with SEO, you may want to include warnings and recommendations you gather from Ubersuggest.

#2: Create a List of Content Issues to Identify

Now you have all your content assets in one place; it’s time to analyze them. Go through each piece of content one at a time to see how it’s performing, whether it’s missing metadata or there are any obvious ways it can be improved.

Here are a few things to look for, in particular:

  • Duplicate Content: Search engines prioritize fresh content. If you have a lot of duplicate content living on different pages or posts, you’ll want to remove or rewrite those pages. 
  • Outdated Content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it too. Update it wherever possible.
  • Content Gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.  
  • Target Keyword: Does the content asset target a particular keyword and include it in the copy?
  • Metadata: Have you written metadata descriptions for all pages? This spreadsheet is going to help you see which ones need to be written and which ones are repetitive and should be updated.
  • Image Data: Does every image have a descriptive title and alt tag? This will ensure your images are SEO-optimized and accessibility-friendly.
  • Word Count: Do your pages and posts have enough words to optimize for SEO? Or are they too short? Check that word count to see if pages need to be updated or edited down.

Keep track of everything by creating a note next to each asset about why it needs improving. You can also color-code your spreadsheet based on the type of optimization required, but this can quickly become complicated if a single asset has multiple issues.

#3: Address Content Issues

You can’t do everything at once, so now it’s time to prioritize your content issues. One strategy is to work through each asset numerically, starting with those at the top of the spreadsheet. Another is to group each optimization issue together and tackle them in bulk. For instance, you could update the meta data on every page, then move on to fixing image issues and so on.

Alternatively, use Ubersuggest to prioritize content issues for you. When you run an SEO audit on Ubersuggest, you’ll receive recommendations based on an issue’s difficulty and SEO impact. 

Ranking content issues based on how difficult they are to fix and the impact of them.

Focusing on tasks with a high SEO impact and low difficulty will give you a series of quick wins. But you could also prioritize all of the easy tasks to get the ball rolling if you’re not that confident.

Content audits work best when they are tackled by several people, so don’t be afraid to ask for help and split up the work. Maybe you can take care of on-page issues while a colleague addresses the content gaps your audit has highlighted.

FAQs

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s pages and analyzing their performance.  

Why Do I Need To Do a Content Audit on My Website?

Content audits help you identify topic gaps, problems, and areas for improvement on your website. Good content helps you rank better in Google and can earn you more traffic, conversions, and revenue.

What Are Some Tools I Can Use for Content Audits?

You can use tools like Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to run a content audit.

Where Do I Start With a Content Audit?

You should start your content by compiling a list of all of your content assets. You can do this by pulling a report through tools like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the results in a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

A content audit may feel overwhelming at first glance. But don’t let that stop you.

Starting a website content audit is one of the best steps you can take to improve your content marketing strategy. Compiling all of your assets in one place makes it much easier to see what needs improving and which assets are missing. It also makes it easier to prioritize and fix issues.

Once you’ve run a content audit once, managing your assets in the future becomes a breeze. You’ll have no problem taking your content marketing efforts to the next level. 

What issues has your content audit identified?

How to Run a Content Audit (2022 Update)

Have you lost track of all the content you’ve created? It’s easy to do.

If you’re anything like me, you’re so focused on coming up with ideas and creating new articles that you might lose track of what you’ve already created.

But the truth is the content you’ve already created is just as valuable as anything you’re yet to create, possibly more so. Optimizing it just a little bit could result in thousands of dollars more in revenue.

That’s why you need a content audit of existing pages. In this article, I’ll cover:

  • What a content audit is
  • Why you need an audit
  • Content audit tools at your disposal
  • How to run a content audit step by step

Ready to create an inventory of your assets? Then let’s begin.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s content assets and analyzing them against a set of criteria.

It’s a way of keeping track of the content you have created, seeing which assets need improving, and identifying which topics to tackle next.

A content audit can be as brief or as detailed as you want. You can audit your entire site, just your blog, or even just a category of your blog. They can all offer value and insight. I recommend doing a comprehensive audit, though. The time you spend on your audit now will pay off later.

Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?

