The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Up Content Creation

Why Scale Content Creation

In today’s competitive content marketing landscape, scaling content is a key success factor. A regular content publishing schedule, combined with the right quality checks, makes it easy to build devoted content followers, an essential for getting recurring business. 

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 64% of content marketers said their greatest educational need is understanding how to create a scalable content strategy:

As soon as the publishing frequency goes up, content marketers often find it hard to maintain quality. Here’s why you need to focus on both content quality and quantity.

• Search engines are continually looking to improve the quality of search results.
• The audience is submerged in a sea of content; they’re looking to follow content that’s unique and insightful.

This guide will show you how businesses can develop a content creation workflow that makes scaling a child’s play (with the quality checks, of course).

Start With Keyword Research

Before building a tall six-month plan, start with the foundation. Keyword research is the first step to creating search-friendly and audience-centric content. In this section, let’s understand how to align the keyword research process while scaling up content.

The evolution of search engines means more focus on intent-based search results. Also, searchers are using longer, conversational voice queries.

Take a look at these examples.

• Find me cheap hotels in san jose
• Best lunch places in san jose

As a content marketer, you need to focus on the intent and context of the search terms. That’s your key to audience-centric and searchable content creation.

It’s as easy as this:

When you’re still building niche authority, you want to start by targeting longer tail, more accessible keywords. Segment keywords based on the user-intent and customer journey stage—here are some quick examples:

Keyword	Customer Lifecycle Stage	Intent
lead generation strategies	Problem Awareness	Informational
best marketing automation tools	Solution Awareness	Informational
hubspot vs salesforce	Solution Comparison	Informational
hubspot price	Decision	Commercial
hubSpot guide	Retention	Informational

The ultimate goal is to go after higher search volume and competitive keywords, but you can start with the low-hanging fruits. Once you have a bucket list of keywords, you can start creating a content calendar.

Build Up a Content Calendar

Simply put, a content calendar helps get an overview of your publishing schedule. It lets you decide what goes out when. It’s a six-month content plan. Let’s now learn about this crucial next step of the content creation process.

• One of the first steps is to convert keywords into topics and content headlines. 
• Create monthly topic segments or content campaigns. Pick up a topic cluster and dedicate one whole month to it.
• Choose a content format for each topic—it could be a blog post, an infographic or a video. 
• Add a column that tells about the status of a content piece. 
• Include a tentative publishing date. 
• Add responsibilities to writers, editors, designers, SEO specialists and social media executives.

Plan and manage branded content creation with this well-designed template

Get Your Free Content Strategy Template

As you start scaling content creation, having a schedule becomes necessary for tracking progress. It organizes your content creation efforts and paves the way for newer content initiatives.

Create An Editorial Guideline

An editorial guideline is a document that helps make branded content stand out like a rockstar. It includes the brand guideline and the style sheet; works as a ready reckoner for content creators. In this section, let’s understand how to infuse an editorial guideline into the content creation process.

a. Create a Distinct Brand Voice

When creating content, you want to make it unique. Start with the following questions:

• What are some of the vital content gaps in the industry?
• What makes your brand different from the competition?
• How does your business change the lives of the audience?
• What are some of the fundamental brand values?
• What emotions do you wish to evoke with branded content?
• What is the goal of branded content?

A voice gives a distinct flavour to branded content. It connects with the audience. With a consistent voice, the readers know what to expect from every new content piece. 

For instance, when we think of Redbull, we think of words like extreme sports, adventure, excitement.

Plus, a consistent voice adds to the conversion rate.

Take these steps to carve a unique brand voice:

1. Brainstorm with the team and the founding members about the brand’s overarching purpose.

2. Create a voice chart that talks about the core values and how to steep them in branded content. 

Include a content mission statement. You can take a look at this example of writing goals from MailChimp:

b. Formulate the Text Style Sheet 

Roughly 45% of a brand’s image can be attributed to what a brand says and how it says it.

