Unless your website is so new that it still has the default “Hello, world!” message as your first blog post, you already have some content on it. A great content strategy allows everything that your website contains continue to work for you for as long as you keep it visible, but your current content might not fit with that goal. It’s worth revisiting what you currently have published and measure it against the standard of what content should be. As you browse your video library or read through your blog posts, ask yourself these questions.

Is It Relevant?

No matter how brilliant your site copy for your air conditioning company may be, people in Nome are not going to find it as relevant to their interests as someone in New Orleans. To be relevant, you have to know what your audience wants. Only once you understand your visitors and what they hope to find on your site can you give them what they want. Your marketing team can paint an accurate picture of your ideal customer; once you have that image in hand, compare it to how relevant your content is to that buyer.

Is It Useful?

Utility and relevance are related but not identical. Relevance is potential energy; visitors find your content compelling when it’s relevant but don’t always act on it. Usability puts that potential energy to work by giving visitors actionable information. An article about improving your business content might be relevant to you, especially if your current SEO and content marketing strategies need an upgrade, but that article only becomes useful when you take concrete steps toward your goals. While not every line of your content has to be actionable, seeding your website, blog and newsletters with suggestions that enable visitors took great take action makes your site a more valuable resource.

Is It Shareable?

Content becomes exponentially more valuable as it spreads. Making all your information easy to share and worth sending to friends is a huge boost to your customer acquisition and lead-building. Better yet, it’s a passive bump; you don’t have to keep feeding energy into broadcasting your content when your audience does it for you. Getting people to share your content relies on two factors: making it interesting enough to be worth sharing and making it easy enough to share that people take that extra step. All your blog posts should have widgets that let readers send them to others with a single click, which welcome them to share and more likely to take you up on their offer – but only if your content’s compelling enough to be worth passing along in the first place. Eliminate dry business jargon, colorless passive-voice writing, and glaring grammatical errors at a minimum, then focus on developing your brand’s voice with a content creation team that understands your market.

Is It Optimized?

Almost everything published on your site is subject to SEO rules because almost everything is searchable. Search engine optimization may not be your primary goal on your about page or your FAQ section, but it should be a strong secondary objective. A great content team takes SEO into account on every page, working in keywords naturally and adding links where they make sense. The same rules about avoiding keyword-stuffed, thin content, apply when giving your pages an SEO makeover, so great content doesn’t take things too far in the other direction by over-optimizing pages.

Is It Measurable?

You may not see dramatic changes in your traffic or conversion rates at first when you develop and implement a new content strategy, especially if your business content relates to B2B products and services, but your marketing company should track the data. Part of a sound content strategy is using analytics to inform future choices and refine the next video or article you publish. If you have a blog and can’t think of your most shared or visited posts off the top of your head, you may want to pay closer attention to the numbers.

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