As you start to plan for 2023, it’s a good time to review how the year went to make better content for the new year.
Next year, what should you prioritise? What content resonated with your target audience? This information can be intuitively gathered, but I prefer to do some analytical digging to find the top-performing posts.
The same system can also be used on other content marketing platforms. This step-by-step process works for Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.
Blog Audit Steps
1. Start by extracting the data
Here’s a look at the entire year of top blog posts. Note that the newest ones won’t have had as much time to accrue pageviews.
You can pull this data from Google Analytics or I’ve used the Jetpack plugin for WordPress.
Consider your top-performing posts as well as your bottom-performing ones.
You’ll this as information on what to write about in 2023, what to make adjustments to, and how to create better content for your ideal readers. We’ll be back with more information later.
2. Analyze the data and categorize
You could interpret your lowest-performing posts in a number of ways. It doesn’t always mean that the content wasn’t good – or that you shouldn’t continue to post it. But it does mean that it hasn’t gotten traction.
Here are some reasons your blog post may have failed:
- It hasn’t gotten enough promotion. It hasn’t been promoted more than once. You can share it across platforms. Google rankings can be different from Pinterest and Instagram.
- This book needs to be improved in order to be more useful and interesting.
- It’s not targeted enough to your ideal audience.
3. Audit your top-performing blog posts
First, plan to promote these top posts even more – or repurpose this content, so you can embed a YouTube or TikTok video to the post.
If they worked on one platform, it’s possible that they’ll work for others.
Make sure they are up-to-date in order to be relevant in the new year. You can make changes as needed for your promotion, such as in 2023.
Example: Your Guide To Better Health Habits
Additional Relevant Update: Your Guide to Better Healthcare Habits for 2023
4. Create a spreadsheet with all your blog updates (if there are many)
As I have shown, you can make a spreadsheet. Two tabs are available in my ClickUp doc to help me with my blog audit. One with overall notes about what I’ve learned while looking through the top & least performing posts.
The spreadsheet other has four columns that can be used for tracking edits and repromotions of past blog posts. You may need to promote some of the most popular and least performing posts, as we discussed previously.
- Blog headline with link to blog post for easy reference
- Pageviews
- Is there more marketing needed for the blog? (Y/N column)
- Do you think the post needs to be updated? (Y/N column)
- Done (Check box).
To create the spreadsheet, I simply copied the information and added tabs for promotions and updates.
This way, I can keep track of the blogs that need updates and when I’ve made them. We have over 900 posts at Life Goals, so this checklist will help me to keep track of the progress because it won’t happen within a day.
5. Review your audience
Now that we have our top posts settled, it’s time to look at our demographics.
Are you reaching your ideal audience? Take a look at your analytics to review who you’re reaching. You can make your analytics more specific to better target your market.
6. Reexamine your process
How consistent have you been with your blogging in the past year? What has been the impact of your blogging schedule? Is your content being repurposed?
You might also consider using this method for other social media platforms, such as Instagram. It may be worth creating a process to repurpose your content in an efficient way for your workflow.
Take a look at the sales process
If you’re selling products or services and using a blog to get visibility, how are you taking someone from a blog post to taking action?
Have you got a funnel in place? A funnel is simply a flow that you create to convert someone from free content to paid content. This could look something like an email sequence where people sign up for free resources embedded in your posts.
What happens when someone clicks on your blog? Evaluate your current systems and see if there’s a way to make it better for the upcoming year. Are your funnels in need of an upgrade?
7. Create your 2023 blog plan
All of this information can be used to help you create your blogging strategy.
Create a content plan for what you’ve learned about these results. Do you see patterns in the most-performing posts?
All of this information will help you to plan your 2023 content strategy. What does this post have in common with each other? What can you do to create similar posts that aren’t competing with your own work.
Other metrics that you can review and audit:
- Site speed
- Bounce rate
- Dead links (I use this website to view dead links)
How to use the content audit process to conduct end-of-year social media reviews
You can go through the same seven steps but instead of evaluating based upon metrics that are most important to your app, you should do so again. Hint: it’s probably not follower count!
For Pinterest, you’ll want to look at sales, outbound links, or saves, depending on your business goals.
For Instagram, you’ll want to look at your top performing posts and engagement.
–> Ask yourself: What platforms should I be focusing on in the New Year? What can I do to leverage content already on other platforms, such as a blog?
Do some further research on brands who are doing a great job, and adjust your strategy to do more of what’s working, eliminate what’s not, and try out some new techniques to continue testing.
It’s totally normal to go through an auditing process and get frustrated that you didn’t perform as well as you hoped. Instead of getting discouraged, remember that a lot of “going viral” is luck – and it’s important to keep trying new things and see it as an experiment.
Sometimes content that is quick to produce can be more effective than content that took hours to create. And even more importantly, sometimes you can’t force results. Just keep putting content out there, and something you’re not seeing results on now could still do well in the future.
It takes time to get visibility sometimes, and that’s just part of content creation and marketing!
