You Ask, I Answer: Lightweight Content Audit Tips?

In today's episode, Fiona asks, any tips for a lightweight content audit? Ever magic up something quick based on little information or objectives? Yes, all the time. Uh especially in my old agency days, um, when a client literally had no idea what they were doing, and uh and we were not allowed to uh to go outside certain boundaries and things uh obviously much less of a problem now uh that I uh I run a company of uh my own. Uh so if we consider the purpose of a content audit, it is to understand the value of a content marketing opportunity, right?

To understand, is there there? Is there something that we can take advantage of? Is there something that we need to protect in order to be able to uh do our marketing most efficiently? So this is really is a a six-step process uh that uh can be done with you can scale the level of sophistication, right? So the framework remains the same, it's how much effort you put into each step.

You could spend five minutes on each step, you could spend half a day on each step really digging in. Um so it depends on what you want to do. So six steps. Number one, how large is the conversation space itself? And that's something that you would determine with social media tools, search tools, to find all related terms.

So uh real simple example, if I'm looking for uh uh Irish beers, right? Um I would start with uh a a search in my social media monitoring tool for like Irish beer, and then for whatever brands that you can remember, like Guinness, for example. Actually, no, is Guinness Irish? I think it is Irish. Um, I clearly don't drink a lot of Irish beer.

And that would give me a set of keywords, uh, phrases that are highly co-occurring around that that I would want to then use to assess the space. So, what are the terms that are on target for the brand, and then related terms in discussions that people have and in content out there on the web that indicate these are also terms that you'd want to rank for? This is more than just SEO because in a lot of cases you're looking for co-occurring terms that may or may not be keywords that a brand is thinking about. This is a goes back to the uh yesterday's episode on modern day SEO. If you're talking about Irish beers, you're probably talking about certain types of pubs, certain types of glasses, certain types of uh serving temperatures and things like that.

All those are related terms that are not necessarily like you know, best Irish beer in Ireland, right? That that's that's old SEO. New SEO is all topics related. Second, how large is the audience opportunity? So you take that keyword list and you feed that into the SEO tool of your choice, and you get keyword search volumes.

Discard anything, it's obviously irrelevant. Um, but that gives you a sense of like are are 10 people a month searching for this stuff, or is it 10,000 people or 10 million people searching for this this area of interest a month? And that that's sort of your your addressable market space uh for this particular type of content, which is really important. Third, how well does the website map to the audience, right? So easiest way to measure this would be search rankings, right?

So if you have your keyword list, how well does this website in question rank for these top terms, right? Is it in position one? Um, some SEO tools like uh RFs, which is the one I use, um, give you actual traffic percentages as well, which is really handy because uh just because you rank well doesn't mean anyone actually clicks on it. Um so you you can use that traffic number as an estimator. Fourth, technical stuff.

Real simple, real lightweight again. Almost every SEO tool does this. What's broken? What's not working on the website? 404 is broken links, and and this can just be raw numbers, but focus on the ranked pages, focus on the pages that are ranking for those key terms so that you're not like nobody cares if the the the uh you know when we were founded and our building has a lake and all that stuff.

Nobody cares about those pages, but the pages that you rank for in content, blog pages, uh uh anchor content, pillar content, all that stuff, those are the things that you really want to pay attention to from a technical perspective. That said, remember that in modern day SEO, once you've got the basics done, there's not much else you can do on site in terms of technical things. It's now all about volume and quality of content. Number five, this is where you do your competitive assessment. How much competition is there?

So for those keywords that you already pulled, you know where the company ranks, who are the competitors and how do they rank, right? If I'm an Irish beer startup, uh Guinness is probably the you know the the market leader, which means that I've got a long tough uh hill to climb in order to rank up there. And so you need that assessment, you need to know of that addressable market how much are you likely to get. If you're familiar with Sequoia Capital's TAMSAM SOM model, total addressable market, serviceable addressable market, service obtainable market, right? So in this example, your a total addressable market is everyone's searching for Irish beer.

Your uh service addressable market is in the area that you serve, right? So if you are based in the Netherlands, then you don't need to worry about the Irish beer searches in Ireland, right? And then finally, your obtainable market is in if you're in Amsterdam, and for some reason, you know, Guinness is the most popular beer, I don't know if it is or not. Um, what percentage of the Amsterdam search market could you conceivably rank for? So those those three divisions are very helpful.

It's a good framework from Sequoia Capital. And lastly, and this is where this is where you make your money, where are the gaps in the competitive rankings? Where are the opportunities? Where did the competitor not do a great job of locking down certain content that you can take market share for, right? With your content marketing, with social, with ads, all these things.

And you can again tet you can tell that by how well that competitor ranks for that stuff. Search signals are really good proxies for how much effort a company is putting towards any one piece of content. Because the more you shine a light on a certain piece of content, the more links it gets, the more attention it gets, the better it ranks, right? So though if you take take one step back, you can say, okay, these are the places where this company is not making a good uh investment or is not protecting, and then you and your on behalf of your client can go after that that unprotected space or or less protected space. So that that's the framework.

Now the question is again, how much do you want to throw at this? You can, for example, with a conversation space, spend half a day building a machine learning model for natural language processing to really dig in and get all the granularity. Or if you have five minutes, you press the word cloud button and you copy and paste the top words, right? It depends on how much time you have and how and how technically uh capable you are. All of these steps can go down a very deep rabbit hole.

And uh after a certain point you do hit diminishing returns, but I would say if you're not spending at least an hour or two on each of these steps, um, that's like then you're like in a super lightweight territory, right? Five minutes to an hour is super lightweight. You'll get some insights, but you'll miss stuff. An hour to two hours, you're you you're probably investing a good amount of time to really dig in. And then more than two hours, at that point, unless you're doing the actual the machine learning modeling itself, you probably are going to start hitting diminishing returns.

But that's the framework I would use for this. Um and good luck with it. It's a it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of ways to slice this onion. Uh as always, please leave your comments below.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.