Whether you’re doing content marketing for your own company or a client’s, the first step is to look at the existing content to see how it’s performing. This will show you what you or your client is doing correctly and where the content could improve.
Later on, when your content strategy is ready to put into action, making those improvements is going to be the first task on your to-do list.
These tasks might include:
Updating Metadata for Search Engine Indexing
Metadata is all of the information on a website that doesn’t show up on the page itself. Title tags, for example, let search engines know what your website is about so that they can index your pages properly.
Updating these tags and other metadata can be helpful for search engine optimization (SEO), increasing the site’s visibility in related searches.
Restructuring the Site Architecture
It’s easy for websites to get disorganized, especially if you have a lot of different pages. But when a site is well-organized, it’s easier for users to navigate, so they’re more likely to stick around. For this reason, digital marketing strategists often set aside some time to examine the information architecture of their clients’ sites.
A well-organized site is good for SEO, too, as search engines can easily identify the topic of each page and index it accordingly.
Deleting Under-performing or Useless Content
Most sites have at least some content that doesn’t need to be there.
This includes:
- Pages with low or no traffic
- Old versions of pages that have since been updated
- Duplicate pages that have made their way online somehow
Use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify those pages. If you can’t or don’t want to improve them so they actually add value to your site, delete them.
It is important to curate existing content, keeping only engaging content that performs well. Google only indexes so many pages on each website, and under-performing pages could steal attention from the effective content you actually want the crawler to notice.
Suggesting Improvements to Pr-Existing Content
There’s a chance your client’s site already ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some keywords or is close to doing so. That’s great — a few small improvements could give those pages the nudge they need to slide onto the first page of Google’s results for target keywords.
Also, if your client’s current website lacks basic information, such as their address, phone number, social media handles, or operating hours, you’ll have to let them know. Even if your contract is for blog content, it’ll benefit you both to have them update their home page.
After all, if you’re creating blog content for a restaurant but they don’t have a menu on their site or a Google My Business page, your content is probably not going to meet user needs, no matter how well written it is.