Content is key when it comes to building brand recognition for any hotel website, blog or social media channel – auditing it can reveal areas for improvement that drive bookings forward.
Attaining this goal requires meticulousness and organizational skill, but using an excellent scheduling tool with analytics capabilities will make the task far simpler.
1. Review Your Sitemap
When conducting a content audit, it’s essential to narrow your focus. While this may seem counterproductive, doing so allows you to take an in-depth look at each piece of content and its performance against your goals. Once you understand exactly what those goals are, it will become much simpler to see which pieces support the strategy or might need tweaks or revamping.
Before diving in to your SEO strategy, review your XML Sitemap. This document serves as a map of all your pages and is essential to search engine optimization. To locate it quickly and efficiently, Google Search Console’s “Sitemaps” link at the top is where you should go; here, you can sort by Page Views, Priority, Date Added etc to see which of your pages is receiving more traffic.
With this data at hand, it becomes much simpler to identify which pages are not ranking well for their target keywords and why. This provides an ideal opportunity to make some small tweaks that will have a noticeable positive effect on traffic and leads.
Once again, it’s important to delve deeply into each XML sitemap entry – for instance, which URLs Google is indexing and how many pages each entry comprises. This can help identify duplicate content not being ranked and can also serve to clean up your XML sitemap and ensure all relevant pages are included.
Once you’ve gone through your XML sitemap and further classified each piece of content based on performance, composition or optimization criteria, it will give you a much clearer idea of which pieces need updating, rewriting or keeping. Start small with smaller action items before working up towards larger tasks that might necessitate an overhaul or revamp.
An important aspect of content audits, analytics are an indispensable way of connecting the dots between your efforts on social media and organic search, and your bookings and leads generated on your hotel website. Therefore it’s crucial that you monitor all relevant data so as to optimize marketing strategy and increase lead generation results.
2. Review Your Analytics
Content audits don’t just involve reviewing individual pieces of your website – they also assess its overall performance and make changes accordingly. To effectively conduct one, look closely at metrics related to your business goals; this will help identify any gaps or opportunities which exist online that aren’t being fulfilled by existing content.
For optimal results, it’s advisable to use a content audit tool which will crawl your entire website and collect key data points about each piece of content – making the task faster and more efficient than manually gathering each page or post’s stats manually. Connecting your tool of choice with an analytics account such as Google Analytics may help provide additional SEO-related data points.
Once you’ve collected and evaluated all the data and reviewed your sitemap, it’s time to categorize your content. There are a variety of approaches you can take when categorizing, but one effective method would be setting clear business goals and then matching those to relevant metrics – for instance you might divide content based on topic, buyer journey stage, author or word count etc. Doing this allows you to sort content more efficiently while quickly creating a plan for each piece: keep, update, rewrite or delete.
Once your analysis is complete, the next step should be creating a content strategy for every piece of your website based on the findings from your audit and how they tie back to your business goals. Once this plan has been set in motion it’s important that it remains followed regularly so as to sustain any gains that have been achieved through improvements.
Regular keyword reviews will ensure you’re still targeting the appropriate ones and prioritizing those terms that work well for your audience. They’ll also help identify any shifts in search trends so you can adapt accordingly – ultimately keeping the success of your content going.
3. Review Your Keywords
Utilizing tools such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs can provide the data necessary for an effective content audit, but it’s important to keep in mind that such projects require considerable time and resources – it is wiser to set time-bound tasks and concentrate on finding impactful pieces first.
Start by reviewing your top landing pages, such as blogs or forms, then use your sitemap to identify them all and see which keywords they rank for – then edit these pages accordingly to target these search terms and improve SEO performance.
Once you’ve collected all of the data necessary, it’s time to review your content inventory in a spreadsheet. Categorizing each piece based on its goals (for instance revenue generation, traffic generation or brand promotion).
Add columns for each piece of content you produce in order to gauge its metrics, such as pageviews, keywords and social media mentions. You might also track backlinks and keyword density on every page.
Once you’ve reviewed the results of your content audit, it’s time to decide how best to treat each piece. For instance, a poorly performing blog post could require either revision or removal altogether; alternatively, creating new pages or posts covering its topic more effectively might be more suitable.
Conducting a content audit may seem daunting, but every accommodation business should invest the time in conducting one. Doing so will allow you to identify strengths and weaknesses as well as maximize resources so you can further develop your marketing strategy and meet growth objectives. Kelsey Raymond serves as COO at Intero Digital – a 350-person marketing agency offering comprehensive services including content marketing, web design & development, Amazon promotion services, social media management, video production & graphic design – she is currently COO for Intero Digital’s content team.
4. Review Your Social Media
After reviewing the results of your content audit, it’s essential to devise a plan for moving forward. Take advantage of insights gained through analysis to enhance website performance and attract more visitors by applying your findings directly.
Start by compiling a spreadsheet with all your pages and posts listed by URL, description and any relevant metrics. It would also be wise to organize content based on type/form/author, buyer’s journey stage etc to speed up and simplify audit process more quickly and efficiently. This will make audit process faster and less chaotic overall.
Once all your information is organized, evaluate each piece of content to see if it meets its goals effectively. If certain articles or pages are not performing well, changes could include altering their writing style or repurposing for other uses; such as turning an in-depth blog article that drives lots of traffic but no bookings into short lead generation posts that can be shared on social media to boost conversion rates.
Review your social media to identify which channels are working for you and link your analytics tools with those accounts, analyzing data collected therein and developing a targeted marketing plan for your accommodation website based on this insight.
If you haven’t established such a tool already, give one some consideration. Such tools can help you analyze and compare the performance of different pages and posts as well as highlight keywords that are underperforming. They can also show you the number of clicks and impressions each post or page has received to assess whether it is working effectively.
Make sure to test the mobile usability of your website to ensure it can easily be navigated on mobile devices and avoid losing potential guests. This will allow for a smooth user experience on these platforms and could save you from potential guests being turned away from visiting.