We all know that content quality is critical to marketing excellence. Engaging content positions you as a thought leader, which, in turn, helps you sell your products and services. But quality content is irrelevant if it doesn’t make it to your audience.

Start by analyzing your current content and content strategy. Follow up with a series of actionable items you can immediately implement to refine your overall strategy.

Here are a few areas to cover in your content strategy overhaul:

SEO Strategy

If you’re not using keywords, now is the time to start. Use Google’s Keyword Search Tool to identify the most popular search terms in your industry. These terms are most likely to attract leads ripe for conversion. Include those keywords in your blog posts, post titles, and throughout your site copy.

Analytics

Google Analytics and SiteMeter are both free tools you can use to analyze your site.  Determine where you’re getting the most traffic, and where you can improve conversions. On the content end, check your blog and explore which posts are most popular and which days of the week drive the most traffic. Analyze these results in the context of your keyword strategy and determine what’s working and what’s not.

Sharability

This applies to your blog as well as the rest of your content arsenal. Are you using social sharing buttons? Are your titles and headlines compelling? Is your content engaging enough that people want to share it through their social networks? It’s not always as simple as adding sharing buttons. Review your content and analyze how it fits into the wider social media ecosystem.

Images/Videos

Are you using these mediums? Videos are easier than ever to produce. They don’t necessarily have to be complex, expensive productions. Sometimes a simple whiteboard video is enough. It’s also easy to add images to posts, whitepapers, and ebooks. Images help instill a connection with the audience, as well as overall visual appeal.

Copywriting Best Practices

There are many copywriting tips out there. Write short, direct sentences. Highlight product benefits, not features. Copyblogger is one of the best resources for gathering this kind of information.

Unbiased and Valuable Content

How unbiased is your content? Does it exclusively sell your product, or does it attempt to solve a larger problem? Readers don’t like advertisements. They like information. Take this into account when creating content. At a certain point, you need to plug yourself, but you shouldn’t always push the hard sell.

These tips should get you started with auditing your current content strategy. Ideally, analysis is an ongoing process. So brush off those analytics and get to work!

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