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Here is an example of a grouped keyword analysis prepared by Dave Chaffey for a garden centre.

Developing keyword analysis

Keyword analysis is really the domain of SEO Managers and analysts, so if you have one in your company you may want them to oversee the process or at least advise on it. Entire books have been written on keyword analysis.

If you want a different perspective, beyond the Smart Insights search marketing guides, the following online articles are recommended:

rr SEOMoz - Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Keyword Research rr John Doherty – Minimum Viable Keyword Research

rr Distilled - Determining Site Architecture from Keyword Research

Forming personas

rr Q. Audience personas defined for content consumers?

Through this process, you will gauge what your audience are doing, what they think about your brand and how they are searching for content in your vertical. With this information, you will be able to create personas – fictional characters created to represent the difference audience types to help understand your content needs.

See the Smart Insights customer persona toolkit for examples and advice on creating personas.

For instance, from the information you’ve pooled from your research, you could have a snapshot as below:

This in itself is more of an audience snapshot that a persona. To develop a persona, we need to delve deeper into possible audience behaviour and their preferences into a series of ‘stories’. Using the snapshot above, we could create the following:

þþ Rob is a 25 year old web designer who lives in Leeds. He works for a small design firm with 10 employees.

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þþ He has a girlfriend and has been going out with her for a year, but lives in Headingley with three other friends from university.

þþ His main passion is music, and he goes to a gig at least once a fortnight. He rarely goes to nightclubs but goes to the pub once a week.

þþ He isn’t particularly active, and rarely partakes in physical exercise. However, he is not overweight.

þþ He remains in debt from his student days, but is not anxious about when it is paid off. þþ He spends about £100 a month on clothes.

This persona should be entirely believable, and it can inform choices you make later in your content marketing strategy. If you were a fashion e-commerce website, for instance, using this persona could inform your content as follows:

rr It should suggest products that are within a budget of £100 a month.

rr It should regularly relate to being young and relatively free to spend time as you like, particularly the excitement of live music.

rr Content should be well formatted and sit within a creative design scheme – since this persona has an eye for good design.

It is useful to start with at least two potential personas, and ask questions around their anxieties and preferences. When you get into their mind set, you can answer important questions about what content they are most likely to engage with.

Audience research recap

Getting a firm understanding of your current and potential audience is an essential component of an effective content marketing strategy, you may be able to find out more about who you are talking to, and who you want to talk to, from the following:

rr What do you already know? Do you have brand guidelines, sales figures, market research and other pockets of data already in your business?

rr Website Analytics – Where is your current audience coming from, through which sources and what are they doing? What is the segmentation of your email database?

rr Social Media Analysis – Use Followerwonk and Facebook Insights to find out more on the demographics of your social media followings.

rr Social Media Responses – What are your audience saying about you? Check social media comments, website comments and create polls, forms and surveys to gain greater insight on how your audience really feels about your brand and your content.

rr Key Influencers – Who are the most important influencers in your vertical? Draw up a list of 20 key people you would like to connect with.

rr Keyword Analysis – How are people searching within your vertical? Use the Google

Keyword tool to find relevant searches and volumes.

rr Create Personas – Using your research, create an audience snapshot and then at least two personas, creating believable stories from the information in the snapshot.

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Technique 2

Establishing communication standards

Your research will lead you to important insights into how you can best communicate with your audience. You now need to understand your company’s credibility and how it wants to be perceived at a general level.

Making this clear to writers and content creators through a brand essence, message architecture and editorial style guide is the subject of this section.

Strategy recommendation Define brand and editorial style guides

This is a familiar approach in large company corporate communications and publishing, but the advent of blogs and content marketing means that every organisation should use one.

Defining a brand essence

rr Q. Brand essence reviewed and defined?

A brand essence is a document that informs the overall personality of a content marketing strategy (or a brand). All further planning with communication goals, or deviations to strategy, should refer to the brand essence, as it will help suggest what to do next.