You should carve out the time to do a content audit to see where the gaps are and to start creating better content.

Why should you do a content audit? There are a number of reasons a content audit can help your website perform better.

A content audit offers a heap of benefits. These include:

  • Analyzing the performance of your content to help you make data-backed decisions about which pages to improve.
  • Highlighting pages on your site that aren’t optimized for SEO. Some pages may be missing metadata or have a poor heading structure, for instance.
  • Identifying SEO opportunities and content gaps that you can fill with new content.
  • Improving the quality of content on your site to upgrade the reader experience.
  • Identifying content you can repurpose.
  • Creating a complete inventory of content that makes managing your content strategy easier in the future.
  • Improving your content’s accessibility and inclusivity.

Whether or not you see value in running a content audit, there are certain points in the life of your website when running a content audit becomes essential. Consider running a content audit if:

  • Your website is a few years old and you’ve never run an audit.
  • There’s no clear strategy or you’ve inherited a content marketing strategy from another team.
  • You’re redesigning your website.
  • You think you’ve created content on every possible topic in your niche.

Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose

How you approach a content audit will depend on your goals. While you can create a content audit that achieves all of the benefits I listed above, it will be much more effective if you pick one or two goals to focus on.

For instance, if you want to use a content audit to improve your SEO, then you’ll want to focus on identifying content gaps and pages with missing metadata. That means paying particular attention to the technical SEO of each page. 

Given you are reading a digital marketing blog, I’m going to write the rest of this guide as if you were running an SEO-driven content audit. You can still use this guide if you’re looking to improve your reader’s experience or make your content more inclusive and accessible, but just know some of the more technical aspects may not be relevant.

Content Audit Tools

Software tools are an essential part of the content audit process. Rather than go through your website manually, noting each issue in turn, you can use the following tools to automate much of the process.

Ubersuggest

If you’re running a content audit to improve your SEO, Ubersuggest is essential. Running a site audit is easy. Just enter your URL, click “Search,” and click “Site Audit” on the left. Think of this as a quick, free overall look at how your website is doing.

You’ll also get a snapshot of which SEO issues are most prevalent on your site and how critical they are.

Google Analytics

Do you want to compare the performance of your pages? Then use Google Analytics to find traffic data for each page.

Homepage of Google Analytics.

Note: Be aware that Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, in favor of Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t already, you should make the switch to GA4 before completing your content audit. The faster you switch, the more historical data you’ll have and the easier it will be to reuse your content audit in the future.   

Broken Link Checkers

As you analyze your content, you’ll want to find and fix broken links. Integrity, Ahrefs, and Dead Link Checker can help you there.  

A broken link checker tool named Integrity.

Content Inventory

You could manually pull each content link associated with your website, but that could take far too long and you could risk overlooking some things. Instead, you may want to try a content inventory tool like Screaming Frog or DynoMapper.

A content inventory tool named Dynomapper.

Website Content Audit Steps

It may seem like there’s a lot of work involved with creating a content audit. But it’s easy when you break it down into manageable steps.

#1: Create a List of Your Content Assets

The first step of a website content audit is to make an inventory of your assets. Seeing all of them in one location makes it much easier to analyze content performance, highlight areas to improve, and update each asset methodically.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool is the best way to extract content assets from your site. It’s free to use if your site has less than 500 pages. But you can also use any of the other content extractors I mentioned above.

Whichever tool you use, export your data into a spreadsheet, making sure relevant data points (word count, meta description, target keyword, no. of images, etc.) are included. You may also want to add traffic data from Google Analytics to each page so you can analyze content performance alongside technical SEO metrics.

Creating a list of content assets using Microsoft Excel.

Content Audit Templates

As I explained above, you will want to build a content audit spreadsheet so you can keep all the data in one place. You can build one from scratch, download one of the following templates, or use these as a launching point and customize your spreadsheet.

Keep in mind the goals we discussed earlier. There are lots of stats or data points you could pull alongside each content. However, some data is going to be more relevant to you than others.

If you are using this audit to improve your content marketing engagement, you will want to check information about clickthroughs, social media engagement, comments, and so on.

