managing-content-marketing-smart-insights

As mentioned earlier in this guide you can use the Content Drilldown feature of Google Analytics to group content in a similar way and view its effectiveness.

Subcategorisation and review of content types

Once you’ve got a ‘top level’ category listing, you can start ‘subcategorising’ – which is basically recording the topic covered of each piece of content. You could possibly do this by URL strings, but I would take a good look at the content at this stage, because content could have been miscategorised in the past – particularly on older sites that don’t have a history of content governance.

You should give subcategories your best own definition, rather than always using what’s already there, since you’re going to be making a recommendation on how these should be reshaped later anyway.

While doing this checking, it is worth also noting the ‘Content Type’ or format. For instance, is the content a product page, article or gallery?

A great explanation of different potential content types can be seen in Smart Insight’s Content Marketing Matrix.

By now, you should have a table with the following columns filled out:

The URL, Page Title and Meta Description would all have been covered by the Xenu crawl, so you wouldn’t need to fill them out. The rest should be filled out at this stage, but it is just a rough guide. You don’t need to check every URL meticulously. It’s much better to make some assumptions on the content through URLs, Page Titles or Meta Descriptions – you can always review in the second stage of the audit.

Of course, at this stage you may also notice content duplication – which is particularly important to highlight for SEO – so you should create another column and add the ID number of the duplicate if something matches the content you are assessing.

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Using the Excel COUNTIF() function

Once you’ve done this, you should be able to make a few graphs to explain counts in Topic Covered and Content Type. Make one count table per category by using the COUNTIF function on the Topic Covered and Content Type columns. Once you have this you can make another graph, indicating which subcategories have the most content:

The Smart Insights guide to content marketing gives more detail on evaluating the value of content. In particular we recommend setting up Goal tracking to assess Page Value.

rr Volume – number of page views of these pages

rr Quality – quality content has better engagement7 measured through lower bounce rates and longer duration

rr Value – does engagement turn to sales – it’s important that your site has goals or Ecommerce tracking setup8 to deliver this. Individual or averages of Page Value can then be reviewed.

rr Cost – the cost of developing content should also be reviewed to check the return on investment.

Best Practice Tip 4 Use Page Value to assess the value of content effectiveness

This measure is assigned to pages automatically by Google Analytics based on whether content influences sale since the page was visited during a customer journey that generated a lead or sale.

7  Smart Insights: How is engagement measured?

8  Smart Insights: Guide to Google Analytics

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Here is an example of a typical blog post that has only a limited initial impact and hasn’t generated any Page Value. So you should use the Top Content report in Google Analytics to identify pages which generate the most Page Value.

You can also setup up custom reports to show landing page value as shown in this post by Himanshu Sharma9

You can see how this custom report shows the value generated by different referrers in the rows against pages in the columns. This could be reversed to focus more on the content.

Phase Three: Qualitative Audit

Q. Review quality of content and select priorities for the future?

Now you have a feel for how much content sits in which sections, as well as the topics covered, you can begin to look at quality and engagement.

Quality Indicator Columns

First of all, it’s worth bringing some quality indicator columns into your sheets. These are: þþ A pageview report from your analytics package for the entire site.

þþ An inbound links / shares / Page Authority sheet – the most regular source I’d use for this is Opensiteexplorer.org (an SeoMoz Tool that requires a $99 a month

9  Smart Insights: Effective content marketing dashboard

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subscription).

You’ll have quite a few sheets of data here, but you really need them all in the same tables. Add the following columns to your tables:

You can also add social shares if you have that data – this is possible to find from Social Crawlytics.

You’ll need to use a VLOOKUP Excel function to import the data. Here are two useful resources if you want to learn how to do that:

rr VLOOKUP in Tech on the Net

rr VLOOKUP in Distilled’s Excel for SEO Guide

With these extra columns, you can make quantitated judgements on what’s most important, and what you should focus on reformatting or marking for deletion. However, now you have to look through the content with a rather finer tooth comb.

Note: You could take this further by scraping using XPATH – including bringing in author names, date published or other data.

Content Notes

Here you need to add three further columns:

þþ Action – deems the action for the content. You should have a set list of options: Keep, Reformat, Update, Delete.

þþ Notes – you may see inconsistencies such as no images or poor formatting which need to be picked up on. For instance, the headline could be weak (and bad for SEO) or there could be style errors.

þþ Keywords – It’s worth assigning particular relevant keyword analysis to specific rows if you have done one already (see Keyword Analysis in Audience Research). It means when you come to restructuring or editing the content, all the information will be in one sheet.

Note: You may also want to make notes on pages (or create a column) that could be marked for Schema.org implementation (for SEO). This isn’t necessary unless your content is relevant to one of the available Schemas.

