Think of the last time you left a website.
Maybe the layout was hard on your eyes. Maybe it was littered with pop-ups.
One of the most common reasons why people leave a website—and why they don’t convert—is because it doesn’t give them what they’re looking for.
Online Marketing Institute tells us that you can lose around 50% of potential customers if they can’t find the content they need.
We know you’re pressed for time. You’re trying to keep to your unrelenting blog schedule, clacking away at email campaigns and racking your brain for original social media content.
All your efforts (probably) aren’t for nothing. Still, there’s something crucial that most content marketers are failing to do:
They aren’t checking if their website content is still relevant and aligned with their persona buyer’s journeys.
Is auditing really a crucial task?
You probably looked great when you left the house this morning. But if you got spinach in your teeth after eating salad for lunch, you’d probably want it out before anyone sees. That’s what mirrors are for. Spinach.
Your website, likewise, is undergoing healthy changes—you’re adding more pillar pages, creating e-Books, inserting internal links, optimizing layout, etc.
But rarely does one component change without affecting another.
What’s more, there may be multiple people on your team optimizing here and there, and no one’s checking for consistency across different webpages. While they’re seeing things page by page, your visitors are experiencing the whole site at once.
And with inconsistencies all over the place, they won’t develop trust in your brand. They’ll bounce.
But don’t just think of website auditing as finding gaps and inconsistencies. Any time you see an opportunity to add value for your website visitors, you’re doing a mental audit.
All you have to do is build the habit of writing these opportunities down on an auditing sheet and applying them regularly.
When will I know it’s time for an audit?
There are some pretty clear warning signs that your website content is in need of a facelift:
- High website traffic, but no qualified leads
- Your subscribers don’t read your blogs
- Your blogs don’t push anyone down the funnel
That last point is crucial. Your content should, above all, push buyers down the funnel.
To figure out if your content is accomplishing this, begin your content audit by asking these questions:
- Is this information relevant to my buyer personas needs or problems?
- Did it answer my questions about the topic and leave me feeling satisfied?
- Do I feel like I should take an action after reading this content?
- Is the writing supplemented with data and facts?
- Is the content selling me things or is it providing value to me?
Score yourself out of 5 for each of these criteria. Do this for every page and see how well they match up.
What about SEO?
We didn’t forget! You need to determine if you’ve been properly writing for SEO, or if you’ve just been keyword stuffing. This is a thing of the past—it worked well in Google’s earlier, less sophisticated days, but not anymore.
Inserting a keyword in every other sentence doesn’t help you rank. Instead, write content that actually answers the question or delves deeply into the topic of your long-tail keyword.
Google has grown intelligent enough to realize when a website is mindlessly stuffed with keywords until its language sounds robotic. If it turns off customers, it’ll probably turn off Google.
Keeping your content relevant, buyer-centric and SEO-optimized should be a habit. Start by scheduling your audits, then choose a template that works for you. Bring one or two more people to analyze your website with you—second and third opinions always help.
If you take one thing away from this, remember to put yourself in your buyers’ shoes. Build your content around their needs, frustrations, and opportunities.
It’s time to refurbish your content.
Want more awesome tips about the kind of content it takes to convert your readers to leads? Flawless Inbound has helped more than 80 B2B companies do just this — and we've compiled a whole bunch of our best tips in our overview of Marketing Enablement.