Brand essences can vary, but it could include the following categories:

rr How it makes me feel – the emotional benefits of the content for the audience. rr What it says about me – how the audience interprets themselves with the content.

rr Functional benefits – what the content gives the audience beyond emotional responses. rr Audience personality

rr Facts/Icons/Truths – the audience’s ideals and aspirations. rr Product/content – what the audience wants from the content.

rr Core Values – words and phrases associated with the brand essence. rr Essence – a single statement that captures the brand.

Best Practice Tip 2 Define the brand voice through a “mood grid”

The mood grid consists of positive (and negative) ways of describing a brand through it’s content and design style. You can perform an initial review of brand tone of voice (including negatives) and then define a future positive style.

Often the best way to agree and define the brand essence is through a ‘closed’ card sort.1

You should list about 100 adjectives and place them on a table. Some examples of terms to use in the sort are given below2:

1  See p.4, Donna Spencer, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (2009, Rosenfield Media) for the more on the difference between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ card sorts. Simply put, an open sort allows sorters to group cards and then label these groups once the sort has been completed. In a closed sort, the categories are pre-determined with labels.

2  See p.30, Margot Bloomstein, Content Strategy at Work, (2012, Morgan Kaufmann).

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For further guidance and more ideas, see this Smart Insights post from Daniel Rowles on

Defining your Brand Voice.

Gather stakeholders to sort out the cards according to the categories. The objective is to arrive at a single defining statement. This can be a difficult process with large groups, and it is recommended not to go beyond three people per sort. There are regular debates and disagreements in this process, and it can take a few attempts to get right.

The brand essence is normally drawn out on an onion layered chart, with the essence at the centre:

More examples of brand models are available in this Smart Insights Guide to Completing a Brand audit.

Establishing a Message Architecture

rr Q. Messaging architecture defined?

According to Margot Bloomstein in Content Strategy at Work, a message architecture is “An outline or hierarchy of communication goals that reflects a common vocabulary.”3 Having a brand essence makes creating a message architecture relatively straightforward, as you are likely to extract key elements from this document to define your message architecture.

The core values of a brand essence for a creative agency that is also a networking hub might be: þþ Networking

þþ Inspiring

þþ Creative

þþ Innovative

3  P.27, Bloomstein, Content Strategy at Work.

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And the essence for such a group could be:

“Inspiring creativity across London”

These are inspirational words and statements, most likely referred to by employees when thinking of the company or in communications. However, they are not very specific or actionable – particularly not in the context of copywriters wondering how to talk to an audience. They also don’t give any order of priority.

Thus a message architecture can be created to define the communication and order its priority. The structure of this can be in primary and secondary messaging:

þþ Primary message: The most important thing you want your user to know or feel after viewing your content.

þþ Secondary messages: a group of messages that support the primary message and provide further context.4

Drawing on the values stated above, a message architecture could be as follows:

þþ Inspiring Creativity

þþ Drawing on any sources that we think our audience can use to inspire them þþ Showcasing network talent.

þþ Funny but Focused

þþ Humorous but not random.

þþ Tells jokes where jokes are due, but don’t go off on tangents. þþ Don’t make fun of people’s submissions or work.

þþ Innovative

þþ A focus on the new.

þþ Don’t give into hype! Explain why new is good in real world terms.

Updated Design and Written Communication based on defined style

rr Q. Revised brand messaging incorporated into site design style and content?

Combining a message architecture and a brand essence will mean any content creators will be able to get a steer on how they should communicate, whether they be designers, writers or in other media.

For instance, it could inform website design and typography – if something is proposed that seems irrelevant to the secondary message of funny but focused, then it shouldn’t be applied. For instance, greyscale colour schemes using a boxed layout is unlikely to

work – while brighter colours, perhaps with splashes and curved edges is more likely to be applicable.

4  P.107, Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach, Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd edition, (2012, New Riders).

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The Eloqua blog gives a good example of this. It’s not simply “The Eloqua blog”, but supports their brand through the branding “All About Revenue”.