If your goal is associated with SEO, you may want to include warnings and recommendations you gather from Ubersuggest.

#2: Create a List of Content Issues to Identify

Now you have all your content assets in one place; it’s time to analyze them. Go through each piece of content one at a time to see how it’s performing, whether it’s missing metadata or there are any obvious ways it can be improved.

Here are a few things to look for, in particular:

  • Duplicate Content: Search engines prioritize fresh content. If you have a lot of duplicate content living on different pages or posts, you’ll want to remove or rewrite those pages. 
  • Outdated Content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it too. Update it wherever possible.
  • Content Gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.  
  • Target Keyword: Does the content asset target a particular keyword and include it in the copy?
  • Metadata: Have you written metadata descriptions for all pages? This spreadsheet is going to help you see which ones need to be written and which ones are repetitive and should be updated.
  • Image Data: Does every image have a descriptive title and alt tag? This will ensure your images are SEO-optimized and accessibility-friendly.
  • Word Count: Do your pages and posts have enough words to optimize for SEO? Or are they too short? Check that word count to see if pages need to be updated or edited down.

Keep track of everything by creating a note next to each asset about why it needs improving. You can also color-code your spreadsheet based on the type of optimization required, but this can quickly become complicated if a single asset has multiple issues.

#3: Address Content Issues

You can’t do everything at once, so now it’s time to prioritize your content issues. One strategy is to work through each asset numerically, starting with those at the top of the spreadsheet. Another is to group each optimization issue together and tackle them in bulk. For instance, you could update the meta data on every page, then move on to fixing image issues and so on.

Alternatively, use Ubersuggest to prioritize content issues for you. When you run an SEO audit on Ubersuggest, you’ll receive recommendations based on an issue’s difficulty and SEO impact. 

Ranking content issues based on how difficult they are to fix and the impact of them.

Focusing on tasks with a high SEO impact and low difficulty will give you a series of quick wins. But you could also prioritize all of the easy tasks to get the ball rolling if you’re not that confident.

Content audits work best when they are tackled by several people, so don’t be afraid to ask for help and split up the work. Maybe you can take care of on-page issues while a colleague addresses the content gaps your audit has highlighted.

FAQs

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s pages and analyzing their performance.  

Why Do I Need To Do a Content Audit on My Website?

Content audits help you identify topic gaps, problems, and areas for improvement on your website. Good content helps you rank better in Google and can earn you more traffic, conversions, and revenue.

What Are Some Tools I Can Use for Content Audits?

You can use tools like Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to run a content audit.

Where Do I Start With a Content Audit?

You should start your content by compiling a list of all of your content assets. You can do this by pulling a report through tools like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the results in a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

A content audit may feel overwhelming at first glance. But don’t let that stop you.

Starting a website content audit is one of the best steps you can take to improve your content marketing strategy. Compiling all of your assets in one place makes it much easier to see what needs improving and which assets are missing. It also makes it easier to prioritize and fix issues.

Once you’ve run a content audit once, managing your assets in the future becomes a breeze. You’ll have no problem taking your content marketing efforts to the next level. 

What issues has your content audit identified?

The post How to Run a Content Audit (2022 Update) appeared first on #1 SEO FOR SMALL BUSINESSES.

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Content Optimization: A Step-by-Step Guide

Is your content not getting the results it deserves?

Unfortunately, in today’s ultra-competitive, crowded SERPs, creating great content isn’t enough. You need to optimize it effectively if you want it to rank and sell.

That doesn’t just mean optimizing content for Google. You also need to optimize your content for readability and for conversions.

Confused? This is the guide for you. I’ll show you a step-by-step guide for optimizing your content. We’ll cover:

  • what content optimization is
  • why you need content optimization
  • how to optimize your content for SEO
  • how to optimize your content for readability and style
  • how to optimize your content for conversions
  • common optimization mistakes

Ready? Let’s begin.

What Is Content Optimization?

Content optimization is the practice of updating and improving your content so it has the best possible chance of achieving its goals. That goal could be ranking in Google, but it could also be converting readers into customers or acquiring backlinks. In many cases, it’s a combination of several of these metrics.

Why Do You Need Content Optimization?

From an SEO standpoint, content optimization is essential if you want to rank. You might have written the best article in the world from a reader’s perspective. But if you don’t optimize content for Google, it won’t rank.

Getting your content to rank in Google has many additional benefits. These include:

  • earning backlinks
  • growing your audience
  • increasing leads
  • building trust

Optimizing your content for readability improves audience engagement and helps your brand to build trust with readers. It can also help to position your brand as an authority. It’s a lot easier to trust a brand that clearly puts time into content creation compared to one that puts out barely legible content.

Optimizing content for conversions is critical if you want to squeeze as much money out of your efforts as possible. You’ll never write the best-converting piece of copy the first time around, which is why tweaking your headings, targeting new keywords, and improving your CTA is vital. In addition, goals for conversion may change over time, and you want to make sure your content adapts with them.

How To Optimize Content For SEO

Improving your content’s rankings is the primary reason for content optimization. So let’s start by looking at how to optimize content for SEO.

Keyword Research

Optimizing content for SEO starts with keyword research. You need to make sure you’re targeting a keyword that

  1. has traffic potential
  2. you can rank for

Ubersuggest is one of the best ways to find suitable keywords. Use the Keyword Ideas tool to enter a seed keyword and get a list of relevant keywords along with their potential volume and SEO difficulty.

Keyword research from Ubersuggest for content optimization.

You’ll want to choose the keyword that best represents your content, but also has a decent amount of traffic and a realistic keyword difficulty. If your site is new, there’s little point optimizing for a term with an SEO difficulty in excess of 50. You’re fighting an uphill battle from the start.

You can also use this tool to find semantically related keywords that you should also use in your content. The more of these topics you include, the easier it will be for search engines to understand what your content is about.

Competitor Research

Once you have your keywords, it’s time to see what’s currently ranking on Google. In particular, you need to make sure your content aligns with what users are searching for. Luckily, that’s pretty easy to understand by analyzing each of the top-ranking results. Open them up and look at:

  • The page type: is it a blog post, an e-commerce page, or something else?
  • The format: is it a listicle, a how-to guide, or a review?
  • The content: Do the top pages write about the same thing? Do they all come at the topic in a similar way?

Don’t try to be unique here. If Google is prioritizing blog posts over e-commerce pages for a certain query, then you need to create a blog post. The same goes for the content’s format and angle. Understand what Google wants and then deliver it.

Don’t just create cookie-cutter content, however. By analyzing the content for each page, you can see what’s missing and find places to add your own perspective.

Integrate Keywords Into Your Content:

At the same time, you’re editing your content to align with Google’s preferred format, make sure you’re integrating your keywords into your content.

You should include keywords in the page’s:

  • title
  • meta description
  • H1 tag
  • image alt tags

You should also naturally include your main and related keywords throughout your copy. Be careful of keyword stuffing, however. Keyword stuffing is when you fill a webpage with a specific term. Not only does this provide a terrible user experience for your readers — who have to trip over the phrase every other sentence — but it will also get your site penalized by Google.

If in doubt, err on the side of caution and follow Google’s advice:

“Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”

Add Internal and External Links

Internal linking is criminally overlooked when it comes to content optimization. The more internal links you have on your site, the easier search bots can crawl it, and the more link authority will be passed between pages.

Internal linking also makes it easier for humans to navigate your site.

When optimizing a page, list all related pages on your site and find a way to link to them naturally in the copy. Then go to each of these pages and make sure there is a link back to the page you’re optimizing.

How To Optimize Content For Style and Readability

Next, let’s look at how to improve your content from a human perspective. There’s no point in having an article that ranks well if users aren’t going to spend time reading it. At the same time, the more readers engage with your content, the better your rankings will be.

Improve Your Content’s Structure

Does your content look like a stream of consciousness, or is it carefully structured and easy to scan? If it’s more the former than the latter, then you’re going to need to reassess your content’s structure.

Luckily, improving your content’s structure and increasing visual comprehension is easily done:

  • Add a table of contents at the start of the post
  • Use bullet points to break up paragraphs
  • Use headings and subheadings
  • Add a takeaway sentence at the end of section

Add Images and Other Media

Another way to improve your content’s structure is to add images and videos to your content. Make sure the images are relevant and add to the content — in other words, limit the use of stock photos.

When you add images, improve your SEO by adding keyword-rich,descriptive titles and alt tags to all of them. But again, be careful of keyword-stuffing.

Imagine I’m writing an article about choosing the right sized moving truck and I want to include the following image:

A man in a truck helping unload it.

(image source)

Here’s a bad example of a title and description for this image.

Title: truck.png

Alt text: moving truck

Neither are particularly descriptive, despite including the keyword.

Here’s another bad example:

Title: moving truck.png

Alt text: moving truck image to find the right sized moving truck

This is a classic example of keyword-stuffing. The alt text has too many keywords that it becomes unreadable.

Here’s what the title and alt text should look lke

Title: loading-moving-truck.png

Alt text: Loading a moving truck with black crates

Both the title and alt text accurately describe the image and include a relevant keyword once. Were someone to use a screen reader on this image, they’d be able to imagine what it looks like fairly easily.

Optimize for Readability

If your users are spending their valuable time reading your content, make sure it’s a great experience.

There are lots of ways to improve your writing:

  • Use a spellchecker to eliminate errors.
  • Eliminate fluff like cliches and words like “that.”
  • Use short sentences and write as you speak.
  • Vary sentence length, so your copy isn’t monotonous.
  • Write in an engaging tone.

Tools like Hemingway, Grammarly, and Writer are fantastic additions to your arsenal when it comes to improving your content’s readability.

Grammarly and Writer are writing assistants that will improve your spelling, grammar, and clarity. Think of them as spellcheckers on steroids.

So not only will they highlight spelling mistakes and suggest places to add an Oxford comma, they’ll also offer style and tone suggestions.

In the example below, for instance, Grammarly suggests you replace “very helpful” with “constructive” because it’s a stronger and more concise alternative.

Using Grammarly to improve content.

Both platforms have their own app and can be integrated into common writing tools. Writer, for instance, offers add-ons for Chrome, Microsoft Word and Figma. Grammarly can be integrated into an even wider range of tools, including Gmail, Outlook, Slack, LinkedIn, Notion, Google Docs and even Salesforce.

Hemingway can also improve your grammar, but it excels in suggesting ways to make your copy bolder, more concise, and more engaging.

For instance, it highlights hard-to-read sentences, suggests simpler phrases, and gives your content a readability score. It won’t turn you into Heminway, but it can certainly help you write with more style.

Using Hemingway to optimize content.

How To Optimize Content For Conversions

Good content converts. But here’s how to create great content that converts.

Target Commercial Keywords and Topics

Choosing the right topic is the first step to driving sales with content. Just as you did when optimizing for SEO, make sure the keyword you’re targeting has a high user intent. You can use Ubersuggest to analyze keywords, but the following sources are also a great way to find suitable topics:

  • Reddit
  • Quora
  • Alexa
  • Buzzsumo

Bonus points if your product or service is relevant to the keywords. For instance, we can use the related questions tab on Quora to find a great list of blog topics for a company that sells kitchen knives.

Find suitable keywords and topics by using forums.

“Is a good chef knife worth it?” and “what is the best type of kitchen knife?” are great high-intent information-based topics that may be easier to rank for than a more general keyword like “best kitchen kife”.

Be Persuasive

There are several persuasive strategies you can use to make your copy much more enticing. These include:

  • Add social proof to show real people love your product.
  • Write in a friendly tone to get on your reader’s good side.
  • Show your product works through case studies.

If you can combine several of these points in a single piece of content, even better. Take this blog post about e-commerce website security by BigCommerce as an example:

A quote from Jason Simmons about fraud protection.

In a section about fraud protection, they include a quote from a store owner explaining how a specific app on the BigCommerce platform helped them reduce chargebacks after losing thousands of dollars in merchandise.

Not only does it show BigCommerce apps work, it also proves they are used by real retailers.