Besides creating content that’s on-brand, you need to maintain consistency in the writing style. For instance, it creates a terrible impression if certain words are spelt differently on different blog posts. That’s why you need to create a rulebook to define the content style, structure, and format. Here is the stuff that you need to determine:

• Usage of specific punctuations like the Oxford comma.
• Rules for capitalizing headlines and subheadings.
• Guidelines concerning the usage of specific terms and abbreviations.

• Specify details about the spaces between paragraphs and the use of visuals.
• General advice on how to simplify industry jargon.
• Communicate how to create content that works for different content platforms and formats such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media posts.
• Put down rules on how to spell and use branded terms.
• It’s vital to tell writers how they should hyperlink text. For instance, it’s better to avoid hyperlinking full sentences and go for a phrase that conveys what’s on the linked page.
• Include preferred data sources in your style sheet.

A style guide helps writers to understand the writing best practices and maintain consistency in written content. 

c. Develop a Visual Content Style Guide 

Sloppy and incompatible graphics can’t build an online brand. That’s why you need a visual content style guide. 

• Incorporate your brand logo and colour usage specifications.
• Communicate about the preferred alignment of images.
• Mention acceptable image types. Do you wish to include in-house images only, or do you allow stock photos as well?
• Specify the right way to add image sources. 
• Create or source an image size cheat sheet. It would help designers in developing images for different content platforms.
• Include details about font preferences.

Make a List of Content Quality Parameters

Most successful content marketing brands have the distinction of creating soulful content. They do it consistently and at scale. There is no place for half-hearted content. And that’s why you need to develop a set of content quality parameters.

Make sure you have them in place before you scale-up. 

Let me break this down for you.

a. Offer Real Value

Online searchers are looking for the best answers to their queries. They want the latest information. Moreover, you want to help them in every possible way. When you create content that’s useful and solves problems, you’re adding value.

• Educating the target audience is a crucial quality parameter.
• Content should be devoid of a hidden agenda or self-promotion. Be as authentic and honest as possible. 

In 2019, 90% of the most successful B2B content marketers claimed to prioritize their audience’s informational needs over their own sales/promotional message. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

b. Include Practical Advice

Online searchers aren’t looking for half-baked fluff. They’re looking for actionable advice—stuff they can quickly implement. 

• Create resources that are easy to understand.
• Divide content into step-by-step instructions. 

c. Make it Engaging

Nobody likes dull, lifeless walls of text. Make your content sweet as pie. 

• Use colourful visuals, exciting new charts, and inspiring quotes to make branded content engaging. 
• Use trending content formats like live video and IGTV to make content talk of the town. Infuse two-way interaction to entertain the audience. 

c. Create Benchmarks and Goals

As a content marketer, you can create a tailored content quality program for your brand. Here’s how:

• Find the best content pieces in your industry. Highlight some of the key reasons why these content pieces stand out. Inspire the team to match these benchmark pieces.
• One of the ways to improve content quality is to add goals against each upcoming content piece. The objectives could be in terms of rankings, traffic or shares. 

d. Write Awesome Headlines 

Headlines are the face of branded content. Unless they attract the audience to branded content, it won’t get enough click-throughs and traffic. 

• Create an impact by using power words in headlines.
• Optimize them for your key search phrases. 

Make use of a headline analyzer to iterate powerful headlines.

• Be genuine with your communication—don’t use clickbait to trick the audience. Use the headline to communicate about what’s inside and be honest.

e. Write From Your Experience

Making branded content authentic is about being yourself. Create content from personal experience, and you’ll end up being unique:

• Share anecdotes that inspire.
• Tell stories about your business. 
• Create thought-leadership content—use your expertise to go out of the way to help the audience.

Infuse the Content Outlining Process

A content outline maps out the details of a content piece. It’s an essential workflow element that enhances content creator productivity. Let’s understand how to create a simple content outlining workflow.

• Better content planning ensures lesser time spent on review and iterations. 
• Outlines help add logic to the flow of a content piece. 
• Once there’s a ready outline, the content creators need to go out there and fill in each section.

