The Content Inventory and Google Analytics for Small-Medium Websites
A friend, Aaron, had an unconventional start to his SEO content writing career. Instead of completing the usual agency stint or going for classes, he spent his daylight hours pouring over the posts from ‘pro’ content writers, until said hours aged into night, and even then he didn’t stop. Plus1 for dedication. "Five tips that’ll make you a better writer", "Why you SHOULDN’T starts your sentences with…", "The ultimate SEO writer’s guide" and similar hype-riddled titles constituted the bulk of his mental fodder. In retrospect, Aaron says, he’d have been better off going for a coffee, and just observing people. Writing is a people thing.
His story isn’t an unfamiliar one. We’ve all done the same thing one way or another, even in our interpersonal relationships: getting stuck on trivial points, instead of seeing the bigger picture. Can’t see the forest for the trees is an idiom that illustrates this perfectly. It applies to websites, too.
Apropos websites, how do you take a step back to plan the road ahead to better content, increased visitor engagement, and, ultimately, better conversion?
Here’s our take on the matter…
Know what you’ve got
Aaron would have reached his goal quicker had he kept an objective view on his progress, and how it related to his aim of becoming a good writer. Unfortunately it’s not as easy with a skill you need to develop, as it is with a website.
A content inventory is a spreadsheet that details the top-down logical structure of a website. It makes it much easier to know what you have, than working from memory. Starting with the main menu, it lists page titles, URLs, internal links, and, in terms of SEO, keywords used on individual pages.
The Information Architecture Institute’s content inventory (RiceContentInventory 6.6MB) template is a good example of a website that has been inventoried for ease of management. The ‘Content Inventory’ tab at the bottom details aifia.org’s individual pages that make up the website structure. Whether you’re familiar with aifia.org or not, this sheet makes it easy to see how their website is structured, and where the different links on each page point to – invaluable when you’re working with an SEO strategy.
Feel free to use the template above, or create your own.
Make decisions based on visitor behaviour
At a Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that, today, we create as much information every two days, as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003. Impressive. But there’s a good reason for that: increased competition from similar businesses means that we have to do more to get the attention of our audiences – give them the information they love. A content inventory can help you manage your website with greater efficiency, but it can’t help you make accurate decisions on it’s own; creating on-target briefs for your SEO content writing service requires accurate information about your visitors.
Just like writers need to know what businesses and agencies expect from them, you’ll need to know how people use your website – which pages perform best, how long visitors stay on those pages, and where they go from there. Google Analytics is a free measurement tool that makes it easy to achieve all the above, and more. The Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting on Your Data video by Google Analytics shows how to use analytics correctly to make accurate content decisions.
When you combine the content inventory with your Google analytics data, it becomes much easier to get a bird’s eye view of your entire website, and to monitor the progress of individual pages. Adding additional columns to your inventory, ‘Visitors’ and ‘Bounce Rates, for instance, makes it easy to compare individual pages, and to identify those that perform well.
From there the road to online success should be a little easier – give your visitors more of the content they love, and you’ll increase your potential for better audience engagement, and conversion. And if ever you’re stuck in the detail again, just think about Aaron – one of the better content writers around today.