Auditing and Prioritizing Your Content

Whether you are switching up your strategy or developing a new website, it is easy to get lost in the excitement and start producing content right away. What gets lost a majority of the time is making sure your content production is aligning with your overall strategy. Auditing and prioritizing your content should be the first thing you do before producing anything. 

Content Strategy

This is where it all starts. As stated before, whether you are starting a new website, pivoting strategies, or revamping your website, you need to know a few things.

• Audience – Knowing your audience is important as these will be the people coming to your website and potentially using your services or buying your products. You need to get into their head and know what they are thinking. In other words, who are you producing the content for?
• Intent – What is the intent of your content and what is the intent of the people laying eyes on your content? 
• Relevance – Is the content your creating and the keywords you’re creating the content around relevant to your strategy?

Auditing Your Content

There are a few ways to go about auditing your content once you have your strategy in place. At Firestarter, we create a keyword map. From this keyword map, you can identify a keyword to assign to each page on your website. Once you do that, you can use a tool that grades out your pages in relation to the keywords associated with that page. After following the direction of the page grader you can make sure the search engines send the right people to the right page on your website. It is important to remember that not only should your content speak to the search engines, it should also speak to your audience. Make the content look natural and professional. Another wonderful tool that should be used on every page and every post on your website is Yoast. Much like the Moz page grader, Yoast grades out your page or post and gives you direction on how it can speak to your audience and search engines better. 

The Most Important Content for SEO

Not all content is created equal in the SEO world. To make sure you are getting the most ROI out of your content, these types have shown to give you the most bang for your buck. 

• On-page Content – As we discussed above, your on-page content needs to speak to the search engines properly, or you will get the wrong people to the wrong page, or noone at all.
• Digital Assets – These types of content not only are visually appealing, but they also can be shared on social media or through a push campaign. Use digital assets to get your potential customers into the funnel.
• Content Clusters – Once you have identified your number one keyword, produce blogs around that keyword and interlink it to that page on your site. Not only will your potential customers get more information, but you are showing the search engines that you have supplemental content around a certain keyword. 
• Long-Form Content – If you’re a writer or enjoy what you’re writing about, these types of content can bring you some equity on your website. Learn more about long-form content.

Taking all of these steps into consideration can get you on the right track when it comes to auditing and prioritizing your content. Always remember that content is king and fundamental to how your business is perceived and how you are found online.