Category Archives: Content Strategy

Audit Website Content: 5 Reasons You Should Do It Regularly

You should definitely audit your website content if, one way or another, your company has been publishing content on its website and blog for a few months or for a few years.

Why is it important to update your website routinely?

It’s because there are big chances that when you published your content for the first time, you didn’t get it right.

Maybe you didn’t optimize it for the right keywords. Maybe you wrote the content (or got it written) in a hurry and didn’t pay much attention to optimization and conversion. Maybe there are lots of spelling mistakes because someone who wasn’t a proficient writer worked on your website content back in those days.

Maybe you need to update anyway because your content is now outdated.

When you decide to or agree to revise your web pages and blog posts it doesn’t mean so far you have had inferior-quality content. Just like your office needs regular maintenance, so does your website. In fact, I’m pretty sure in the past 5-10 years you must have redesigned your website or blog multiple times.

Click here if you are looking for website content auditing services.

The same goes for your content. What you thought back in 2008 might be totally different from what you think in 2017. Your content should reflect your thinking.

Where to start?

If you are auditing your website content for the first time it is but natural to wonder where to start?

What is content auditing and how to do it on your website

I use WordPress.org to manage my website and blog and there is a nice plug-in that allows me to export all the links into a text file that I later on import into an Excel sheet. You can create different columns to track your progress.

It is very important to know why your content exists. Does it simply fill up the pages because blank pages would look odd or does your content really have a purpose in life?

If you don’t know why you have published content on your website it will be very difficult to audit because then what’s the purpose of auditing it when you don’t know what to look for and what changes to incorporate to achieve what results?

So decide first.

Coming to a general question, why do people publish content on their websites?

Broadly there are two reasons:

To have better SEO
To have better conversion

Without content there is no SEO. It’s your content that tells the search engines what your website stands for.

For this you need to optimize your content using the right keywords. Whereas there is no need to obsess over your keywords, you should have a fair idea of what people are looking for on search engines to find businesses, products and services similar as yours.

You can decide for which keywords your chosen web page or blog post should get search engine traffic and then search for those keywords and see whether your link appears on the first or second page or not.

If it doesn’t, mark that link for a revision. Keep revising your links until they begin to rank well or at least you think that on the basis of your content, they should rank well. I say this because your rankings don’t just depend on your content; they also depend on the number of incoming links and many other factors.

So, before starting, prepare a list of keywords and search terms you think people are using to be able to find you (or your competitors).

Then you study how well the content converts. Is it able to convince people? Is your writing up to the mark? Is the tone professional as well as conversational? Do you have the right information? Are you linking to URLs that no longer exist or you shouldn’t be linking to?

Once you have all this information with you, you can start auditing your website content.

It can be a great advantage if you have been using something like Google Analytics to keep track of the traffic you are getting. Google Analytics tells you what sort of traffic is being drawn to your website. It will tell you if you are getting traffic for the right keywords or not. Google Analytics also tells you what links are getting traffic for what keywords.

5 reasons you should audit your website content

Although above I have briefly explained why you should routinely revise your website content, in this section I’m going to compile 5 reasons why it is beneficial to your online business that you routinely audit your website content and update it.

1. For repurposing your content

To stay ahead of your competition you constantly need fresh content. But content writing ideas are finite. Even content generation ideas for various formats are finite. But, you can get some new ideas from your existing content.

Go through your existing content and see if you can repurpose it – complete web pages and blog posts or some of their parts. Read How to repurpose old content.

2. For improving your SEO

Are your web pages and blog posts attracting traffic for the right keywords? If your important web pages and blog posts are not ranking well, maybe you can give it another try?

Maybe this time you can use a tool like Yoast or SEOPressor.

Maybe you could incorporate some longtail keywords. Maybe you can optimize the title and the description.

Maybe the first time when you created those web pages and blog posts you didn’t use alt tags with the images.

Maybe there are some inner web pages and blog posts you can interlink.

There are scores of things you can do to improve your SEO during your website content audit.

3. For improving visual appeal

This is something that I have been doing recently with my website content auditing. I’m revising almost all the web pages. I’m not happy with the images I have used with many web pages. So, I am now creating new images. In fact, I’m inserting many more images.