Here are some critical steps in developing a content outline:

• Add the tentative length of posts. For instance, in the case of blog posts, you need to mention the word limit. 
• Put down the list of targeted search terms.
• Start with researching the topic to understand the content scope.

• Organize your thoughts and put down critical pointers related to the topic.  
• Create a content structure document. Include sub-headings and key resources. 
• Make use of mind mapping tools to collate ideas.

You can’t expect writers to produce content from their brains. Give them the bare-bones, and they’ll be able to deliver fresh, high-quality content.

Supplement with Content Curation

Content curation is the process of finding excellent content online and sharing it with your audience. It could be sourced from anywhere and does not represent your brand. In this section, let’s learn about the importance of content curation and its use for effective content scaling.

Is Content Curation Effective? 

Content marketers are under tremendous pressure to keep the social timelines active. Content curation is a pivotal way to improve brand reach and impressions.

The strategy helps you add value to the audience and create visibility for the business. Here are some benefits of curating content:

• It helps in saving time that goes into creating new content. Plus, curators can look for information that matters most and share it with the audience in no time. 
• Content curators can identify content the audience wants and deliver it quickly. 
• Curation is a cost-effective way to produce more content. 
• Share content pieces to social networks without creating fresh ones.  

You can’t rely on curation alone, but it’s undoubtedly an excellent tactic for scaling up content production and promotion. Let’s take a look at some effective content curation strategies:

 

• Look for the best content pieces on a topic and compile an insightful newsletter. 
• Subscribe to a prominent niche newsletter to create a list of fantastic content pieces to share.
• Use BuzzSumo’s content explorer to find topical posts that are popular on social media platforms.
• Follow niche influencers on social media. Pick up content they’re sharing and save them to Pocket.
• Use Feedly to follow authority blogs in your industry. 
• Curate resources on a topic to formulate a resource listicle post. 
• Put together a list of the latest stats and industry research. 

Curate quotes from experts and famous personalities to create inspiring new blog posts. Take a look at this example from the Brain Pickings blog.

Attach an opinion snippet to the content piece. The strategy helps showcase your brand voice alongside a content piece that does not belong to your business.

Embrace Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is about using a content idea to churn out many pieces in different content formats. How awesome is that? In this section, let’s look at how to do content repurposing to improve content creation productivity.

Producing large quantities of content requires a lot of hard work. 

But here is the deal.

When you have produced a certain number of great content pieces, you can re-use them!

Sounds interesting? Keep on reading.

Have you ever wondered how some big brands publish content on so many content platforms? It’s with the help of creative and selective content repurposing.

Ways to Repurpose Branded Content 

Let me explain repurposing with the help of some examples:

• Convert a blog post into a slideshow video or a Quora answer. 
• Transcribe a video into a blog post. 
• Break down a listicle post into a brief LinkedIn update.
• Use an existing blog post and re-purpose it for a LinkedIn article or a Medium post.
• Pick up stats and quotes from blog posts and create visuals for social media updates.
• Convert YouTube videos into podcast episodes. 
• Use existing blog posts to find ideas for guest posts and vice versa. 
• Create an eBook out of a series of blog posts. 

The list goes on and on. Every content format and platform is unique, but what you convey to the audience may be quite similar on most occasions. Here are some key benefits of recycling content and using it in different forms. 

Benefits of Content Repurposing 

a. Content repurposing is a useful method to extract maximum value from high-performing content pieces.

b. It’s a creative way to tweak an existing content piece and make it look fresh.

c. As most audiences are scattered across online platforms, repurposing helps you reach out to all of them. 

d. It helps add to the scale of content production and improves production efficiency. 

Now that you know how repurposing works let’s come to the critical question—how to immerse the repurposing in your content production workflow?

The Content Repurposing Strategy

Fair enough, here are some easy steps to follow

• Find the top two monthly content pieces by traffic.
• Make a list of content formats suitable for these content ideas, such as infographics, newsletters, LinkedIn updates, etc.
• Do some research to find the latest information on those topics.
• Create a separate editorial calendar for producing and publishing the refurbished content pieces. 
• Allocate the repurposing task to a different set of writers.
• Get the team to follow the standard set of editorial guidelines.

