Website content remains one of the most successful ways of attracting traffic to your site and converting your visitors into patients, customers, and clients. 99 times out of 100, there are opportunities for you to add more content to your site to acquire and convert more traffic. How can you discover these opportunities? Ask yourself this: what questions and concerns do your patients, customers, and clients have? If there are any your website doesn’t address in-depth, those are gaps that can be filled in with accurate and reliable content.
Identifying Opportunities for New Content: The Process
At Now Media Group, we are often asked to analyze a website and consult on new content opportunities. We accomplish this through a content audit, a comprehensive analysis of your website and how well it speaks to what your visitors are seeking. Key to a successful content audit is stepping into the shoes of your patients: what kind of information are they seeking; what are their intentions? Looking at your site from the perspective of a visitor, we first look at the content your site already has and we answer the following questions:
- Is the existing content unique?
- Is it optimized?
- Does the content speak to the visitor’s needs or is it general or vague?
- Do multiple pages talk about the same topic and, if they do, should these pages be consolidated?
- How are these pages ranking for the keywords and/or search queries they’re intending to target?
- Is the content structured in a way that makes it easy to find once the visitor has arrived to your website?
By looking at your existing content first, we can see what your website does right and we can offer suggestions on how to improve what you already have. If you have analytics data, we can use it to look at how visitors are behaving once they arrive on your site — their behavior can speak volumes on how well the content is addressing their needs.
Now that we know your site well, we can start looking for new content opportunities. This is the second part of a content audit: figuring out what new content you can add to target more patients, customers, or clients who are interested in your goods and/or services. Just like in the first part of the audit, the key here is to think from the perspective of the patient or customer — what information are they looking for, how are they looking for it, and how do they want it provided?
The next step is to do a bit of keyword research. Keywords or, more accurately, search phrases are how people look for the information they seek. Your website probably targets some of these. If you’re a dental practice, for example, your site may do very well at attracting patients who search for “cosmetic dentist” in their city, but it may not do so well for patients who are searching for more specific queries, like “porcelain crowns” or even “am I a candidate for porcelain crowns,” or “what are the benefits of porcelain crowns.” Those are sources of traffic — prospective new patients — that your website isn’t tapping into, because the existing content isn’t doing a good enough job of attracting these searchers.
If prospective patients or customers are searching for information on a service you can provide, but aren’t finding you, that’s a good sign that you need to add new content. Coming back to the dentistry example about porcelain crowns: if you’re looking for new patients in this area, but aren’t showing up for certain search queries, you can add content tailored to these queries that would stand a better chance of being found. For instance, suppose that you aren’t drawing from prospective patients trying to figure out whether they are a candidate for the treatment. You can add a page on what makes a good candidate and what kind of factors would make one a non-candidate.
While conducting a Now Media Group content audit we look for these unaddressed search queries and recommend a content strategy that will allow you to tap into that source of new traffic to your website. We do this exhaustively and comprehensively, providing you with a list of opportunities you can take advantage of. Depending on your business goals, you can then pick and choose what content to add depending on the type of patients or customers you’re looking to attract, and the goods and/or services you’re looking to promote.
As you can see, the general idea behind adding new content is to capture a larger audience — an audience that is still customized to the needs of your business, but one that isn’t so small that you are missing out on patients and customers that otherwise would have never known about your services. If you are not tapping into these sources of traffic, adding content can correct this limitation in your online marketing strategy.
Is Your Website Performing?
Interested in getting more out of your investment? Starting with a complimentary analysis, at Now Media Group we can help gauge your website’s performance and we can help you determine whether a content audit would identify opportunities for growth. Contact us at Now Media Group to speak to your consultant and start the process towards a stronger, more efficient online marketing strategy.