Analyze Your Content

A new drive-thru coffee spot recently opened in my town. In the days leading up to their grand opening, the business decided to promote themselves by giving away free iced coffee samples at spots around town.

One of these spots just so happened to be my church. I joined the line of people waiting outside in the parking lot, where two crew members from the coffee place had set up a table, handing out the free samples. After a couple minutes, I finally got a hold of a nice small cup of iced coffee, and asked the barista, “when do you open?”

“Oh, we have a hand out right here,” said the barista, pointing at a small stack of papers on the table. “Feel free to take one. It has all of our dates and specials on it.”

Amazing! I thought to myself. I happily took a copy. This handout contained everything I – and other people – would want to know about the new business, specifically, their menu items.

In the same way, good content gives the viewers the information that they want. It doesn’t beat around the bush, showing readers information they aren’t looking for. And when a business publishes good content that matches their needs with the wants of the audience, it’s a win-win situation; one that’s just as good as a fresh cup of iced coffee.

What Works and Doesn’t Work

Businesses already have content. The question is, what works? And additionally, what doesn’t work?

Those, in a nutshell, the questions a content analysis seeks to answer. In a blog post for Copypress, Jill Conway writes, “Conducting a content analysis can help you understand the effectiveness of your content.” In analyzing the content you have, you can find the places where you can improve.

In The Content Strategy Toolkit, author Meghan Casey details what she calls the content ecosystem, which encompasses where content is found and stored. “The content ecosystem helps tell the story of the role that content plays within the organization” writes Casey, “and how mature the organization is in managing its content.”

If organizations can figure out how content operations work internally, there will be better results externally. This is why content analysis is important – it helps organizations to see what they’re doing well and what they need to do better.

Businesses can benefit strongly from a good content analysis. But so can nonprofits. With the amount of good work done by charities and organizations every day, content is sure to get lost in the loop. That’s why I decided to try out my skills by creating a content analysis for Habitat for Humanity.

The Screaming Frog Surfs the Wave (With His Friend the Spider)

Running a content analysis for a website requires looking at important information from each of your pages. Obviously, no one is going to do a deep analysis of every single page of a website – unless you want to sit at your desk and stare at a screen for a long, long time.

Thankfully, there’s technology out there that can help us analyze things faster. For my content analysis of Habitat for Humanity, I used two different data collection tools: Screaming Frog SEO Spider and WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool). Yes, these are the actual names, but don’t let them fool you – these are excellent tools that can help you get the job done quickly and efficiently.

Screaming Frog crawled up to 500 pages of the Habitat for Humanity website for me. In the end, it gave me loads of information, such as page titles, meta descriptions, and headings on each of those pages. This allowed me to analyze how effective the organization is in describing their content, which is important for SEO.

*Screaming Frog SEO Spider, after having crawled the Habitat for Humanity website.*

WAVE analyzes one page at a time to see what works in terms of web accessibility. According to the World Wide Web Consortium, “Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.” WAVE was able to find what on the Habitat site met standards, and what could be fixed to make the website more accessible.

*WAVE’s report of the Habitat for Humanity homepage*

Putting it All Together

After doing my research on Habitat for Humanity and looking through all the data collected by both Screaming Frog and WAVE, I compiled everything together into a document with my takeaways and recommendations.

I found that overall, Habitat for Humanity has an accessible site with many of the SEO titles and descriptions effectively filled out. However, some improvements to be made include creating alt text that accurately describes the photo, decreasing the number or characters in the meta descriptions, and improving on color contrast throughout the entirety of the website.

If you’re interested in reading my content analysis for Habitat for Humanity, check out the full document here.