How To

How to Do a Content Analysis in 5 Steps in 2023

Most professionals realize content writing is necessary for a successful digital marketing campaign, but too many overlook the importance of content analysis. While writing engaging and unique website content is a great first step, you can do more to succeed in the world of digital marketing. Your content strategy should constantly evolve to keep up with your audience’s changing needs. 

Content analysis is an essential marketing tool that allows you to monitor your content’s success and identify gaps in your strategy — as well as improve your SEO content. You can gain powerful insights into how well your content is performing while finding ways to improve its overall impact. 

Looking to implement content analysis into your marketing campaign? Keep reading to learn more about what content analysis is, why it’s important and how you can do a successful content analysis. 

What is content analysis?

Content analysis is a marketing technique that evaluates your content’s performance. Experts use several criteria to analyze content for impact, including:

• Relevance.
• SEO value.
• Accuracy and consistency. 
• Brand awareness.
• Sales volume.
• Audience engagement. 
• Lead generation.

Marketers use content analysis as a valuable tool to see if the content is delivering the intended message and meeting its primary objectives. 

Content marketing has progressed a lot since the days of keyword stuffing. Powerful copy must now match user intent while aligning with your brand’s voice, vision and strategy.  

Why is content analysis important?

We know content analysis helps you better understand your business’s content strategy, but why is it important? 

Content analysis is a flexible and cost-effective way of collecting and understanding data. The main benefits of content analysis include the ability to:

• Understand key metrics: Tools like SEMrush, Moz, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console provide metrics you can use to measure your content’s success and engagement levels. Content analysis allows you to understand those metrics and take actions to improve them.
• Create a new content strategy: Content analysis helps you identify your top-performing posts and create an effective editorial calendar for a new campaign. You can easily see what type of content works best for your audience and focus on creating more of it.
• Optimize past content: Analyzing past content for optimization opportunities can save you time and resources. Content analysis helps you identify brand inconsistencies, broken links, obsolete information, poorly optimized title tags, and errors in SEO.
• Repurpose content: Content repurposing is a great way to improve your content’s visibility, but it’s most effective when you identify and use your best-performing pieces. 
• Find gaps in your strategy: Content analysis helps you identify gaps in your marketing strategy by analyzing your competitors’ content. You can see how their pieces perform and determine if they rank for any keywords you’re missing out on. You can then revise your content lifecycle management based on what you learn.

Bonus reading: Learn about the value of pillar pages for SEO!

5 steps to conducting content analysis

Now that you know the basics of content analysis, let’s look at how you can implement it. These five steps will provide you with content analysis best practices to help you gather key metrics and your content strategy performance.

1. Select your content

Start by using a spreadsheet to collect your published content and its associated data. Take detailed notes about how often you publish content, what type of content you typically post and how that content should benefit your target audience. You can also separate your content by type, including blogs posts, infographics and longform articles.

2. Determine which metrics matter 

The metrics you focus on will depend on your marketing and business objectives. Decide which metrics matter most for your content strategy. Possible metrics can include website visitors, bounceback rates, social media shares, sales volume and audience engagement. 

3. Start the analysis 

Once you’ve selected your content, compiled the relevant data and decided on the most important key metrics, you can start your analysis. Use a free program like Google Analytics or Yoast’s SEO plugin to collect data associated with each piece of content. Compare and contrast similar content to develop a well-rounded perspective on what works best for your audience. You can also see what content type outperforms the rest.

4. Ask your audience 

While key metrics can provide valuable insights about your content’s performance, they’re not the only way to complete an analysis. You can also ask your audience to give feedback on your content and how they engage with your website. Businesses can gather valuable information from audience feedback that’s harder to collect from metrics. 

5. Revamp your marketing plan

Once you’ve collected and analyzed your data, you should better understand your current content strategy. You can then use that information to determine which content works well and which you should adjust. You can also make any necessary improvements to your content management workflow to optimize your publication processes going forward.

Who should do a content analysis?

If your business creates content to attract new customers, increase sales and drive traffic to your site, you should conduct a content analysis. Regardless of your company size, content analysis allows you to discover new opportunities to improve your campaign’s effectiveness and increase brand awareness. 

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