Develop a Schedule for Content Promotion

Content promotion is an essential way to start building an audience for branded content. In this chapter, we will look at all the ways to amplify content and improve its reach.

Many marketers make the mistake of scaling up content creation only. 

And that’s when they run into trouble. Why?

That’s because you need to get the audience to find your content before they can use it or share it.

Here’s a simple truth:

Targeted and scaled content promotion is the key to optimizing the returns from content creation. 

How to Create a Content Promotion Calendar

Let’s understand how you can create a calendar for promoting branded content at scale: 

• Create a workflow to optimize content for search. Be it blog posts or YouTube videos, using the right key-phrases and similar meaning terms helps improve content searchability. 
• Use internal linking and make it easy for site visitors to find content. 
• Schedule content pieces on your social media pages. To facilitate this process, you can hire a social media team.

• Promote gated content assets like ebooks and infographics using paid campaigns on channels like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 
• Set up personalized outreach campaigns to earn links and press mentions for long-form and high performing content pieces. 
• Pitch guest posts to authority sites in your industry. Write expert articles on high-traffic sites and promote them on your social media pages. 
• Create a newsletter to deliver valuable content pieces to your contract list.

Hire Writers Who’re Niche Experts

There is no shortage of writers to help you with your content creation process. But when you’re competing with the big boys of the industry, you need to create authority content. And for that, you need writers who know your business.

What happens when you hire generic writers?

• They don’t understand the context of the topic they’re writing on. 
• Inexperienced writers have little knowledge of niche audience expectations. 
• They don’t have industry experience and can’t write like experts.

Here’s the bottom line:

Scaling up content does NOT mean recycling what’s already out there. Here’s what you need to do:

• Don’t look for mediocre writers from freelancing platforms.
• Find writers who have niche exposure and a decent portfolio.

• You can browse industry blogs to get to know writers who have by-lined pieces.
• Reach out to these writers to see if they’re interested in writing for your business.

Build up a Robust Content Team

As you scale content creation efforts, you don’t just need a bunch of good writers. Levelling up content means you want to get the desired ROI from producing that content. So how do you get there? You hire a team of specialists to help edit, promote, and optimize branded content.

If you have little idea about what I’m talking about, then here’s a list of roles you need in your content marketing team:

Search Specialist

Remember the first step in the content creation process? An SEO specialist manages everything from keyword research to content optimization to internal linking. 

In short, the SEO specialist helps make branded content easily searchable. A search professional will track content rankings and present ideas on how to fare better.

Social Media Specialist

This role comprises those who love being active on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A social media specialist shares existing content pieces on these channels. Besides that, they actively create social updates and keep your brand’s social timelines active. 

Outreach and Media Relations Expert

When you think of spreading your wings and earning substantial publicity, you think of outreach specialists. An outreach professional will pitch content assets to prominent industry blogs and news publications. The strategy is critical to expanding the audience for branded content. Plus, it’s a great way to drive traffic to your content assets.

Content Editor

An editor plays a vital role in proof-reading a piece of content. Editing professionals would create editorial standards and make sure that every piece of content adheres to it

Paid Campaign Expert

When it comes to running paid campaigns, you need people who know the tricks of the trade. Hire professionals who have an in-depth knowledge of the ad interface of different online platforms. 

Performance Experts

Content performance experts will keep tabs on the vital content metrics such as views, traffic, likes, and shares. They will create reports about the top-performing posts. Such details come in handy when analyzing which content strategies and channels work best for your business.

Designers

Designers help with creating stunning visual content. Attractive designs make branded content a lot more appealing.

You can choose to hire pure specialists or those with more than one of the above skillsets. The idea is to focus on building a team that works together to delight a targeted audience.

Use Content Creation Tools

Mastering the art of creating path-breaking and relevant content takes time. But don’t lose heart. There are many free and low-cost tools to help you produce top-notch content more efficiently.

