In the wake of the pandemic, content production is more important than ever. With more people spending time online and tighter advertising budgets, content marketing is a must-have if you want your business to get discovered online.
But how do you know which content is truly working for your business? How do you improve pieces that are missing the mark? And how do you ensure your content marketing strategy continues working for you in the future?
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Find out how your content is performing.
Before you go in and start updating or refreshing your website content, you need to know how each piece is performing. You can either do this on your own using a marketing metrics tool like Google Analytics or enlist the help of a digital marketing team like Yellow Pages.
If you’re doing the digging yourself, hop into Google Analytics and click on Reports > Behaviour > Site Content > Content Drilldown. Once you’re in this section, you should be able to see the breakdown of traffic for different sections of your website, such as to your blog or homepage.
Once you have this, you can begin to separate your content into:
- Top-performing pieces of content: the best measure of success is to see which posts have the highest page views, visitors, or average time on page. In short, they’re helping more people discover and engage with your business online. These posts should be refreshed regularly.
- Under-performing pieces of content: this could be a blog post with a high number of page views but a low average time on site (<1 minute), or a blog post with a high time on site but fewer page views. With a bit of tweaking, you can ensure these content pieces work harder for your website (more on that below).
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How to refresh your top-performing content.
Once you’ve identified your top-performing content, it’s time to make sure it stays this way.
Google loves new content and almost always prioritises relevant, updated web pages in search results. But don’t worry — you don’t need to completely rewrite your blog post every year! If your content hasn’t been updated in a year or more, follow these simple steps to give it a refresh:
- Update any quotes and statistics that are in the blog post, so everything is as relevant and timely as possible. At the same time check your links and remove or replace any broken or outdated ones..
- Change your headings and subheadings.
- Update the post time. Simply go into your content management system (such as WordPress or Wix) and click ‘edit’ on your existing post. From there, you can adjust the publish time to a more recent date.
- Rewrite or update at least 30% of the content. This is the minimum amount needed for Google to see your content as ‘new’. You can check that you’re not duplicating copy using a plagiarism checker tool like Quetext.
How to improve under-performing pieces of content.
In addition to the points that we’ve highlighted above, here are three other things you can do to improve under-performing posts on your site:
- Fix the length. It’s not just about quality with Google — it’s also about quantity. A number of studies have shown that long-form content generally ranks higher than short-form content. Try to make your post at least 500 words or, if it’s possible, aim for 1000 words and above.
- Integrate the right keywords. This simple action can make a huge difference. Go on to a free keyword research tool like Ubersuggest or SEMRush, type in your blog topic and the tool will show you the most popular related search terms. Try to include at least 5 different related keywords in your blog.
- Add imagery. Google wants to display websites that cater to a diverse set of users and their content preferences. If your blog content only features text, try adding a few images (and even a video) to improve the diversity of content on the page.
How digital marketing from Yellow Pages helps your business grow online.
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