Content performance audit

What a content performance audit is

A content performance audit judges every published page on its figures and nothing else. What it attracts, whether that is going up or down, and whether anybody who lands on it goes on to do business with you. The output is one scored spreadsheet and a short list of what to do about the bottom and the middle of it.

It does not read the pages. Nothing in it says whether the writing is clear, whether the facts are current or whether it sounds like you. That is the content audit, which does both jobs and costs more. This is the numbers-only slice, for businesses that have plenty of content and no idea which of it is working.

When you need one

It is the right piece of work in three situations. You are publishing steadily and want to know whether any of it is paying, before committing another year of budget. You suspect traffic is slipping but cannot say which pages are doing the slipping. Or you are deciding what to cut and want the decision made on evidence rather than on who wrote what.

You do not need this if your site is small and you already know the figures are thin. Nothing is learned from scoring twelve pages that nobody visits. A gap analysis is the better purchase there, because the problem is what has not been written rather than what has.

What gets measured

Every page gets the same four readings, taken from your own analytics and search data, which you give me read access to for the duration.

• What it attracts now. Visits and entrances over the last twelve months, and how many of them arrived at that page first rather than wandering in.
• The direction. The page compared against itself a year earlier. This is the reading that finds decay, and it is invisible on any dashboard that shows only the current month.
• What it leads to. Whether visits to the page are followed by an inquiry, a signup, a call or a sale, as far as your setup can tell. Where it cannot tell, the audit says so rather than guessing.
• What it costs to keep. Pages that need maintaining, checking or updating are noted, because a page earning nothing and needing work every quarter is worse than one that just sits there.

Where the measurement itself is broken, that becomes a finding rather than a guess. A site with no record of what a contact form leads to cannot be scored on sales, and the report says which readings are solid and which are the best that the current setup allows.

What you get

The scored sheet. One row per page, the four readings above, and a band: earning, flat, decaying, or never earned. Sortable, and yours. It is the same shape as an inventory with the figures added, so it slots straight into work you have had done before.

The short report. Three to five pages. The decaying pages first, because they are the ones where acting quickly still recovers something. Then the pages that earn well enough to be worth protecting. Then the ones that have never earned anything, grouped so the decision about them can be made in one sitting rather than one at a time.

The call. Forty-five minutes going through the bands with whoever will act on them.

A worked example

An illustration. An Ottawa software trainer has 118 published pages. The audit finds 9 pages earning almost everything, 22 flat, 14 decaying and 73 that have never earned a visit worth counting. Of the 14 decaying, 11 are guides written three and four years ago that were the strongest pages on the site and have been sliding steadily since.

The report puts those 11 at the top, because a guide that used to do well and is fading is the cheapest thing on any site to rescue. The 73 dead pages are dealt with as a single decision rather than 73. Nothing in the report says whether any of those pages is well written, and the trainer does not need it to: the question asked was which pages pay, and the answer was eleven of them are still worth saving.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What counts as a result for you, and what you are considering cutting. No charge.
2. Access. Read-only access to analytics and search data, going back far enough to allow a year-on-year comparison.
3. The work. Four to six working days for a site under 200 pages. Larger sites, or sites where the tracking has to be repaired first, are quoted after the call.
4. Delivery and walkthrough. The sheet and the report arrive the day before the call.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call, because the work depends on how many pages there are and how trustworthy the existing measurement is. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts. The full content audit, which covers both the figures and the reading, is published at $450 CAD on the pricing page; for many small sites that is the sensible purchase, and I will say so on the call if it is.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The decaying pages go into a refresh plan that says exactly what to change on each. The dead ones go into pruning, deleted or merged with redirects. And the scoring gets repeated, either by you or as monthly decay analysis, so the next slide is caught while it is still cheap. The audit is complete on its own and none of that is assumed.