Improve your CTA

Every piece of high-converting content features at least one call-to-action. CTAs can take many forms. You could:

  • promote a free trial
  • encourage email sign ups
  • add links to relevant products

CTAs typically come at the end of a landing page or blog post, but they doen’t have to. Buffer, for instance, include an email signup CTA in the middle of their blog post.

An example of a strong CTA by Buffer.

Note how hard it is to miss and how far down it is on the page. That’s on purpose. If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you enjoy the content and will want to be updated whenever a new post goes live. This CTA wouldn’t be half as effective if it was used at the start of the article.

What Are Common Content Optimization Mistakes?

Now that we’ve looked at the three major methods you can use to optimize your content, let’s cover the most common content optimization mistakes I see time and again.

  • Not aligning content with search intent. Don’t just optimize your content for a specific keyword, optimize for the intent behind that keyword. If it’s an informational query, like “how to groom my puppy” make sure you write a how-to guide and don’t just sell your grooming tool.
  • Failing to improve the reader experience. Many site owners spend ages improving their content’s SEO, but give no thought to the reader experience. The result is a lot of traffic but a huge bounce rate and no conversions.
  • Not adding internal links. Internal links are an easy way to optimize a number of pages at once, yet they are criminally underused.
  • Not improving the content. Content optimization isn’t just about adding keywords. You also need to make sure you cover a topic in its totality to rank well.
  • Not deleting irrelevant content. At the same time, you should delete content that’s outdated.
  • Over-optimizing content. It’s possible to go too far and stuff your content full of keywords. Avoid this at all costs. Not only will Google penalize your site, but it will also create a poor user experience.

FAQs

What is content optimization?

Content optimization is the process of improving your content so that it ranks better on Google and is more digestible to human readers.

How do I optimize my content?

There are several ways to optimize your content. You can improve your content’s SEO so that it ranks better in Google. You can improve its structure and readability so that it’s more engaging. And you can improve its sales elements like the CTA so that it converts more readers.

Why is content optimization important?

Content optimization offers a ton of benefits. It can bring better rankings, a larger audience, more backlinks and help you build trust. 

Conclusion

Optimizing your content is essential if you want it to be read and drive conversions.. A well-optimized mediocre article will always perform better than a poorly optimized but well-written article.

So make sure you optimize your content for the right keywords, use tools like Grammarly and Hemingway to improve your copy and, and think about ways you can improve your copy’s conversion rate.

Do all three, and you’ll have a killer piece of content that ranks well, engages readers, and sells.

How are you going to optimize your content?

How to Create an Effective Social Media Content Calendar

Are you striving for consistency with your social media marketing? A good social media content calendar could be the missing ingredient.

Creating a social media calendar is a simple process, but it can have some impressive results.

Here’s how to quickly set up your social media content calendar and start leveling up your performance.

What Is a Social Media Content Calendar?

A social media calendar gives you a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts.

This helps you to be more strategic with your content, maintain consistency, and delight your target audience on a regular basis.

Your social media calendar can be as simple as setting out what dates you’re going to post on, or it can be much more detailed.

Many successful social media content calendars will include high-level information to help you get more from each post:

  • Platform: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
  • Content-Type: Behind-the-scenes video, testimonial, product, etc.
  • Date: Proposed schedule date.
  • Time: Proposed schedule time.
  • Title: The title of the post.
  • Topic: What the post is about.
  • URL: The URL of any links you will use.
  • Visuals: A description of any visuals you want to use.

This information gives you an initial framework you can use to build out each post.

Be careful when you are planning, though.

There’s a clear distinction between a content calendar and a content plan. Generally, a content calendar will set out the dates and times for your posts, whereas a content plan will detail the strategies and topics you want to use for your social media marketing.

Since these ideas are closely related, they’re often referred to interchangeably—and can be incorporated into one document.

To give you a better idea of what to include, and where, take a look at this example of a content calendar:

Example of a social media content calendar from Asana

By taking a strategic approach with your planning, you may find a social media content calendar helps you save time and be more effective with your social media marketing.

Why You Need a Social Media Calendar


Over 72 percent of the U.S. population use at least one social media platform, so your social media marketing is clearly important.

The question is, how does a social media calendar fit in?

