Business moves and evolves over time. That’s essential for survival, otherwise Apple wouldn’t be making phones.
But as your business evolves, you need to make sure your content evolves too. Which is why a content audit isn’t a one-time thing; it’s something you need to do regularly to keep your content aligned with your business objectives.
Lexham Insurance is a UK-based insurance company that focuses primarily on motorbikes and scooters. The Lexham team were keen to produce more content, but I told them we needed to review what we had first for three reasons:
One: The team of guest writers had written some excellent guest blogs, but some of them weren’t as relevant to Lexham’s offering as they once had been.
Two: there were some instances of multiple pieces covering the same topics.
Three: there are always plenty of opportunities lurking in the gaps in an existing content portfolio.
It was time to get our content audit on.
Digging in the data
A digital content audit is no small task. You need to crawl the entire site, pull in the relevant data for analytics, search, and backlinks. You then need to parse this huge amount of data to identify the content that’s going down a storm, the content that’s treading water, and the content that’s gone belly up.
Lexham had a lot of content, so there was a huge amount of data to go through. I stripped away the underperforming content that was holding Lexham back, merged together duplicate content, and updated top-performing content to make it even better.
But I was doing more than just this. And more than just telling the Lexham marketing team what to do. I was training them to do it all themselves.
I wrote guides, consulted on specific proposals, and gave walkthroughs of my bespoke content tracker.
This wasn’t an attempt to get other people to do my work, you understand. The team simply wanted to learn.
Sharing the knowledge
The training took a number of different forms. I wrote guides, consulted on specific proposals, and gave relevant individuals bespoke walkthroughs of my bespoke content tracker. But the entire team was subjected granted a day of intensive, in-person content training that covered:
- how to categorise different types of content
- which types you should prioritise
- how to identify underperforming content and what to do with it
- the importance of content clusters and internal linking
- how to make stronger content stronger
- how to approach merging multiple pieces of content
- how to delete content the right way
- the SEO implications of this sort of activity and how to avoid penalty.
It was a lot to cover, which is one of the reasons I used examples specific to Lexham to illustrate my points. It meant the Lexham team wasn’t left trying to figure out how nebulous examples applied to them and left more mental capacity for all the information I was conveying.
Top results
This all took place against a backdrop of a content-led outreach campaign that landed features in The Telegraph, The Sun, The Mirror, the Huffington Post, and industry sites such as ScooterLab, Visor Down, and British Dealer News.
Impressive, yes, but these kinds of placements mean nothing if the content funnel doesn’t exist to drive prospects towards conversion. That’s why content audits and the resulting optimisations are so important.
James helped us greatly with content writing, planning and auditing along with general digital and email marketing which has helped us achieve some significant growth.
Brett Tinkley, Lexham Insurance
That‘s why I was delighted by how much the Lexham team absorbed from the training. They were eager to learn and started applying lessons straightaway. But, because of the combination of headline-grabbing content and back-of-house optimisations, we were able to boost sales by 20%.
Not too shabby, right?
If you’re looking to get more from your existing content and align it with your business of today, get in touch. Let’s make your content work harder for you.
