Unearthing Hidden Content Gems and Junk: The Dual Edge of ATC Content Analysis

As we at Air Traffic Control (ATC) have been growing and exploring our optimal product-market fit, we uncovered an interesting dichotomy that could be both our Achilles heel and our best gift to marketers.

Discovering the Double-Edged Sword of Content Analysis

When marketers and teams first get started with ATC, we import their content. This includes podcasts, webinars, blogs, help libraries, you name it. The purpose of this import is to determine how effectively that existing content engages their target audiences. Additionally, this analysis identifies content gaps, helping to inform future content strategy.

Our Initial Value Add: Shedding Light on Forgotten Content

One of our very first value adds is a comprehensive content analysis and content metrics. When ATC ingests all your content, it might shed light on things you haven’t seen for years like things that don’t appeal to your current target audience, obsolete value propositions or product info, or just plain garbage.

Clearly, you don’t want to promote content like the above to your audiences. And so, therein lies the problem. We’re revealing to you a whole bunch of junk that, before you can start promoting it to your audience, needs to be fixed. And it’s in our and your best interest to fix it efficiently, so here’s how you start.

How to Revise or Remove Outdated Content Without Damaging Your Website’s Domain Reputation

So, what do you do with this revelation of outdated or irrelevant content? Here are some steps to manage this process without damaging your website’s domain reputation:

• Identify and Prioritize: Start by categorizing your content into three buckets – content that is still relevant, content that needs updating, and content that should be removed. Prioritize the updates based on their potential impact on your audience and SEO. In Air Traffic Control, we identify how many people each of your content items is relevant to so we generally suggest starting with the oldest content that has the highest number of contact matches.
• Update and Optimize: For content that is outdated but still has potential, revise it to align with your current value propositions and target audience. Optimize for SEO by incorporating relevant keywords, updating meta descriptions, and ensuring the content is engaging and informative.
• Remove with Care: For content that is no longer relevant or useful, consider removing it. However, be cautious with this process to avoid creating broken links or negatively impacting your SEO. Use 301 redirects to guide users and search engines to related content or updated versions.
• Monitor and Maintain: Regularly review your content to ensure it remains relevant and up-to-date. Implementing a content audit process can help you stay on top of your content strategy and maintain your domain’s reputation.

Leveraging New Metrics for Future Content Strategy

Your content analysis should also inform future content strategy. You should now have, or be working towards a clean collection of relevant content. So what should you be writing about next? 

It’s our opinion that simply using tools like SEMRush, Moz, or Ahrefs to identify high-quality keywords with traffic will not be enough to create truly great content. Particularly in the age of AI-produced content, the combination of AI and keyword driven content will produce top of funnel content that doesn’t provide enough value to your readers and frankly, reads like drivel.

Applying Topic Radar Insights

The Air Traffic Control topic radar is unique in that it lets you quickly assess whether the topics you’re creating content about are the same things your audience is engaging with. We are going to wager a bet that your customers and prospects within your database have similar interests to what anyone searching for relevant content online that fits your ICP are interested in. 

Therefore, identifying areas which are interesting to your audience but haven’t been covered thoroughly will reveal opportunities for topics which should be getting added to your upcoming content production queue. Here’s how the Topic Radar works. 

Along the X axis is the ratio of engagements with a topic relative to how often a topic was written about.For example, if a topic was written about 5 times, but engaged with 10 times, that topic’s ratio would be 2:1.

Along the Y axis is how many times you’ve written about a topic. So, in the top right quadrant, these are topics where you spend a lot of your effort and it’s paying off.

The top left quadrant are topics you write about often, but don’t generate much engagement. The bottom left quadrant are topics you rarely write about and don’t perform very well when you do.

Lastly, the bottom right quadrant are probably your best opportunities as these are topics you don’t write about very often, but generate a lot of engagement.

You can click on any quadrant to filter the topic list

The Bottom Line

The combination of identifying, updating, and creating new quality content is the best way to keep a steady stream of top of funnel and engagement coming. And no, we don’t believe that new content can be created, at least exclusively, by artificial intelligence. 

Can AI be a powerful tool to get started, do research, and identify relevant sources? Are there dozens of other ways AI can streamline your content production process we haven’t listed here? Absolutely. But if you don’t have a human being heavily involved in the actual writing and editing of your content the impact it has for your business is going to be much lower quality than if you did.  

We’re always happy to connect and chat through your content opportunities and future strategy. If we can be a resource, feel free to get in touch. You can even take ATC for a free test flight and get your first content report for free.