You can see that other aspects of the messaging architecture are defined through the panel in the right sidebar.

Creating an Editorial Style Guide

rr Q. Online editorial style guide created?

The final part of creating your content standards is to create an editorial style guide – a central document that content creators will ultimately refer to when producing content. This should certainly include a statement including the message architecture at the beginning, but may also provide the following:

þþ Headline writing – how are headlines capitalised? How should stop words or keywords be used in them?

þþ Use of punctuation – for instance do you use single quotation marks: ‘Hello’ or speech marks: “Hello”.

þþ Application of SEO – how writers should use keywords within content and link to other documents.

þþ CMS usage – defining various fields (which could be viewed as extraneous) in the content management system and explaining why they are important and should be filled out.

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þþ Formatting – paragraph length, subheadings and multimedia usage.

þþ Platform usage – how to write on specific platforms, for instance on the blog, website copy or email.

The key to this guide is to create a guide which can deliver consistency. It can be very confusing to users to see articles in different formats, with no clear consistency of how they should read articles or potentially navigation through the website via content. Inconsistency will most likely lead to higher bounce rates and poor engagement.

Writing a guide to grammar should be unnecessary – when you hire content creators, they should be expected to have a good grip on this. It also does not need to run into tens of pages. Keeping it between 10-20 is recommended.

The following sources are useful for creating an editorial style guide:

þþ The Guardian Style Guide – A well established guide which shows how common terms relevant to your audience and sector should be standardised

þþ Mailchimp’s Voice and Tone – an online guide for writers of this email service provider, always with user sentiment and Mailchimp’s response.

þþ The Yahoo Style Guide5 – there is a short online guide, but there is also a c.500 page guide which claims to be ‘The ultimate sourcebook for writing, editing and creating content for the digital world.’ Because it is so comprehensive, it can be an extremely useful resource if you are creating your own style guide.

þþ The Elements of Style6 – initially written as an inhouse style guide for Cornell University in 1918, this book little book is a timeless reference to writers for punctuation and grammar.

Establishing Communication Standards Recap

Establishing communications standards will assist you in creating consistency in content. In a multiplatform web where audiences may come across your brand from numerous touch points, it is important to have a clear and consistent voice, else your consumers may feel somewhat confused about what you are saying.

rr Brand Essence – use the table provided and a card sort to create core values and an essence for your brand. This may take a number of attempts, but it is important to reach something that all stakeholders are happy with.

rr Message Architecture – using the brand essence, create a hierarchy of messaging, explaining the tone and style of primary and secondary messages. This should inform all content and design.

rr Editorial Style Guide – create a guide for editors and content creators to refer to, including house style around punctuation, headlines and formatting.

5  Chris Barr (editor), The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for The Digital World, (2010, St. Martin’s Griffin).

6  William Strunk JR. and E.B White, The Elements of Style, (4th Edition, 1999, Longman).

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Technique 3

Content Auditing

In most digital marketing disciplines, starting a project or campaign begins by ‘looking under the hood’ of what is working and what isn’t. When creating a content marketing strategy, checking what you already have and assessing its viability to be maintained, repurposed or even removed is a necessity.

I see content auditing as a two stage process:

rr Quantitative Audit: The process of finding out what sits where.

rr Qualitative Audit: The process of what to ‘why?’ and checking for standards.

The objective is to assess all – or as much as practical – content for its viability and usefulness in a new strategy. On new sites, this may not be entirely necessary, but on larger legacy sites, it is essential. By following the methods below, the process can be streamlined, and you can have a meaningful set of audit documents that can be a vital reference for later in your strategy. For every five hours you spend on auditing, you might save twenty at a later stage.

Combining Content Audits with On-page Search Engine Optimisation

A content marketing audit is closely linked to an SEO audit. SEO practitioners doing a thorough job of an onsite audit will normally include crucial ‘on-page’ elements in their list of fixes. This might include the following which are covered in our guide:

þþ Inclusion of headlines (<h1>) þþ Use of subtitles (<h2> or <h3>)

þþ 250+ words of body copy giving appropriate context to the web document

þþ Formatting of the copy, using strong, italics or - most importantly for SEO – hyperlinks to other documents.