Without further ado, let’s look at the best tools for content creation:

Grammarly

Nobody likes to read blog posts with grammatical errors like spelling mistakes and loose punctuation. Grammarly is a popular AI-based language checker. The tool makes editing and proofreading quick and easy. The paid version of this ideal tool will cost you a little over $139 per year.

Feedly

Researching and finding interesting new content can be a tiring process. You can use a free tool like Feedly to follow the best of niche blogs. Browse through multiple feeds from a single tab. Sweet, isn’t it?

Piktochart

Creating beautiful looking infographics should not seem like it’s some rocket science. Tools like Piktochart make it easy to drag and drop your favourite design elements and put together a sexy infographic. Picktochart’s premium version costs around $24 a month.

Evernote

Research is a constant thing for content creators. Evernote is a powerful tool to take notes and save online resources. 

• You can use this tool to save relevant article URLs or web clippings. 
• The tool is useful for organizing information and sharing it with colleagues.
• Jot down blog post ideas or simply take notes of your content draft and access it from another device. 

Evernote is a terrific free tool for storing ideas and using them for your upcoming content pieces. A must for assembling your thoughts and improving content creation productivity.

Trello

Do you enjoy playing Solitaire? Trello is an exciting project management tool that makes you feel like you’re playing an online card game. Plus, it’s super easy. Here’s what all you can do with this free tool:

• Trello is excellent for managing the content workflow and content creation teams.
• You can create boards for managing different content campaigns.
• Add cards to assign tasks to team members and track progress. 
• Attach documents, images, links, and comments to collaborate with team members.

It’s a fantastic tool for content managers handling small to medium-sized content teams.

Free Stock Image Sites

When it comes to using images for social media or blog posts, stock photos can be useful. There are many free stock image sites to add colour to branded content and make it look nice. Take a look at some of the finest stock image sites:

• Unsplash
• StockSnap.io
• Pixabay
• Pexels
• Gratisography
• SplitShire

Use these platforms for quickly downloading some attractive images. You can use a graphic design tool to add text and edit the pictures to fit your content.

Canva

Canva is a popular tool among content creators. It has some cool templates to create beautiful social media graphics, infographics, blog graphics, flyers, ebooks, and whatnot.

• The free graphic design tool has an easy-to-use interface—you don’t need to be a pro designer to use this tool.
• Use your brand logo on marketing collateral.
• Download and access your designs anytime, anywhere. 

When you’re scaling up content creation, you need branded collateral to look professional. Canva is a hassle-free tool that makes it painless to churn out designs that align with your brand guidelines. 

IdeaBoardz

Good content is most often a result of some fantastic ideas. Start by brainstorming ideas with your team. IdeaBoardz is a tool that helps individual team members to put down their thoughts and start a discussion.

• Create different boards to add ideas. 
• Start talking about unique ideas in an offline or online group discussion. 
• Combine some and find out the best ideas of the lot.

Teams that collaborate can put together the most creative content ideas. And that’s the coolest way to make branded content to stay away from the herd.

Miro

Speaking of educating the audience, using flow-charts and diagrams can work magic. Such visuals make learning easy. Miro simplifies the process of creating flow-charts and diagrams.

• The tool comes with pre-created flow-chart templates. 
• You can fill in the text and edit the charts to create customized visuals. 
• Download the visual as an image or PDF file. 

You can use this tool to spruce up branded content through neat-looking flow diagrams. Miro also comes with many other features such as project management, collaboration, and mind-mapping.

SEMrush for Keyword Research 

The correct way to know what the audience wants is to do keyword research at the right time. You can use SEMrush to find the right key phrases.

• Use the topic research feature to know about trending niche topics. Get an understanding of what to include in the next content piece. 

The feature allows you to use a location filter to know about content ideas for a specific city.

• The keyword overview feature shows niche-specific keywords with search volume, competition, CPC, ranking pages and ad copy. 
• You can move one level up and use the keyword magic feature. The feature is useful for creating keyword master lists. With the keyword magic tool, you can find the relevant long-tail keywords and keyword subgroups related to specific topics. 
• You can use other features like match modifiers, question filters, and keyword difficulty. 

