This episode is brought to you by EditorNinja, the business I founded focused on providing professional unlimited content editing services to content marketers, whether in-house or agencies. Schedule a free editorial assessment to learn more.
I spent my days thinking about content, and specifically content marketing. After all, I’ve built my career off the back of blogging - starting with my first blog in the early 2000s, my personal blog in 2010/2011 which established me in SEO and got me my job at Distilled, blogging on Moz and other sites through the years, and then writing a lot of content on Credo and EditorNinja to build those businesses.
But what happens when you’ve tackled most of the topics on your content roadmap, but traffic is going down?
It’s a common problem. At some point in a content program’s maturity, it feels like you’re just producing content to try to keep traffic steady.
This is when you need to shift strategy.
If we accept that Pareto’s Principle (that 80% of results are seen from 20% of effort) and apply that to content, 80% of your content marketing results come from 20% of your content. That is likely content you produced early on, but haven’t really paid much attention to since then.
It’s time to pay attention to that content again.
First I want you to watch this free video training (it’s ~10 minutes long) that I put together for you.
Then, I’d like to recommend that you sit back, take a deep breath, and then look at your Analytics or Search Console.
Compare traffic and leads from content from the first 6 weeks of last year, to the first 6 weeks of this year.
Identify the pieces of content that have dropped off the most, specifically in terms of raw traffic. You can look at percentages too, but you don’t want to prioritize content that dropped by 90% but the raw numbers are 10 visits last year and 1 this year.
This exercise is purely focused on getting traffic, and therefore leads and revenue, back. We’re not focused on opportunity for NEW traffic and improved rankings - we’re focused on regaining what has been lost.
Once you’ve done this, you have your priority list. I see the most effective content teams are now spending 25%+ of their time updating old content.
In each piece, they are:
Adding in new content
Moving around sections
Adding in new internal links
Updating old statistics (anything older than 1-2 years)
General editing and proofing to help the piece be more effective in converting visitors to customers
Adding a call to action at the end.
Hope this helps you out today.
Hit reply and let me know if you find this valuable. I’m really enjoying creating this sort of content, so I’d also love to hear what else you’d like to see me cover.
John (Founder, EditorNinja / Credo)