Let’s take a look at two of the most important aspects of social media marketing: understanding your target audience and being consistent.

If you don’t understand where your target audience hangs out, what content they want to see, and how they consume information, then how do you expect to reach them? It’s difficult to connect with your audience when you’re making social media posts on the fly, which is why a social media content calendar can be so valuable.

The other thing that takes you a long way in social media marketing is consistency. It might not seem like it, but this one is actually very difficult to pull off. It’s not easy to keep coming back each day (or however often you post) with top-quality content.

It’s simply impossible unless you’re planning ahead.

Whatever niche you’re in, there’s tons of competition out there, so you need time to bring your ideas to life and make sure they’re perfectly targeted to your audience.

Those aren’t the only reasons to start using a social media content planner though. They can also help you:

  • save time
  • schedule posts
  • reduce errors
  • create more cohesive campaigns
  • create a stronger brand identity
  • run timely campaigns that fit with holidays and sales promotions
  • track performance more accurately

The great thing is that anyone can start using a social media content calendar right now and use these benefits to improve their social media performance.

6 Steps to Create a Customized Social Media Content Calendar

You don’t need any fancy software to create an effective social media content plan. All you need to do is open a spreadsheet and follow these 6 steps.

Step 1: Review Your Social Media Goals

Before you create any plan, you need a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve.

We all have some kind of goal for our social media posts, but it pays to narrow in on this and make them much more implicit. When you know exactly what you’re working towards, then it’s going to be much easier to come up with the content that’s going to help you achieve it.

Before you create your social media content calendar, make sure you sit down with your team and set yourself SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

It’s also important to understand what KPIs you will use to measure your performance against these goals. For instance, are you most concerned with followers, impressions, clicks to your site, or something else?

Once you’ve got clearly defined goals, and a process for measuring your performance, then you’re ready to proceed.

Step 2: Audit Your Current Accounts

Now that you’ve got a clear picture of what success looks like, it’s time to find out how you’re currently performing.

This information is important because it’s going to serve as your baseline. Once you have this data, it’s much easier to test the changes you’re making and adjust your strategies accordingly.

You can add a sheet for all your KPIs to your social media content calendar to keep an eye on this and help make sure you’re constantly working to improve your processes.

Gather all relevant information and make sure it’s easily accessible:

  • account details and passwords
  • specific goals for each platform
  • audience demographics
  • responsibilities of each team member
  • information on your most successful posts and campaigns
  • areas for improvement, gaps in your content, poor results
  • platform-specific KPIs to measure future success

This will require a little bit of hard work, but it’s well worth it!

One of the main reasons you’re creating a social media content calendar is to make sure you’re giving your audience the content they’re looking for, and you’ve got to understand your past performance to do this.

Step 3: Choose What Social Platforms You’ll Use

If we went back a decade or so, this step would have been pretty simple. There were a handful of social platforms dominating the scene, which made this question easy to answer.

Today though, there are lots of thriving social media platforms, each with its own demographics. For instance, if you’re advertising to people aged 18-25, you’re probably going to have to use different platforms than if you’re trying to reach the over 55s age group.

Don’t get me wrong though, they’re all on social media!

58.4 percent of the global population is on social media, but how can you best reach your specific target audience?

You don’t have unlimited resources, so that might mean focusing your efforts on a handful of platforms. Bear in mind, that those platforms won’t necessarily be the biggest ones, they just have to be the ones where your target audience hangs out.

Check out the in-depth demographics in the image below and think about which platform might be the best fit for your target audience.

Social Media Content Calendar - Choose With Social Platform to Use

As you can see, these figures vary greatly, so it’s important to decide where you want to be and when.

Step 4: Outline How Often You’ll Post

One of the greatest benefits of a social media content planner is that it helps you to be more consistent, but the question still remains, how often should you post?

The answer will vary for each business.

If you’ve got a huge marketing team working on different elements like images, video, copy, personal interactions with followers, and everything else, then there’s no reason why you can’t post multiple times a day.

However, if you’re a one-man team working on every part of your business, then this probably isn’t realistic.