Previously I used to have just one image. Now I try to use at least 3-4 images.

The idea of using more attractive images came to me when I actively started using Instagram.

4. Improving overall quality

We are all constantly improving (at least I would like to think that). We learn new things. We realize that we have committed mistakes.

While auditing your website content you will realize that there are lots of quality gaps that can be filled. You can rewrite and rephrase paragraphs. You can remove unnecessary text. You can add some new text. You can make your paragraphs and sentences shorter. You can make the language simpler. You can remove difficult or needless words.

5. Streamline your information flow and structure

Even if your content is great, if it is not creating a story flow, it is not going to serve you well. For example, you have a home page or a landing page communicating a particular message. From there, are you linking to a page that takes your story forward. Have you organized your content according to your sales funnel? Is your content organized in a logical sequence? These things can only be improved if you have lots of content to audit.

Some content marketing experts believe that there is no sense in creating new content unless you have audited your existing website content, and I think this makes sense.

When you audit your website content you learn what you want to do and what you want to discard. If you don’t study your existing content you won’t realize what mistakes you are committing and then you will carry forward these mistakes into your new content.

How often should you audit your website content?

It depends on how much content you have. If you have thousands of web pages and blog posts it doesn’t make sense to audit them every month. Since auditing is an ongoing process, you can also mark web pages and blog posts that don’t need auditing so that the next time you audit your content, you know which links you shouldn’t bother with. Otherwise, I think once a year it should be sufficient enough to audit your website content.

How to do content writing for the mobile-first experience

Leave a reply

Is your content writing tailored for the mobile-first experience? Somewhere in November 2016 Google started mobile-first indexing. It means these days Google might be ranking your content according to its mobile version. Even if right now you don’t have a mobile version of your website, Google might be ranking your web pages and blog posts according to how they look on mobile devices. There is a reason I’m saying “might be”.

According to this Search Engine Land update, Google isn’t rolling out the mobile-first index until 2018.

Why writing content for the mobile-first experience is important?

More people are accessing your website from their mobile phones. Some of my clients have reported that almost 35-40% of their traffic comes from mobile devices.

When you think of content writing in terms of mobile-first experience, as well as usability goes, there is no big difference. People seek the same sort of information on the mobile phone that they seek on their PC. Then what’s the big difference?

It is difficult to do research on mobile phones. For example, you want to make a big business decision and for that you need to do lots of research. It is difficult to do it on the phone or even on the tablet. You need a laptop or computer.

As explained on this Google blog update, most of the searches on mobile are of the sort “I want to know”, “I want to go”, “I want to do” and “I want to buy”.

On the mobile people are looking for quick solutions. They neither have enough space nor enough patience to go through long streams of text to find what they’re looking for. The answers should be modular, to the point.

If you are still writing content keeping your PC audience in mind and totally ignoring the mobile audience, you may lose on a big chunk of your prospects because they won’t be able to make sense of what you are trying to say.

Therefore, your content writing needs to take into consideration the mobile-first experience.

What are the peculiarities of the mobile-first experience?

Prominent peculiarities of a mobile screen are

A smaller screen size, smaller text
Visibility through a single window
Lots of distractions in terms of notifications
Limited keyboard
People are normally on the move when using their mobile phones
Many people may check out your website while having conversations or dinner/lunch

Stats

71% social media users access your updates using their smartphones
1/4th of your emails are accessed from smartphones
Still, a significantly small portion of people visit business websites using mobile phones (source)

The last point is quite ambiguous. It also makes sense.

As I have mentioned above, there are many constraints while browsing websites with mobile phones, at least right now. Most of the websites are not mobile ready. People accept that. Whereas, many may leave your website and may not come back, people who are serious about doing business with you may also access your website using a laptop or a PC.

Content writing for mobile phones

Very few people accessing business websites from their mobile phones doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write content for the mobile-first experience. Although Google introduced the concept in 2016 and started pushing it into some aspects of search engine rankings, the main thrust is going to come in a year or so.