You can get access to the paid version of SEMrush at $99.95 per month. Businesses who are expanding their content efforts must consider this feature-rich keyword research software.

Google Trends

The free tool from Google lets you know the worth of a content idea. 

• Pop each idea in the free tool and see which one is more popular.
• Choose the location and period to get specific results. 

Google Trends works well to help you decide topical priority within your content strategy.

Surfer SEO

Knowing which keywords and phrases will get you search-rankings could make things easier. That’s why SurferSEO. 

• The tool helps you analyze competition content and learn more about it. Get a breakdown of stuff like word count, keyword density and frequency, partial match keyphrases, Alt text, character count of the title, and much more.
• Next, this tool offers you a robust content editor. The tool displays the phrases you need to weave into your content for better search rankings.

All-in-all, SurferSEO improves content optimization productivity. It helps content creators to make content more relevant and search-friendly.

Measuring Content Performance

Scaling up content can be a roller coaster ride. There will be occasions when you feel that things are going just fine. But at times, things might look gloomy. That’s why keeping track of content performance is one of the keys to successful content scaling.

Let me walk you through how you need to create a performance measurement process.

Here’s how it flows:

1. Define the metrics you think matter.

2. Put down a process for tracking the data.

3. Analyze reports to understand the gaps and how to fill them.

Tracking the Right Metrics

Many content marketers fail to understand the true meaning of content marketing success. 

In fact,

Only 44% of B2B marketers are clear on what content marketing success looks like. 

The correct way to define content metrics is first to understand your content goals. What do you wish to achieve with your content creation process? 

Once you know the goals, it’s easy to prioritize the metrics.

Sounds simple? Let’s go more in-depth and learn about some of the possible content marketing goals. 

Lead Generation

54% of companies reported generating quality leads to be their biggest challenge with content marketing. (The State of Content Marketing 2019 by SEMrush)

Looking for more leads with every content piece means you’re looking at the right people visiting your content and filling up an online form. 

Here are the metrics that you need to track:

• Click-Through Rate: With every blog post or content piece, you’ll have a call-to-action that takes the visitor to the desired landing page. It could be an option to subscribe to the newsletter or download a gated content piece or a free trial. Measure the number of people clicking on the call-to-action. 
• Form Fill Ups: These are the actual number of leads generated through a content piece. Track those who filled up a contact form after clicking a CTA on your blog post or infographic or video.

Engagement and Interaction 

At a point in time, when you’re working on content quality, you may want to focus on whether the audience is enjoying and appreciating the content. 

Here are the numbers you need to capture:

• Genuine comments from visitors who’re interested in your business. 
• Content shares on social media channels. The metric tells you that your content was indeed insightful.

As I said, engagement shows the value of your content. Simultaneously, it also affects other goals, such as leads, conversions, and awareness. 

How does that happen?

Engagement increases the possibility of more people knowing about your business and find it worth their while to convert as well. 

Sales and Revenue 

All said and done, you cannot run a marketing program without any returns from it. That’s why getting sales is the ultimate goal of creating content. 

The most common measurement of success for content marketing programs is Total Sales. (HubSpot, 2020) 

Let’s understand the key metrics you need to track:

• Keep tabs on the leads that are making a purchase. Which content pieces have got you the maximum sales?
• Compare the ticket size of each sale to understand and attribute revenue to different content pieces and campaigns.
• Check for the customer lifecycle to analyze content performance on a holistic level. 

Brand Awareness 

Again, as a goal, brand awareness helps add to long-term sales from content creation. Let’s see how you can track this objective:

• The primary data, in this case, is content traffic. The more, the merrier. 
• Also, look for social post views and shares when trying to figure out the number of eyeballs your content has reached. 

Setting Up Tracking 

You can use a few simple tools to set up content performance tracking. Get the performance team to set up the mechanism to track the right data.

Use Google Analytics to learn about content traffic. You can set up goals to track leads from specific landing pages.

• Each social media platform has its own insights section for learning about post views and engagement. Social media scheduling platforms like Hootsuite also offer analytics dashboards.

