A DIY Guide on How to Troubleshoot Your Existing Content
Understand the Good, the Bad and the Downright Ineffective of your Content.2017-03-06 08:35:00
So you’ve worked with your web master to make sure your site runs fast, is viewable across all devices, features interlinked pages, shows the magic keywords to up click-through rates (egs Top Tips, How Tos, Blog Post, Tricks) but your traffic and your rankings still seem to be down.
What steps should you take next? There are some basic tactics that anyone can adopt. At first, it can discipline to adopt these steps on a regular basis, but given they are largely based on common sense they will quickly become part of your working day.
· Download Analytics: Google Analytics can give you an exact breakdown as to which pages are most popular and how your visitors reached your content in the first place. Frequently you will have a good feel for what makes your best content. But it’s good to move from a feeling to a proven analysis. But it can take time and patience to learn how to understand the Analytics platform fully, to learn which metrics are key for your business, set up alerts and most importantly drive resultant actions from Analytics. A really great guide with easy to follow steps can be found at http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/microsites/google-analytics-guide/
· Perform your own DIY Content Healthcheck: Time to take a good, long, critical look at your content, page by page and article by article with a committed view to bin, refresh, expand or add. Ask these 3 simple questions on each item and if you can’t answer all of them positively then move to step 3 (Refresh and recreate):-
o Did the content ever truly pull/resonate, when you first placed the article? (Did it attract Social Media engagement/or did it perform well under Analytics.)
o Is the content still relevant, up to date and of value back to your readers?
o Are you proud to have your company name against the article and does it reflect what you do as a business?
· Refresh & recreate – Going back to basics, remind yourself that refreshing content and adding new content is the most effective method to increase your Google rankings.
Google simply favours fresh pages to old ones. So here’s some short cuts that will help:-
o Update your articles with latest marketing information
o Refresh the title, subhead, first para and pop-in a new image
o Expand the subject matter with more up to date methods including creation of highly digestible content such as a quote based success slide or an infographic.
About the Author:
Sharon Munday is the owner and lead content maker for On Your Case Ltd and for the past ten years and has authored and presented extensively on all aspects of ‘Expandable Content’ across the European IT vendor circuit. She is the proud owner of one crazy Weimaraner puppy; two beautiful children and one large Australian husband.