To be frank, Google is not bothered about your experience as an entrepreneur or business person. The company is bothered about its users. It knows that more users are accessing the Internet via their mobile devices. So, whatever changes they push forward, whenever they push forward these changes, they are going to do it according to their own convenience and business plan.

Should you be waiting till then? By the time Google completely switches over to the mobile-first experience in rankings, you could be publishing hundreds, if not thousands, of blog posts or web pages. Just imagine, making them all mobile friendly then. Rewriting all the content so that it looks good on mobile phones.

Writing content for the mobile-first experience

Actually, writing for PC or laptop and writing for the mobile-first experience, can go hand-in-hand. The beauty of quality content is that it is good for all experiences. A piece of well-written content looks good on a mobile phone as well as on your PC or laptop.

Here are a few things you should keep in mind while doing content writing for the mobile-first experience:

Write highly focused content: As mentioned above, mobile users are looking for specific answers to specific questions. If they want to know what movies are playing in the nearest theater, they want to know just that, not a review. If they want to find the best carpenter in the area, they don’t want to read about your carpentry experiences or how to assemble a table.
Create shorter paragraphs: Long streams of text can be difficult to read. Write shorter paragraphs. I have seen many people using just one sentence in one paragraph. On the PC it looks odd, but on a mobile phone this can be very helpful.
Avoid using very complex language: People using mobile phones are normally a distracted lot. They may be checking out your website or blog at a crowded place or while having a conversation with friends or arguing with the spouse. If your language is difficult, if you are using words they cannot understand, they usually don’t have the luxury to refer to a dictionary.
Get to the point as soon as possible: Yes, the “above the fold” philosophy applies to the mobile-first experience too. When writing content, keep the most important message at the top in such a manner that the viewer doesn’t have to scroll the screen. The most important message can be anything that holds the attention of your visitor.
Use great, captivating headlines: Since most of the mobile visitors are in a distracted state, write compelling headlines to communicate the main ideas of your content. Great headlines used to be important for newspapers. They are very important for web pages and blog posts. They are super important for the mobile-first experience.
Use the first para to hold the attention of your visitor: It is normally your first paragraph, preceded by your headline, that is going to decide whether the person is going to read the rest of your web page or blog post or not. Pack as much punch as possible in your first paragraph. Incite the curiosity. Give that person an irresistible reason to scroll down and read the rest of the text.
Use plenty of images: Mobile users prefer images over text: This is because as the cliché goes, an image is worth a thousand words.

Does content writing for the mobile-first experience spoil your content for PC and laptop?

Although it shouldn’t happen because every piece of well-written content looks good on mobile as well as conventional PC and laptop, if you feel that content writing for the mobile layout spoils your content for PC and laptop, maybe you need two versions.

Google knows that you may have a different version for your desktop and different for mobile phone. It is going to index the mobile phone version 1st anyway, some day. There is no harm in creating two versions of your website, as many businesses already do.

But, even if you don’t want to go through the hassle of maintaining multiple versions of the same website, it is better to write scalable content. It is not as difficult as it seems.

What is quality content and how does Google recognize it?

Leave a reply

If you want to enjoy good search engine rankings you need to understand how Google defines or recognizes quality content.

Since the Penguin and Panda updates Google has been putting more and more stress on quality content. All its ranking algorithms are focused towards crawling, indexing and ranking as much quality content existing on the Internet as possible.

Read 20 Evergreen characteristics of quality content

In order to understand what is quality content and how Google defines or recognizes it, you first need to define for yourself what is quality content.

For me, the definition of quality content is quite straightforward:

Well-written content
Content that educates and informs
Content that does not mislead
Content that delivers on the promise of the page title or the headline
And in terms of copywriting, contend that improves your conversion rate

These are the basic definitions of what is quality content and these definitions don’t change no matter what the format of your content is. Whether you are publishing text, images or videos, the underlying purpose is to provide quality content that delivers value, whatever that value is, to your particular audience.

Read Why quality content writing matters and how to maintain quality

Why should you bother how Google defines or recognizes quality content?

Although there are multiple search engines in the world Google sends you the most traffic. So, this is why it matters to you how Google defines or recognizes quality content and then ranks your content accordingly.

