Hey everybody, welcome to the video. In today's video I'm going to show you how to perform a content audit on your website using Hubspot. If you're a subscriber to Hubspot, setting the spreadsheet up for the content audit is pretty easy to do. The actual content audit process itself is going to take you some time depending on how big your site is. But I want to show you how to get everything set up so you can start that content audit process.
Downloading your Website Pages from Hubspot
So let's get started. So the first thing we want to do is log into Hubspot, you want to hit the drop down menu under reports. And click on the page performance tool. Now what we're going to do with the page performance tool is we're going to download all of the pages on your website. So to do that, we want to select all pages and we want to select the time period of “All time”. And next we want to export this data. So we scroll down and on the right hand side bar here you're going to find a link that says export all pages to excel.
So we click that link, and in a few minutes you're going to get an email from Hubspot that's going to say that your export is ready. Download the spreadsheet from the email. So the first thing we did is we just moved this URL column a few columns over to the right. We still want it on our spreadsheet, but we want it kind of out of the way for our audit process. But we still want it on the spreadsheet so we can access this piece of content any time we want.
So let's look at the final spreadsheet. So what we did here is we added seven new columns. And we'll talk about what each of these columns are for in a second. And then we highlighted all of the data, and we went to our insert tab here and inserted a table. So the reason we made it a table is when it's in the table form it's really easy to slice and dice the data and sort and find everything you're looking for really easily.
So let's talk about the columns that I added.
Type Column
The first column that I added was type. And this is the content type. What is each piece of content that you're analyzing? Is it a video? Is it a case study? Is it a blog post? So whatever that piece of content is, what type of content that is, you're going to input it into this column.
Stage Column
The next column is the stage. And this represents where your buyer is along the sales process, or rather, where the content you’re looking at most appropriately fits in. So if you think about it, your buyers don't just wake up one day and buy your product or service, they go through a process. And we call that process the buyers journey. There's a lot of philosophies or things that people call this process. A lot of people call it AIDA, which is Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. For this video I'm going to make it really simplified. I'm going to talk about three different stages.
The awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision phase. The awareness phase is, somebody realizes they have a problem and they first start their research. They're just looking for information. They don't even know, really, what the options to fix that problem is yet. So at the awareness stage, you just want to really give them a really top of the funnel, educational piece of content. So that could be a blog post.
Now as they move further down the sales funnel, they go to the consideration phase. And this is where they find out what their options to solve that particular problem is that they're having. So what you could serve them at this point at the consideration stage of the sales funnel? You send them to a pre-recorded webinar, you could give them an e-book. So they're a little bit more farther along in their research process and so they need content to help them understand all their solution options.
Now we're going to move further down your sales funnel and get to the decision phase. And this is where they're comparing your solution versus your competitor's. So at this phase you might want to serve them up a free trial or a demo, maybe even a case study.
Each piece of content you’ve created is going to fit in to a certain stage in that buyer's journey. Whatever stage the piece of content that you're looking at best fits, you want to add it to that column.
Persona Column
The next column that we're going to talk about is persona. If you're doing your content marketing correctly, the first step in that process should have been to build out a persona or your ideal customer. Now to build that persona you might want to do customer interviews. You might want to interview people that have gone through your sales cycle but decided to go with a competitor. You might want to talk to your sales representatives or your customer service representatives.
Then you want to take all that data that you just collect, you want to compile it, and then you want to create a profile of your ideal customer. And what you should do next is create content to answer the questions of that persona. So, when you go through the content audit process, each piece of content should align with a persona that you're trying to target. So that's what you're going to input into this column.
Questions Column
The next column is the questions. What kind of questions or pain points are the personas we discussed having? And which pieces of content best answer those questions that your personas are having? So each piece of content is going to answer a question and you're going to put those questions in this column.
Use? Column
The next column is whether you're going to use this piece of content or not. Now as you go through this audit process, you're going to find some old, outdated piece of content. You're going to find some content that just really isn't well done. And at that point you've got to make a decision. Am I going to keep that piece of content and update it, or am I just going to cut it off and get rid of it? And so that's what this column is for. Are you going to use it, yes? Are you going to use it, no? Are you going to refresh it?
“Links To” Column
What other internal pages on your website does each piece of content link to? As you go through this audit process you're going to find that some of your best content links to some of that old, outdated, crappy content. So you need to make some decisions there and you need to either find some current content that's better and more appropriate to help increase engagement, or you need to create a new extraordinary piece of content that you can link to. The goal here is to create awesome content that's going to help you to convert more visitors into leads, convert those leads into customers and help you meet your content marketing goals.
Notes
The final column that we're going to talk about is notes. And this could be anything that you think is appropriate. It might be something where like “need to add a video to this piece of content” or “need to add some images”. Whatever you think is appropriate you can add notes into this column.
Audit Most Viewed pages First
Now as you start your content audit process, you want to start with the most viewed pages. And you want to analyze all of the columns that we talked about because you want to make sure that each piece of content that you have on your site serves a purpose. It's targeted at a persona, and it is targeted at a persona at the appropriate stage there in their buyers journey. You want to make sure that they're linking out to other good pieces of content. So as you go through the process you really want to start at those pages that people land on the most.
The Benefits of Performing a Website Content Audit
Now, this content audit process is extremely important to the success of your content marketing strategy. It's going to benefit you in a few different ways. First of all, it's going to help you to find pieces of content on your website that are less than adequate. Those crappie pieces of content that aren't going to convert well. This kind of content can really make your brand look bad. So when you find those pieces of content, you can decide to cut them off of your site or update them and just make them better, more extraordinary pieces of content. So that's one benefit.
The next benefit is going to help you to find the gaps in your content strategy. So, what you can do now that all of your data is in a table, is you can sort each of these columns and focus on certain data to guide strategy. For example, if you wanted to analyze all the content that targeted a specific person, you could sort by that persona. What you might find is that you've got a ton of content at the awareness stage of the buyers journey, but you don't have a whole lot of content in the consideration stage or the decision stage. So that informs you that you've got a gap in your content. You need to fill that gap with new pieces of content, and now you know exactly what pieces of content you need to plug into your editorial calendar. So that's another benefit of doing this audit.
Now the final benefit is, that it really helps you to align your sales and marketing. Once finished, you can arm your sales team with this document to help them close deals. For example, let’s say they're talking to a prospect and the prospect has some questions on SEO. Well now the salesperson can sort the questions column to find all of the pieces of content around SEO. The sales rep can then pick and choose which pieces of content that he wants to send to that prospect to have better, more relevant sales conversation which leads to more closed deals.
So that's a big overview of how to start this content audit process. I hope the video helped you out. The actual content audit is probably going to take you a little bit of time. But it's a very important process in your content marketing strategy and its success. So do it! Also keep an eye out for future videos that we're going to putting out. I hope you got a lot out of the video, and I'll see you next time.
