How To Audit And Redesign Content Strategy In 2024

How To Audit And Redesign Content Strategy In 2024

Content strategy is a crucial component of any successful website or online business. As we move into 2024, now is the ideal time to audit your existing content strategy to identify areas for improvement and redesign elements that may be outdated or underperforming. An effective content strategy aligns with your overarching business goals, engages your target audience and helps drive conversions.

Read on for a step-by-step guide to auditing and redesigning your content strategy for 2024.

Step 1: Set Your Content Goals

Before assessing your current content, clearly define what you want it to achieve. Common content goals include:

– Increasing website traffic

– Growing social media followers

– Boosting lead generation

– Improving brand awareness

– Educating customers

– Promoting products/services

Set specific, measurable targets for the coming year based on business objectives and KPIs. This provides a benchmark to evaluate progress.

Step 2: Audit Existing Content

Conduct an audit assessing the following elements:

Volume & Frequency

– How much content do you currently produce (blogs, videos, etc.)?

– Is it published consistently?

– Does output align with audience expectations?

Identifying content volume and frequency gaps allows you to address inconsistencies.

Performance

Analyse metrics like:

– Page views

– Bounce rates

– Time on page

– Social shares/engagement

This reveals your best and worst performing pieces to double down on what works.

Search Visibility

– Which content ranks in search engines?

– What keywords do you target?

– How could SEO be improved?

Optimising content for search helps you get found by your ideal customers.

Value

– Does your content address audience needs/questions?

– Does it solve relevant problems?

– Does it engage readers?

Providing value builds loyalty and encourages sharing.

Sentiment

– What is the reader response based on comments or reviews?

– How can you improve sentiment?

Gauging sentiment ensures you deliver what audiences want.

Step 3: Identify Content Gaps

After auditing existing material, you can see where the gaps lie in your content strategy. Typical gaps include:

– Topic-specific: Certain subjects, products or services that warrant more coverage.

– Channel/format-specific: Some platforms or content types are overlooked.

– Buyer journey specific: Key stages in the customer journey that lack targeted content.

– Persona specific: Specific audience segments that demand a tailored approach.

– Intent specific: Failure to align topics with what users are searching for.

Pinpoint exactly where you need more content to plug the gaps.

Step 4: Improve Topic Targeting

Optimise your keyword strategy to target topics and terminology that resonate with your best audiences:

– Conduct keyword research to reveal high-opportunity terms with strong search volume. Prioritise ranking for these terms first through on-page optimisation and backlink building.

– Optimise for questions searchers ask online around problems your brand can solve. Often, questions offer the highest commercial intent.

– Identify LSI keyword variations around your core terms to tap into broader search demand and increase discoverability.

– Categorise keywords to group closely related terms for content creation and targeting.

– Optimise existing pages to incorporate the terms and topics identified above, ensuring you satisfy user intent.

More specific topic targeting means content better answers the questions customers are asking, leading to improved engagement and conversions.

Step 5: Address Underperforming Areas

Now turn your focus to any areas of underperformance uncovered during the audit. Typical solutions include:

– Repurposing existing content in new formats (e.g. blog to video) to increase engagement.

– Redesigning content by updating themes, imagery, and interactivity to boost appeal.

– Promoting overlooked content through social media, email, and sales materials to grow reach.

– Refreshing outdated content to maintain relevance.

– Redirecting low-value content to more useful pages to improve user experience.

Addressing content weak spots enhances the overall quality and aligns the output with strategic goals.

Step 6: Adopt Agile Creation Processes

With clearly defined goals, gaps identified and underperforming content addressed, implement efficient content creation processes to maintain consistency. Core elements include:

– Flexible frameworks based on content type to facilitate rapid development at scale.

– Collaborative tools so multiple teams can create, review, share and edit content collectively.

– Style guides provide tone of voice principles, brand guidelines, terminology, and writing best practices. This unifies output.

– Editorial calendars detailing planned publication dates, topics, channels and author responsibilities.

– Workflows formalising the content process with defined stages spanning proposal to analytics review.

Agile, efficient content systems let you rapidly produce consistent, high-quality content at the volume, frequency and focus required.

Step 7: Continually Optimise

The work does not stop after auditing and redesigning your content strategy. To continually evolve and improve, you must:

– Monitor analytics across all content, assessing what resonates best with changing audience demands.

– Solicit user feedback via surveys, interviews and reviews on what customers value most.

– Conduct quarterly audits updating assessments of metrics, search visibility, sentiment and performance.

– Hold regular reviews to align content with wider business objectives as they change over time.

– Test innovative formats across channels to expand reach, engagement and conversions.

– Respond to trends in tone of voice, topics, terminology, questions and problems identified through research.

– Set annual targets to drive continual growth aligned to an overarching content strategy vision.

A process of constant assessment, testing and optimisation will ensure your content delivers maximum value long into 2024 and beyond.

Key Takeaways

– Audit existing content output based on key metrics to identify areas for improvement

– Establish clear content goals and KPIs aligned with business objectives

– Pinpoint specific gaps in your current strategy, personas or channels

– Improve keyword and topic targeting to boost relevance

– Address any underperforming content through promotion, redesign or refresh

– Implement efficient systems and structures to facilitate the rapid creation

– Continually monitor, analyse and optimise to drive continual advancement

By following this seven-step approach, you can comprehensively audit and redesign your content strategy ready for 2024. Establishing agile processes now will enable you to continually assess, identify gaps, align output to goals and meet the demands of tomorrow.

With the right strategy, your content will evolve to drive maximum value as business needs change.