As you can see in the chart below, almost 90% of the search market is dominated by Google whereas other “major” search engines like Bing, Yahoo! and even Baidu, have more or less remained at the bottom.

But carefully note the red line representing Google at the top. If you notice, there is a slight downward slant. Although it is still miles ahead of its competitors, it is losing market. Since most of its revenue comes from search advertising, even a small drop in the share of search traffic means a lot to Google.

So there are two reasons why you should bother how Google defines quality content:

Most of your search traffic comes from Google
Google would tenaciously like to hold onto its market dominance by continuing to provide quality content through searches

If Google is unable to find quality content – no matter how it defines it – people will move on to other search engines.

Give Google quality content and Google will rank your website or blog higher

This is not completely true, but it is indisputable that Google will only rank you higher if you have quality content on your website or blog. I have personally experienced that quality content alone doesn’t help you much unless you have tons of it. There are many other factors that affect your ranks including:

The quality of your content, of course
The frequency with which you publish content (the greater the frequency, the better the rankings)
The quantity of quality content that you already have
The age of your domain
The keywords and search terms that you use in the title tag and the headlines
The number of authority websites linking to your content
The social validation your content gets (how many people share your content on social networking websites)
The popularity of your content

A cocktail of these reasons gives you better search engine rankings but all these reasons originate from the fact that you need to have quality content.

Read How to strike a balance between SEO and quality content writing

If you don’t have quality content nobody is going to bother about it and if they don’t bother about it, they won’t share it, they won’t link to it and your content won’t get validation. Without getting social validation, it is very difficult to enjoy good search engine rankings no matter how much quality content you have (although it does have some benefits).

In fact, Google wants quality content so much that it has even created a tutorial on how you can create quality, valuable content.

How does Google define quality content and then ranks it accordingly?

To understand how Google defines quality content, again, you need to understand why Google craves for quality content and not for every type of content irrespective of what its quality is.

Why do you use Google and not another search engine? There might be two reasons:

You are not aware of the existence of any other search engine
You believe that Google gives you the best results for your searches

It’s the second reason that keeps Google hungry for quality content. Whenever you do a search on Google, Google wants to find you the best results. If it doesn’t find you the best results, gradually some other search engine will, and you will move on to that search engine.

This is why among the most brilliant minds on earth working at Google are constantly creating algorithms to find quality content on the Internet.

Now that we know why you need to bother with how Google defines or recognizes quality content and why Google craves quality content, we can come to the topic of how Google defines quality content.

Listed below are the examples of inferior content, according to Google:

Scrapped content
Thin content (Read What is thin content according to Google? Does it harm your SEO?)
Doorway pages
Pages and blog posts senselessly stuffed with your keywords
Webpages and blog posts solely created to draw traffic with no value
Content containing hidden text or links
Cloaking
Automatically generated text strings
Content lifted as it is from other websites and blogs

The folks at Google dislike inferior content or low-quality content so much that they penalize your website by lowering its rankings or worse, completely removing your links from its index.

You may also like to read quality content guidelines straightaway from Google.

Listed below are a few factors that Google uses to define quality content:

Write content for your users not merely for search engines.
Provide information people are actually looking for – don’t mislead people by deceptive titles.
If possible write expert-level content. According to this Search Engine Journal blog post, Google’s human raters as well as algorithms can distinguish between content written by an amateur and content written by a pro.
Become a resource. Link to high quality content from other websites and blogs. Cite reputed publications like the New York Times and Time whenever possible. When you come across quality content on other websites, refer to it from your own website.
Publish fresh content as much as possible. Google is ravenous about fresh content. It crawls your website or blog repeatedly, sometimes multiple times a day to check whether you have published something new. Though, publishing with great frequency doesn’t mean you compromise on quality content. Publish less, but definitely stick to quality.
Abundantly use images and videos. It enhances your presentation and it has been observed that the top 10 ranked sites in Google search results normally have around 6-8 images.
Deliver what you promise in your web page title. Misleading titles attract penalty from Google. Your page title and content should always match.
Create lengthy posts and webpages. Since it is difficult to create long content, and if you are publishing lots of long content, the Google algorithm assumes that you are publishing quality content. Longer blog posts and articles also tend to have lots of information and useful images.