• For tracking newsletter performance and managing leads, you can use a suitable CRM tool. 

There are some marketing automation suites like HubSpot that offer you all metrics in a single software. Let’s now go deeper into how you can run content audits and do in-depth content performance analysis. 

Scoring and Analysis

The idea behind measuring the outcomes is to work on improving them. That’s why you need to know how to turn data into feedback for the content team. Let’s figure out how:

• The first step is to score content pieces based on the achieved results. Based on the targets achieved, you can assign a numeric value between 0-10. The strategy would help the team to create a list of cream-of-the-crop.
• Understand the factors that led to success. Create a reporting mechanism to put down common factors in top content pieces. Then try to analyze what worked best—was it the format of the content, topical relevance or the length?
• The last step is to calculate the content ROI—track results periodically and draw comparisons.

Use the analysis to help the content team to create better content.

Create a Content Audit Workflow

A content audit is about making a list of existing content assets finding strengths and weaknesses. You can do an audit every year or six months. The objective of a content audit is to analyze the quality of branded content. In this section, let’s dive deep into how to create a content audit workflow.

How Does Content Audit Help?

a. A content audit allows content strategists to find strategic shortfalls and work on improving overall outcomes.

b. It helps content creators to fix redundancies in existing content. An audit is useful in understanding how to re-do content pieces that are not performing to their best. 

c. Know about how to improve search rankings of existing content.

d. Make a list of topics that are working better with the target audience. 

e. Find content assets with high traffic but low relative conversions. 

f. Do away with content pieces that are low on quality or do not adhere to your brand voice. 

Let’s now take a look at the steps involved in a content audit workflow:

Content Audit Workflow

Content Inventory Creation

This step involves making a list of all the published content pieces. You can do this by making a list of content URLs.

• You can use the SEMrush Content Audit tool to download a list of URLs from your sitemap data.

• Categorize content pieces based on content format, buyer’s journey stage, date of publication, author, and publication date. 
• Include details such as meta title and meta description. 
• You can use SEMrush and Google analytics to add data points against each content piece. Pull out details such as page views, average session duration, bounce rate, social shares, backlinks, content length, and metadata.
• Use the SEMrush position tracking tool to enlist the content pieces that are ranking for your targeted keywords.

Review Existing Content Assets and Create an Action Plan

When you have all the metrics in front of you, it’s easy to draw up a simple plan that lets you know what to do with your content assets. Here are some possibilities.

• You can decide which content pieces you wish to keep or delete or update at the first level. 
• Keep aside articles or content pieces that can be re-used with revisions.
• See how you can expand some content pieces. There will be shorter posts that might work well as long-form content.
• Are there content pieces that you need to fix in terms of structure and flow? Put them on a separate list. 
• Check for content with very low CTR. Can you work on improving the headlines and metadata to get this content back on track?
• Are there content pieces that can be enhanced with more visuals and videos?
• Review the existing internal linking structure. Observe how you can make better use of high-traffic content.

Once you have an action plan, you can draw inferences that you can use for making the necessary amendments to your content plan. 

Strategic Analysis

A final analysis will show you how you need to tweak the existing content strategy and improve business outcomes. 

• Document the results to put your views on how successes were different from failures. 
• Create internal systems to make sure that the shortfalls are not repeated. 
• Make a note of crucial hurdles coming your way while creating quality content that ranks and gets the desired engagement. 

Since you’re investing more time and resources in creating branded content, you’re under a lot more pressure to get the results. That’s why an audit is such a vital component of creating large scale content.

Final Thoughts

Quality content may not be the shortest route to marketing success, but it’s a sure-shot one. Creating content that resonates with your brand voice makes an indelible impact on the audience’s hearts and minds.

Valuable content assets have the potential to fetch long-term business outcomes—much longer than you might expect. Scaling up is like building a tall edifice that offers you a rock-solid brand reputation and recurring sales for your business. Make each step count, and you’ll indeed find the top spot in your business niche. That is the ultimate goal of scaling up the content creation process.