Conduct a content audit to understanding how your content is performing, and this will allow you to make better decisions about how to improve your website content
Having a digital presence with compelling content should be the cornerstone of your marketing plan, but your digital marketing efforts are not over once you have published your website and populated it with content. You may well have fresh content that is informative, easily understood, and prompts potential patients to convert into actual ones, but when is the time to conduct a content audit to revitalize your digital content so that you can not only retain those prospective patients who have already shown interest, but also attract new ones?
The obvious solution is to create new content. However, diving right into producing new content without first knowing what needs to be updated, moved or outright deleted, can end up making the problem even more difficult.
This is why digital marketing experts encourage performing a content audit at least once a year, depending on the amount of traffic a website gets.
The what and why of a content audit
A content audit is a systematic process to catalogue all the content on your website, including pages, articles and blog posts, forms, and links. Once you have all this data, you can then analyze it, using Google Analytics and other assessment tools. These analytic tools will provide insight as to how your content is performing, both from a snapshot and a longitudinal perspective.
If you notice a drop in traffic to your site, your first thought might be to quickly produce new content, in the hopes it will attract more attention. Although it might, odds are more likely that any increase in views will only be short lived.
Conduct a content audit to understanding how your content is performing, and this will allow you to make better decisions about how to improve your website content and your overall digital marketing campaign(s). Examining the analytics of your overall website traffic, which pages are most popular, and content topics that have garnered the most interest provides you with an objective game plan for updating your content to attract more views and increase your conversion rate.
How to conduct a content audit
The first thing to do to conduct a content audit is to catalog all of the content from your site, as noted previously. This is also an excellent time to double check that all your internal and external URL links are working properly. Once you have all this information in an Excel spreadsheet, you can now turn to Google Analytics to see how both your overall website, and its content, is performing.
Look at how your content is performing, and whether or not there is a pattern:
- Has there been an increase in traffic for content regarding environmental allergies during the spring months?
- Are you seeing less interest in content that hasn’t been updated in more than nine months?
Both of these data points should be telling you that prospective patients not only want current health care information, but that their interest is likely to change with the seasons. These are just two examples of ways in which a content audit can help inform ways in which you should consider changing your digital marketing plan.
Making the changes to convert patients
Now that you’ve done your content audit, you know what needs to be changed. The next step is to actually go through and make those changes to your digital content.
Remember, the larger goal is to improve your digital marketing plan, which in turn, serves to improve your overall conversion of prospective patients into actual ones. Doing a content audit may seem tedious and a waste of time, but the results from your follow through will make all the effort worth it in the end.