From here, you should hide all columns apart from the below, else you’ll have a rather distracting and hard to navigate worksheet:

Now you’re auditing the content for quality. I would normally start with content that has either very low page views or links. This could be due to a problem in the Information Architecture,

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but it’s more likely that users simply aren’t engaging with that content. If something is viewed very little, but is easy to find, it might be time to mark it for deletion. Sometimes you can do this en-masse.

Since you’ve got rid of the deadweight, you should now start looking through each URL to assess content quality, and take notes. It’s crucial here that you match your checks to set criteria – Abhava Leibtag’s Creating Valuable Content Checklist is excellent.

Note: You might notice there are consistent patterns running through content types or even all content. For instance, it’s possible that your site has no HTML styling! If this happens, you may as well forget about marking content for ‘Reformat’, since this will be required for everything.

Note: Websites are often very big – and many are above 5,000 pages. It’s possible for one person to run through all of the above on a site of 5,000 pages, but it would likely take them five uninterrupted days, and by the end of it they might be getting a little jaded. Try and break it up by giving different audit sections to different team members.

Best Practice Tip 5 Share the content auditing workload

An auditor should be able to get through around 1,000 pages per day – so a 5,000 page site may take a whole week! If this is too long, try focusing on the most highly engaged content by pageviews and most linked to – since these will almost certainly be the most important. But still, through this process you will gain an in depth understanding of how the current content is structured, a vital step in making required improvements to the Information Architecture.

Content Auditing Recap

Doing an audit on this scale might seem gruelling, but you’ll need to assess a good sample of any site for content subject matter, quality and engagement if you’re looking to improve both SEO and Content Marketing. Content auditing is split into two major phases, both of which you should run through if you are looking to use old content in a new content marketing strategy:

rr Quantitative Audit: The process of finding out what sits where.

rr Qualitative Audit: The process of what to ‘why?’ and checking for standards.

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Technique 4

Defining an Information Architecture

Up to this point, you would have built a solid understanding of your audience, established guidelines of how you want to communicate with them, audited your existing content and assessed it for re-use in a new strategy. Now you need to build the frameworks of your strategy, by creating your ‘content marketing hub’ and ensuring this has a good Information Architecture.

What is a Content Marketing Hub?

rr Q. Effective content hub created?

A content marketing hub is the core of your content strategy. It is the place where all of your other platforms and communication mediums converge. With this in mind, it is most likely going to be your website, because this will allow for the greatest amount of customisation and the capturing of your brand essence.

There is an entire Step dedicated to communications strategy needed to creating a content hub in Smart Insight’s Content Marketing Strategy: Seven Steps to Success Guide

In simple terms, your website becomes the hub of your activity: the place from which you publish and then syndicate your core content, and grow an audience that subscribes. You may have seen the Smart Insights Content marketing hub infographic which shows the strategic picture. This diagram shows some of the tools involved.

Most often, a content marketing hub will take form of a website or blog, but it’s important to know how to properly integrate all of the platforms for use in your content strategy.

Avoiding blog launches that fail

Let’s say that you’ve neatly redesigned your website, so it’s a much better match to your defined brand essence and message architecture. One month after relaunch the Marketing

Director demands a company blog as soon as possible.

In this scenario, the likelihood is that a Wordpress blog would be bolted onto the far right of the navigation, simply with the title ‘Blog’. However, before you fall into this trap, ask yourself

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the following questions:

þþ Why users would click there?

þþ If they did get there, does the blog have a design consistent with the rest of the site? þþ Will the content link back to the main site and regularly promote the product offering?

The real question to ask is whether you need really need a blog. Many brands who have successfully integrated content marketing into their website don’t have a ‘Blog’ at all – it’s certainly not a necessity. They will have content feeds, but not necessarily a blog.

One of the main problems of having a ‘blog’ is that by its very definition it’s very vague. It is a medium in itself, and as such it’s like naming one of your sections ‘Newspaper’ or ‘Book’. Thus you should aim to give your content feeds a name – something that sums up what is behind the navigation link without being indecipherable to users.

Integrating Subscription Features

rr Q. Options to encourage subscription to social channels integrated?

Beyond a content feed or blog, there are plenty of other platforms that can be integrated into a hub to enhance subscription and syndication. Consider the below:

þþ Facebook Plugins – Facebook usually suits products with mass market appeal, but it can be a very effective platform for getting audiences ‘stuck’ to your brand. You can enhance this stickiness through using one of its many Social Plugins. For instance, you may want to put the Like Button by every post title, a Follow Button next to author names and a use a Comments plugin to power user commenting. You could also place a Like Box within navigation so that your audience can like your Facebook page and subscribe to your updates.

þþ Twitter – Twitter offers rather less than Facebook, but it does have a number of buttons and embeds to enable your content to be easily shared, or you to be easily followed on the social network.

