We help our clients grow their business and we’re big believers in well-executed content marketing. Great content, published the right way, on the right channels can bring high quality prospects to your website that you can convert into customers.

The key phrase is well-executed. Content has to resonate with the feelings of your target audience, reach prospects in their preferred online hangouts, and be optimized for SEO it’s gets discovered in the first place. That’s why we perform a content audit as part of our onboarding for new clients.

A content audit looks at the content, how it’s published, and the interaction and engagement it generates from their community and prospects. It’s an essential step in preparing to execute a marketing campaign, see why on our page on SEO Analysis for Lead Generation. In this article, we’re going to look at 5 ways a content audit can make your content marketing better.

Tools to Help

Tools like SEMRush, Fan Page Karma and others will show you your best and worst posts, keyword data, hashtag use and provide easy-to-use reports. You can also get much of the information we’ll look at from Google Analytics, and social network analytics such as Facebook Analytics and Twitter Analytics. Your social media management tool also likely has analytic data that you can use as part of your content audit.

1 - Find your Best and Worst Posts

Finding your best and worst posts allows you to see what content has performed the best for you, and which posts haven’t done well. In Google Analytics use the Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown and select the path for your blog or landing pages.

We’re firm believers in using pillar pages to boost SEO rank for your core services, but many brands don’t know about this or understand how pillar content can boost SEO.

The concept is straightforward, create content on a single web page broken into sections by topic and subtopic. Publish the page, then publish each subtopic as a separate article. Each article should link back to the pillar page. It’s essentially an ungated ebook, published online, with portions of the ebook published on your blog or other media outlets that link back to the pillar page.

This image shows content from our blog.

Tip: Remember to filter the display for the time frame you're interested in. We recommend going back a minimum of three months.

A tool like Fan Page Karma can also show information by how popular your posts are on your social channels. You can then select your most popular posts to see the content.

How to use this information:

The advice about this information is simple, create more posts like your best content, and fewer like your worse content. But the analysis and execution of that simple advice is more nuanced.

Look at everything about both types of posts. Determine the topics covered, the type of content your audience engages with, the length of content, what channels it’s published on, keywords and hashtags used, and how it was promoted. Find the similarities to determine:

The topics your audience is most interested in.

The channels and promotion that generates the best results.

Tip: Also look at conversion rate from content. Your content should bring visitors in, keep them on your site, and move them down your funnel and convert them to customers. The content that helps create the most customers is the content you should produce.

Troubleshoot your weak posts. Look at the same information and see if you can figure out why your audience isn’t engaging with this content. Maybe the topics aren’t compelling, or the type of content isn’t engaging enough, or is just too long.

TIP: Always look at the type and how it’s promoted. Some things to Consider:

Look at the length of text content? If long posts aren’t getting traction, try splitting them into shorter posts.
If your text content contains a lot of statistics, consider presenting the information as an infographic.
Look at ways to incorporate video, it gets more views and engagement.
Compare how content is promoted including the networks published to, times of day, day of the week. We found longer content does well on LinkedIn, but less well on other platforms. We also find many clients don’t do enough continuous promotion. Republishing content links or highlights from your content at different times on different days is a great way to keep your content top of mind on your social channels.

2 - Use @Mentions

Sometimes people confuse tagging post with @mentions. Most social networks prefer you to tag people you are with at events, in images and posts, and to use @mentions to talk about someone, a topic, solicit feedback, or ask for action. You can usually only tag personal profiles, but can mention personal profiles and brand or business pages and accounts.

The benefits of using @mentions is that the mentioned person gets a notification, which is an invitation to engage online. You’re also potentially putting your content in front of their fans and followers. When done correctly, it can be a savvy way to increase reach, and engagements, and build influencer relationships.

You can @mention on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and you should be including some @mentions in your posts, although many brands don’t. Use them to:

Engage experts and influencers by @mentioning them on articles and posts about topics they are interested in. This can help you build relationships with and reach their followers.
Invite customers and followers to share their experiences and stories to create conversations and user generated content.
Promote events asking attendees and restaurants to share their experiences and by @mentioning attendees when sharing images about events.
Run contests and name winners with @mentions, or require @mentions to claim prizes.

3 - Develop a Hashtag Strategy

You should be using hashtags to related the content you publish to topics, trends, an events important to your brand, industry, and audience, and to coin catchy phrases as part of a marketing campaigns. People search for hashtags find content, and when hashtags inspire people they get reused, start to trend and can help content go viral.

People tend to think of using hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, we also include them on Facebook and LinkedIn posts as those platforms track them as well.

Hashtags are about more than the chance of going viral, they should be an essential part of your brand identity. Brands on Twitter see a 50 percent increase in engagement versus brands that don’t and tweets that include hashtags are 55 percent more likely to be retweeted.

Hashtags can be used in various ways from tagging keywords related to you content, topic, or industry, to coining catchy phrases as part of a marketing campaign. Hashtags are used by various tools to find content, and can when they catch on and start to trend on platforms can help content go viral.

Some think hashtags are only for Twitter and Instagram, we also include them on FB and LI as those platforms track them as well.

Content audits often identify the following issues with hashtag use:

No use of hashtags. Astonishingly, this is still a problem.
Inconsistent use of hashtags commonly used of their topic or industry.
No use of branded hashtags for campaigns and events.
No coordinated hashtag plan across all of their content and channels.

Hashtags are an essential digital marketing component that requires research and a thoughtful strategy for use:

Identify hashtags, and hashtag variants for your industry, niche, or topic.
Find keywords that are trending and include them in relevant content to piggyback off of the trend.
Find keywords used by influencers to establish a synergy with them.
Create catchy brand-specific hashtags for campaigns, contests, events, and products.
Turn campaigns into online communities by continuing to use branded hashtags to connect, communicate, and chat with your community.

TIP: A great way to increase reach is to piggyback off hashtags created for industry events. Those hashtags get a lot of attention while the events are ongoing so including them with content relevant to the event can increase your reach!

Use tools like Keyhole or Hashtagify.me can help you find keywords for your content, show trending keywords, and track specific keywords for your brand.

Pick a tool, do your research, and select a set of hashtags for your common topics, and create brand-specific hashtags for each campaign. Use them across all your channels consistently. Use as many hashtags as you like on Instagram, but limit them to 4 or fewer on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Want help with a content audit, we can do that. Check out our Inbound Growth Plan and let us do the heaving lifting for you!

4 - Find the best time to post

Media outlets and many blogs publish best time to post articles to let you know when the posts get the most engagement on social networks, and they’re all wrong. We’ll maybe not wrong so much as not very right. Those posts are based on generic data across all topics and industries. You can only find the best time for your brand’s posts by analyzing your brand’s data.

Social content audit tools can show you when your fans and followers users are online providing better information about when you should publish content.

Use tools like FanPage Karma to view performance of competitors social channels.

Develop posting schedules for each of your channels based on when your audience engages the most!

TIP: Review and adjust your posting schedule monthly and adjust every time you have a large spike in followers and fans!

5 - Many Brands are in a Great Position to Create Pillar Pages

We’re firm believers in using pillar pages to boost SEO rank for your core services, but many brands don’t know about this or understand how pillar content can boost SEO.

The concept is straightforward, create content on a single web page broken into sections by topic and subtopic. Publish the page, then publish each subtopic as a separate article. Each article should link back to the pillar page. It’s essentially an ungated ebook, published online, with portions of the ebook published on your blog or other media outlets that link back to the pillar page.

You have to do it right. You have to do keyword research to find topic and subtopic keywords that have good search volume and then create the content. If you want to know how to do the research, see our pillar page on creating pillar pages. The hard part is often the content creation, what many brands don’t realize is they may have already created content which can be refactored into pillar pages. Ebooks you’ve created are great candidates for conversion to pillar pages.

If you don’t have ebooks, your content audit is where to look next. Take the itemized list of the content, and organize it by topic and subtopic. They do your keyword research to find related keywords that matter to your audience, and update the content using those keywords and generally refreshing it. Viola, you’ve got a pillar page!

Conclusion

Content audits help brands see what types of posts get the most traction and can improve the publication and promotion process by identifying the need for using @mentions, and hashtags consistently. An audit can tell you the best times to post on each social channel, and help you identify content that can be grouped into pillar pages. Performing a content audit provides you with valuable insights that can help you create more content your audience likes, achieve better reach, drive more traffic, and generate more leads. For more detailed information on planning your marketing campaign, see our 9-step guide to planning your content campaign: SEO Analysis for Lead Generation.