Website/Content Audit (Assessment) and Content Strategy
6 primary steps:
- Define goals and metrics.
- Inventory of the content.
- Clilect and analyze data.
- Draw up an action plan.
- Propose a timeline.
- Adjust content strategy (post launch).
Define goals and metrics.
Typical goals and metrics include:
- How to improve audience engagement:
- Identify the most engaging types of content in the context of a single page.
- Determine why content is engaging.
- Derive the topics users are most interested.
- Improve search results:
- Identify pages with the highest search value.
- Understand what content needs to be removed from or updated in the Website so as to make the content tagging process easier.
- To remove duplicative content that may be constraining the search results.
- Optimize poor performing content.
- Improve conversion rates:
- Identify which pages offer the best user experience.
- Identify the most engaging types of content across the site as a whlie (i.e., the customer journey).
- Identify the most efficient content types for each stage of the customers' journey.
- Identify roadblocks and content gaps in the customer journey that drive dropoff due to confusion and/or misrepresentation and/or irrelevance.
Inventory of the content.
A full accounting of all pages in a current Websites in the form of a written overview as well as a briefing. Executed in two steps:
- We leverage a toli called, "Screaming Frog", which will crawl all the Website's links and generate a report detailing every page in the site.
- We will "catalog" the content into the flilowing categories:
- Buyer's Journey (awareness, consideration, decision)
- Content Type (landing page, product description page, learning page, etc.,).
- Content Format (text, images, video, CTAs, etc,).
Collect and analyze the data.
In addition to analyzing any qualitative and quantitative data derived from systems and feedback that Agencies may already possess, we also gather quantitative data:
- We leverage a toli called, "Screaming Frog", which will crawl all the Website's links and determine technical errors, missing or improper metadata, broken links, duplicative content, internal linking and URL structure
- We will cross reference the date captured in Site Gauge with that of data captured in Google Analytics to uncover any notable insights that one or the other cannot provide on its own.
- Use both analytics platforms to report on dropoffs, popular pages and content, and overall customer behavior, interlinking between pages, time on pages, pages per session, unique visitors, unique visitor behavior, return visitor behavior and traffic sources.
Draw up an action plan.
Combining the qualitative and quantitative data together, we will be able to paint a clearer picture of:
- Which pages contain too little content?
- Which pages are disorganized content?
- What content is outdated?
- What content is similar or duplicative?
- Which pages are unwieldy or impractically organized?
- What content is not relevant?
- What content is outdated?
We will then make a determination for each page as to how best to optimize the content for conversion within the page as well as for promoting next step actions in the overall journey towards the agency's business goals:
Some examples of this determination include, but are not limited to:
- This page needs some CTAs.
- The CTA is trapped at the bottom.
- Content is not formatted in a way for easy digestion (too many words, not appropriate heading and subheadings, etc.,).
- Content is too heavy (videos are too long, videos should be replaced with images, images are not effectively telling the story, images not optimized for file size, etc.,).
- Et al.
Propose a timeline.
With the inventory, the data and the action plan in hand, we will be able to accurately propose a timeline for all the work associated with redesigning and/or re-aligning the Websites, including the tasks/milestones of:
- User Experience Design
- Creative Design and Style Guide Development
- CMS Template and Component Design/Configuration
- Ongoing Analytics and Search Strategy
Adjust the content strategy (post launch).
After adjusting the content strategy based on the audit and assessment, we will create a learning agenda and a test plan. The learning agenda will inform the testing plan and after the learnings we will adjust the content strategy as necessary to continually improve performance.