An upcoming joint research report by The Dubs and global financial native advertising platform Dianomi has uncovered finance brands have significant gaps in the content their audiences are seeking. On that note, check out our tips on how to make the most of native advertising networks.
While the report’s findings will be a highly informative read when published in April 2021, it’s not the subject of this article. Right now it prompts the question – how do you know if you’re making the finance content your audience wants and actually needs, as opposed to the content you think they want or can just simply get your hands on?
“ How do you know if you’re making the content your audience wants and actually needs, as opposed to the content you think they want or can just simply get your hands on?”
Identifying the content your audience wants
You can solve this issue with a content and search audit to verify where you’re meeting the content needs of your audience and where you have gaps as this is where the growth opportunities lie.
Likewise it will inform if you’ve overestimated the demand for certain content topics or formats and are wasting budget by over indexing this content. If you’ve noticed a drop in your search traffic be it gradual or sudden, there are steps you can take to diagnose what’s causing it.
A good content and search audit will realign your content with your audience’s needs which drives audience growth and the effectiveness of your content.
“We grapple with this issue on an ongoing basis. Our publication The Financial Marketer (which you are kindly reading now!) needs to deliver content best practices and cutting-edge techniques to finance marketers globally to help them stay at the top of their professional game,” says The Dubs head of content, Ale Middleton.
“This means the topics and themes of interest to our audience changes regularly and we need to respond as it happens.”
How to run a content and search audit
To undertake a content and search audit does require some rigour and work but it’s quite straightforward and achievable to deliver and you’ll reap the benefits in spades.
The Dubs social media director, Andrew Frith says any of the good search engine analytical tools like SEMrush, AHREFs, Moz Pro or Google Search Console are extremely useful in providing the data to understand your content program’s relevance to your audience.
“We use SEMrush Organic Research tool to understand our SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings and traffic volumes,” says Frith.
“This will tell you if you’re creating content for a very small audience – which can be ok if it’s a valuable niche – or if you’re missing ranking for search terms that are much more popular with your target audience.”.
With this information you can do a few things:
- Scale back creating content that only delivers minimal search traffic results.
- Create more content for more popular search topics that generate a greater volume of relevant audience traffic to your content hub.This helps plug the gaps and makes your content program more useful to your audience.
- Retrofit your existing content where needed to include these more popular search terms. This is like a car engine tune up for your content to better optimise it for search results.
The other SEMrush tool we use is the Keyword Magic Tool. This allows us to explore and discover other popular search terms on key topics or learn how to better capitalise on existing articles we’ve published.
Lastly, we use a content and search audit to benchmark our content program against our key competitors.
This way we can see where we have content gaps we need to plug compared to our competitors and ensure we match the relevance of our content to the needs of the audiences whose attention we’re competing for.
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