These are the factors using which Google defines quality content. These factors may not play a crucial role all the time at the same time, a majority of these factors are considered when Google tries to assess whether you are publishing quality content or not.

As a content marketing strategy Coca-Cola is launching a digital magazine in India

Leave a reply

For a very long time Coca-Cola has had a very well-defined content marketing strategy. In fact, it is one of the first major company to openly declare a content marketing strategy. Here are the two YouTube videos the marketing and advertising division of the company released in 2011-2012.

As the introductory lines of this Marketing Week article on the Coca-Cola 2020 content marketing strategy says

Coca Cola no longer relies on traditional ad agencies for creative ideas, instead taking a collaborative approach to storytelling and content creation, according to its global advertising strategy head.

The article also reports Coca-Cola’s vice president of global advertising strategy and excellence Jonathan Mildenhall…

All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.

A few years ago, Coca-Cola completely did away with its official homepage for the website and instead, started displaying the Journey magazine’s homepage. The beverage company has been publishing its content marketing in many countries and now it is also introducing the magazine in India.

Since content marketing is all about telling stories, in its 2020 strategy Coca-Cola has decided to create stories. How can the company do that? By making positive impacts in multiple spheres.

It’s like, create positive stories and then publish those stories in the magazine. Coca-Cola is an unhealthy drink so the company would like to change the perception. This perception can be changed by telling positive stories about the brand and about the product.

A long time ago I worked with a client who had the same philosophy for his content marketing strategy but somehow the team, including myself, were not very consistent so instead of becoming a clearly-defined strategy, it became a hodgepodge. The client constantly said that we should engage in different activities and then write about those activities on the blog, but neither the activities happened nor the writing.

So, if you go to the Coca-Cola India website, instead of the usual business website, you encounter the Coca-Cola Journey magazine’s homepage.

Journey was an internal magazine that was originally published for the company’s employees and stakeholders in the 1980s. When Coca-Cola decided to switch from conventional advertising to content marketing somewhere around 2010, the magazine transitioned into a globally available publication.

Can you use content curation as a viable content marketing tool?

Leave a reply

In my previous blog post, 10 ways to write highly engaging content, I briefly touched upon the topic of content curation – collecting useful information from all over the Internet and compiling it into a single link.

Can content curation become a viable content marketing tool for your business? Or will you be sending traffic to your competitors?

Many content marketers believe that if you curate lots of content you are mostly sending traffic away from your website rather than drawing traffic to your own website by creating high-quality genuine content.

Although the importance of high-quality genuine content can never be understated, there are some instances when you can use content curation to boost your content marketing. For example, you can use content curation when

You don’t have enough time to create your own, high-quality, genuine content
Someone else has explained better what you have always wanted to explain to your visitors
You want to present as many viewpoints as possible pertaining to a topic or subject
You want to create a repository of opinions for solutions pertaining to a particular topic
You want to introduce authority into a topic

See for example this Content Marketing Institute blog post – What does engaging content mean?. As you can see, instead of presenting her own views on what is engaging content through the entire blog post, the author has collected opinions of various content marketing and content writing experts on what engaging content means.

This blog post titled How to add value with content curation rightly says that there is a huge quantity of content on the Internet with limited shelf life. By the time people find useful information it is outdated or they no longer need it.

Since you must be in the thick of your subject matter, you may have access to many resources that your visitors may not have. So, there is a greater chance of you coming across great, useful information. Instead of simply consuming that bit of information, you can mention it on your website along with the original link, the way I’m doing with this blog post on content curation.

This further explains that content curation doesn’t just mean collecting lots of links and creating a big list of useful links. You can also use just one link and then quickly create a small blog post with your own input, again, the way I’m doing with this particular blog post on content curation. In fact, I often do that. When I cannot come up with a good idea for a blog post, I simply search on the web for some ideas, and when I find an interesting link, I write a few words about that link and sometimes, it turns into a complete blog post.

Another benefit of linking to outside links is it is appreciated by the original publishers. If they like your response, they promote your link among their own followers. This helps your content marketing.