Ultimately, it’s about utilizing your resources to achieve a good balance between quality and quantity. If you’re putting out poor content that nobody interacts with though, it’s no use to anybody.

There’s no hard and fast answer to this question, but the key is maintaining a schedule where you can be consistent. Most algorithms (whether that’s Google, Facebook, or YouTube) value consistency.

This is something you can be in complete control of, especially with a good social media content calendar.

Step 5: Decide What Type of Content to Post

It can be helpful to break your posts down into categories to give your audience a mix of different content types.

There are two rules that are popular for this and they can help ensure you’re offering variety as well as making life a little bit easier for yourself.

The 80/20 Rule

This rule helps you strike a balance between engaging your audience and trying to sell your products.

It states that 80 percent of your posts should be designed to engage, inform, and educate, and the other 20 percent should be used to directly promote your business.

People don’t go on social media to be bombarded with promotions, so this formula helps you hit the right balance of growing sales while maintaining a positive brand image.

  • 47.6 percent of people use social media to stay in touch with friends
  • 36.3 percent of people use social media to fill their spare time
  • 35.1 percent of people use social media to read news stories
  • 31.6 percent of people use social media to discover content

You’ve got to figure out how your content can fit with these goals.

The Social Media Rule of Thirds

If you’re always posting the same type of content then it can quickly get boring. This is why many brands use the Social Media Rule of Thirds throughout their content calendars.

In the social media rule of thirds, one-third of your posts promote your own content, one-third share curated content, and one-third share personal interactions with your followers.

Step 6: Audit Your Resources

The last thing you need to do before setting up your social media content calendar is audit your resources. How big is your team, and what skills do you have available to you?

If you have a team full of social media specialists, videographers, and content creators, then your plans are going to be a lot more ambitious. However, you’ve also got to put systems in place to bring these people together.

This is where your social media content calendar becomes even more important.

When you’ve clearly set out your schedule for the next month, or even quarter, then everybody can see what they need to work on.

Your writer can work on the copy, and your videographer and graphic designer can work on the visuals, bringing everything together on time.

Social Media Content Calendar Template

The easiest way to create a social media content calendar template is using a Google sheet.

Open up a new sheet, and split your calendar into weeks.

Use the columns at the top to set out your dates, and in the rows, enter the following for each platform you intend to post on:

  • type of content
  • title
  • topic
  • links
  • visuals

This should allow you to create a basic template in just a few minutes. It should look something like this example of a social media content calendar:

Social Media Content Calendar Template

From here, you can build your social media content calendar out as much as you like, however, this should give you an excellent starting point.

If you have a budget, you could look at different project management systems like Trello or Airtable to custom-build your social media content calendar. As you start to use them, you’ll be able to spot trends, plan promotions, and much more.

Social Media Content Calendar Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of a social media calendar?

The benefits of a social media calendar are that it saves you time, helps you to be more consistent, reduces errors, and allows you to be more strategical. This should help you provide your audience with better content and increase brand engagement.

Do I have to have a social media calendar?

You don’t have to have a social media calendar but it can be incredibly helpful. It’s hard to consistently offer your audience high-quality content, and sometimes you need time to plan what you’re doing. Knowing what posts you have coming up gives you time to get your copy and visuals in place and tie them to your promotions.

What should my social media calendar include?

You can get as detailed as you want with a social media content calendar. Some basic information to include is the type of content, title, topic, links, and visuals that are needed.

How do I create a monthly social media content calendar?

The easiest way to create a social media content calendar is in a spreadsheet. It’s very simple to set up, and you can have a functioning content plan in just a few minutes.

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Conclusion: How to Create an Effective Social Media Content Calendar

Creating an effective social media content calendar shouldn’t be difficult.

With some basic Microsoft Excel skills, you can create a content calendar that clearly outlines your strategy for the weeks and months to come. Not only will this help you create better content, but it’s also going to save you time.

Whether you’re a large social media team or an individual marketer, a good social media content calendar is going to make it much easier to coordinate your efforts and ensure you consistently meet your audience’s needs.

Start doing this, and your social media marketing results are going to improve dramatically.

How often do you post to social media?