þþ Email Sign Up – If you have regular newsletters or promotional email, then getting your audience to convert should be a priority. You could have quick sign up boxes in modal windows or navigation throughout the site, and a longer signup page to collect more details (this could be near the checkout, where users are more likely to give away data). Always make sure you state the benefits of sign up, and explain what the user can expect from it.

þþ RSS – Stand for ‘Real Simple Syndication’ and is simply an XML feed of your content. Many people read content via RSS readers, and they can subscribe to yours if you have an RSS feed. Most blogging software has RSS built in, but if it doesn’t talk to your development team about.

Best Practice Tip 6 Promote options to engage prominently on your hub.

Use an area with focus on ongoing engagement combining email and social channels. This needs to be above the fold.

SearchEngineLand has an efficient widget featured above the fold to encourage this:

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Navigation and Categorisation

rr Q. Navigation used to clearly show categorisation?

When embarking on a content marketing strategy, it’s important that your content is properly defined into grouped categories; vagueness often leads to confusion, and it can be difficult to fix if there is no clear plan or structure to follow.

Most of your website static content, such as product, service or about us pages, will have their own defined categories. For instance, an E-commerce fashion website such as Topshop has the following:

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Amongst this, there is no obvious content feed, although ‘We Love’ on closer inspection is an e-zine of exclusive content and editorially chosen products. Within certain features, products are neatly presented and you can click through to purchase.

Topshop is a good example of how content can complement a product offering. E-commerce websites can be very large, so being able to categorise groups of items together, then redesigning the presentation of these groups so they are more aesthetically pleasing can be very useful. When you’re aiming to create a content feed, consider these two questions:

rr Will the content match product categories and promote products? rr Does the main site promote the content feed and vice versa?

If the answer to the first question is no, then you should rethink your content feed so it does link back to your main categories. It doesn’t have to be promoting products all the time, but content should, by in large, be related to sales.

The Debenham’s blog is a good example of product promotion via the content. It also shows an alternative approach to encouraging participation or subscription via social networks and unlike some blogs is clearly integrated with the main site.

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The second question depends on how the content feed is surfaced within the Information Architecture of the main site and vice versa. If it is a tiny link in the footer, users are going to struggle to find it. Meanwhile, many website blogs choose to abandon standard website navigation, most likely in an effort for differentiation. Most often, this is a mistake, since a content feed is nearly always part of a conversion process, it would make more sense to contain elements which make it easier to make a sale!

For all of its good work in the content itself, Debenhams has this mismatch between main site and content feed. On the main site, you can only reach the blog through a footer link. Meanwhile, on the blog, there is only one link in the header to get back to the main site.

This appears to be a classic ‘bolt on’ approach of adding a Wordpress blog to an e-commerce website – there is little integration between the two platforms, meaning that cross promotion synergy is lost.

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Categorisation & Tagging

rr Q. Correct method of tagging and categorisation created?

Categories and tagging are the nuts and bolts for organising your content, and ensuring users can find it easily. This functionality is built into common blogging software like

Wordpress, and can allow you to place automated product feeds into content, or vice versa. The key thing is you work out what your categories actually are and what you want them to do.

In simple terms, you could match your content feed categories to the categories you have on your main website.

Debenhams (and indeed many other blogs in fashion e-commerce) often try to replicate lifestyle publishers in their blog categorisation. On the surface, the below content categorisation appears okay:

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But these categories are extremely broad. ‘Lifestyle’ contains all content which isn’t Fashion, which isn’t its true definition. On first thoughts, ‘News’ could mean a broad range of up to date content, but on closer inspection it is company news. Meanwhile ‘Advice’ could fit into all of the other categories, but it is not clear what kind of advice this is. Get the Look: Joey Essex is clearly Advice, but it doesn’t appear in the category.

In the book Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, Donna Spencer uses wine as a vertical to explain the variety of classification schemes:10

rr Topic: Wine varieties are organised according to topic scheme. The wine topic scheme can be thought of as a small hierarchy – at the top level are red and white wines and within each are different grape varieties.

rr Chronology: Vintage and drinking period represent chronological schemes – a point in time or a range of times.

rr Geography: Region is a geographical scheme, representing a defined location where the wine is made.

Of course, most content is best fitted into a ‘topic’ scheme. But within that, we should aim for top level categories that are the same level as each other. While Debenhams gives the impression of a flat categorised navigation, it is confusing for the following reasons:

þþ Lifestyle is a broad category, and would fit fashion and weddings into it.

þþ Designers is really a subcategory of fashion.

þþ News and advice aren’t topic categories – they are article types.

Debenhams Categorisation Diagram

10  p.24. Spencer, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories

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