For many of us who work in the blogosphere, the phrase “Content is King” is a mantra. Here are my notes from the breakout session, “Content Marketing Workshop: How to Plan, Optimize, and Analyze Your Efforts” presented by Jenny Munn (@JennyMunn / www.JennyMunn.com) from the 2014 Wordcamp.
You may love your blog posts and WordPress website content, but does anyone else? How do you know what’s working and what’s not? If your content marketing plan (or lack thereof) could benefit from a strategy planning overview, then this session will help you understand what kind of content your market is searching for, how to make it findable and how to track what’s working and what’s not.
Tactical diagnosis: what is / not working
Book recommendation: Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing
Look to your analytics for information about your readers / customers:
- Device used
- Geo / location
- Total visits
- Traffic sources
- Bounce rate
- New vs. returning
- Popular pages
- Queries / keywords
Are you converting clicks but NOT converting on site CTA (call to action)?
- Is your website outdated?
- Are you being clear or clever?
- Is your content boring or dry?
- Are you using the right keywords for your users?
- Is your CTA inappropriate for your readers and desired conversion?
- Is your copy outdated or not persuasive?
You drive people to your site with SEO, you keep them there with a website marketing plan.
Issue: I don’t have enough traffic
- Diversification is critical
- Social engagement
- Guest blogging
- Face to face networking
- Meeting a real need
- Figure out sep
- Forum participation
- PPC
Issue: I’m ranking but not converting clicks
- Check your GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) to see why. Does the meta description match the query?
Issue: I’m not ranking well at all
- Your content is not old enough yet: it takes Google some time to recognize your new content
- Your keywords are out of your league: you need to choose keywords you can easily compete for
- You’re not using the right keywords: What are your customers searching for?
- Your on-page optimization is weak: There are several techniques to use when adding keywords to your content
- You don’t have enough substantial content: The more findable content you have the better! (tip: blog!)
Where do we go from here?
- Optimize your old blog posts while also consistently creating new ones
- Go back and optimize old web pages and create new ones based on your keywords
- Explore the different content formats you can use
- Create an editorial calendar and track out keywords
App Tip:
Screaming Frog: The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program (PC or Mac) which crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective.
Jenny Munn was nice enough to share slides from this presentation:
