Do you know what is the best performing blog post, eBook, webinar, video, social media post or other content you’ve created over the last couple of years? Are you optimizing your best performing content?
Larry Kim advocates taking that great content — the top 1 percent or unicorn content — and making unicorn babies out of it.
We chatted with Larry in the spring of 2017 about doubling down on your unicorn content and ignoring the donkeys, or worse performing content. Since our conversation, an estimated 1.4 billion posts have been published, according to WordPress.com stats and a little math.
I am guessing not all of those were unicorns or unicorn babies.
As we start out the new year with new or renewed content strategies, marketing plans, and so forth, it is a good time to go back and listen to Larry’s interview and get his recipe for making unicorn babies.
Optimizing your best performing content
By now you’re 2019 marketing to-do list already seem unattainable, but I want to add a few more. Dive into your analytics and identify your top website traffic and other content and see what you can do over the next month to squeeze a little more juice from it, and in the process consider ways you can replicate that unicorn magic.
Things to look for:
- The 3 best-performing website pages for revenue or leads
- The 3 website pages most likely to make the jump from page 2 of the Google search results to page 1
- The 3 website pages with high traffic and a high bounce rate
- The 3 website pages with high traffic and low conversion rates
What to look for as you optimize your content
Once you’ve got your target list of pages, the optimization work begins. There’s a number of things to check, tweak, and test:
The content itself:
- Is the content current or can it be updated?
- Are the images optimized?
- Is this content missing any important parts or aspects that need to be added?
- If it’s an in-house piece, has the author left your company?
Call to action
- Is there a more relevant offer for the call to action?
- What keywords are visitors using to find this page? Do those searches line up with the content and the call to action on the page? (See your Google Search Console account for this data.)
Links:
- For the internal links, are they pointing to pages you want to send traffic to (think content clusters)? Is the call to action working well?
- Check out all the external and internal links and make sure they still are relevant and work (for example a report you’re citing may have been updated to a more recent year)
- Is the on-page SEO for this page optimized?
- Is the title tag properly optimized?
- Is the page mobile friendly?
- Does this page load as fast as possible? (check those image sizes)
Reformatting/repurposing:
- Could this content be re-formatted, then re-published on other platforms, including social media?
For more information on how to optimize your best performing content, you’re in luck. I wrote a post about how to breathe new life into your old content.