Strategy Recommendation 2 Combine content auditing with SEO audits where possible

Since good on-page SEO is effectively creating good content with the correct HTML markup, it makes good sense to combine Content and SEO techniques during the audit process. There are also a number of useful SEO tools and assessment methods that can be incorporated into the content marketing audit process.

Here we will describe a three step approach to content auditing.

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Phase One: Content gather through crawling

rr Q. Content crawled to enable categorisation and review of effectiveness?

Since most commercial websites are large (with at least 1,000 pages), manually auditing everything can cost significant time.

Best Practice Tip 3 Use automated crawlers to help with content audits

A useful ‘shortcut’ in creating audit documents is to use a crawler to check URLs throughout the site.

This does not replace the need for human assessment, but will streamline the first phase of getting all of your URLs in one place.

There are a number of crawlers traditionally used for SEO auditing that can be used in this process:

þþ SeoMoz Campaign Tool – gives a range of options alongside crawling (which can take up to a week) that may be useful in a content marketing strategy, including keyword tracking, Google Analytics and social data integration. From $99 a month.

þþ Xenu Link Sleuth – created to help webmasters find broken links, you can also use it to check URLs. You can send it into your website upon download, and it’s free.

þþ Screaming Frog – similar to Xenu, but with some extra features (such as on-page information like <h1> and <h2> tags). It’s free up to 500 URLs, a license for larger crawls is £99 a year.

Creating a tabbed category spreadsheet

Whichever crawling tool you choose, you’re simply looking to be able to create a spreadsheet which categorises URLs and has some onpage data. Normally you will be able to categorise pages by URL strings – simply filter pages by URL strings containing common keywords and copy them onto a new sheet per category.

Note: There may be some URLs with strings not suitable for categorisation, such as search results that have been mistakenly crawled or dynamic pages that aren’t appropriate to assess in a content audit. As this stage put them in their own tab – it may be useful to see the quantity of these pages, or find out exactly why and how they have been recorded in a crawl.

Thus you might have tabs like so:

You should be able to carry at least the following information into the new sheets as you do so:

þþ Address þþ Title

þþ Description

Potential caveats with using crawlers

Using a crawler to find URLs and categorise may not be possible for the following

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reasons:

þþ The site is badly structured.

þþ There is no indication of categories in keywords or titles.

þþ Site navigation is built in JavaScript or Flash; in both cases a crawl will be impossible.

In these cases, you will almost certainly need to do the audit manually.

On Wordpress sites, categorisation often has little to do with URL strings. In this case, it’ll be necessary to crawl each of the various category URLs only – for instance www.

carsoncontent.com/blog/category/content-strategy/. Simply place each individual crawl on a separate tab.

Assigning Unique IDs

Having split the URLs into categories, it is necessary to give them a Unique ID. This process will be speeded up by categorisation and is an important reference point during the Qualitative Audit.

In the sheet, create a column at the far left hand side of each sheet, then assign each page a Unique ID. Thus, the table should look like this:

Note: If you’ve had to manually check over the site you should assign the Unique ID according as you are inputting information into the spreadsheet.

Phase Two: Quantitative Audit

rr Q. Data collected used to create a quantitative audit of different content categories?

This is the phase where you’re looking for to define the amount of content per category, potentially with subcategories. It can be seen as quite top level, as you don’t necessarily have to dive into the site to get an overall picture.

Reviewing the popularity of content categories and types rr Q. Relative popularity of content types reviews?

Since you should have all of your URLs categorised into separate tabs on a spreadsheet, it will be easy to count how many are in each category. Place each category count into a table.

Then you should go into your analytics package and check how many pageviews each category has (again through keyword filtering using URL strings), then put this in the table as well.

What you should end up with is a table that can create a two axis graph, which should give a snapshot of how much content is in which section, and how many pageviews that content is getting:

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