Content Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to Success

The content audit. Nobody enjoys tackling this task. Yet when you look beyond its reputation for tedious torture, you’ll see this audit is a necessity for your digital marketing efforts. You can acquire valuable insights into your existing content and use this information to refine your entire content marketing strategy.

What is a content audit?

When you conduct a content audit, you are effectively analysing every piece of content that currently resides on your website. This includes blog posts, webpages, events, and even content from your social networks.

This content audit process is all about identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your content. An audit isn’t just about pointing out these aspects, either. It will also supply insights into the type of methods needed to enhance underperforming content. This way, you have a clear roadmap for future marketing activities, can update posts effectively, and ultimately generate greater results.

An SEO content audit is particularly useful for websites populated with years’ worth of blog posts. All too often, a business can post an article on their website and never return to it again. Then later down the line, the content becomes outdated, irrelevant, and of no use to your target audience.

When a content marketing audit is performed to a high standard, it should reveal:

• What content is performing the best
• The topics your audience is connecting with most
• The posts that are no longer hitting the mark

This ensures that, when it comes to your future content marketing strategies, you will have a greater idea about what to focus on with your content and SEO in general.

What are your goals with a digital content audit?

When performing a website and content strategy audit, your business can benefit in various ways. This will lead to your content performing better in search engine results, gaining social shares, and upping those all-important conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. rates.

• Reveal new SEO rules: A content audit for SEO purposes can open the door to new rules and techniques you’re not currently utilizing. Once identified, you can integrate these SEO tactics into your website. The more you cater to the likes of Google, the higher up your site will appear in relevant search results.
• Correct pages that are not optimised: Aside from revealing new SEO techniques, an audit can also highlight any accidental gaps in your current content strategy. As an example, you may have adopted a strategy to optimise images found within your blog posts. Yet if this is a relatively new addition to your content plan, older posts may not feature images at all – let alone ones that are optimised. A blog content audit can assist with locating posts that require an update.
• Fix issues: Along with adding to older pages, an audit might also reveal you have to correct fixes to older blog posts. For instance, you may have created a resource link building page on your site. If this URL link is now broken, it’s important to rectify the problem. This ensures users don’t encounter any errors that hamper their reading experience.
• Highlight your star performers: An audit isn’t necessarily about finding ways to improve your existing content. It can also be used to find your best-performing pages and blog posts. With this information, you could give your star content a greater push by highlighting it on your homepage or including it in an email newsletter. You may also decide to expand on this content with follow-up blogs, videos, social media posts, and so on.
  

How to do a content marketing audit

You know what a content audit is, and you know why it is beneficial. Now it’s time to cover what you’ve been waiting for: a guide on best practices for a content audit and how to conduct this successfully. Below are the steps to take.

Step #1: Consider your goals

The first step on the content audit checklist is to consider your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your audit? Do you want to ensure your pillar content remains up-to-date? Perhaps you have older website pages that need to be injected with the latest SEO techniques? Maybe you want to know which type of content works best for engaging your audience?

Pinpointing these goals is an important step for your business. Not only is it useful from a bookkeeping point of view, but it also allows you to update your marketing strategy with methods to improve.

Step #2: Gather your content into a spreadsheet

The next step is perhaps the one content marketers dread the most. Yes, it’s time to gather all your content and place this within a spreadsheet. This begins by collecting the URLs of your site’s webpages. When doing this, there are two main approaches you can take:

• Manual entry: This is a suitable option if your website currently only features a handful of pages – not so much for those with over 1,000 URLs to account for. Depending on the platform you use for your site, manually collecting URLs is easy. On WordPress, for example, you only need to go to the “All Posts” section and have a list of URLs ready for collection.
• Crawling tool: For a quicker solution, you can utilise a crawling tool to identify every URL residing on your website. This data can then be downloaded as a CSV file and ready to use for your spreadsheet adventure. A recommended crawling tool is Screaming Frog. Along with being able to collect up to 500 URLs for free, it can also supply valuable SEO data points.

Keep in mind: you don’t have to collect every URL on your website. For instance, you may only want to do a blog audit to focus on your blog posts rather than other areas of your site.

When putting together your spreadsheet, ensure there are plenty of available columns to add the rest of the data you’ll gather. However, an alternative to using your own spreadsheet would be to use a site content audit template. There are various audit templates that you can download free of charge.

Step #3: Categorise your content

This step involves populating your spreadsheet with asset data – aka the information you hope to analyse from your audit. As for what data you will collect, this is dependent on your audit goals. A content audit example could be where you only cover blog posts. In this case, the information to gather would include publication date, author, metadataPut simply, metadata is data that describes data. It’s a labelling system designed to help machines and humans understand what is contained within a packet of data., and content type.

To go into more detail, below are some of the main SEO data points to consider:

• Page title
• Meta description
• Target keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business.
• Inbound linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.
• Images and image ALT tags
• Page visits
• Page bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website.
• Broken links
• Average user time on pageYour time on page metric tells you how long visitors are spending on your site. This can be an important measure of engagement, especially when looking at bounce rates and conversion rates.

The good news: a solution like Screaming Frog will automatically generate many of these elements. Yet if you decide to use a different crawling tool or go with the manual approach, you can use Google Analytics to gather these metrics. Want to go even more in-depth? SEO technical audits are available from expert marketing agencies – such as us!

Aside from SEO, there are other content marketing points you may want to gather. These include:

• Word count
• Number of comments/social shares
• Assigned tags/categories
• Content type (article, landing page, infographic, video blog post, etc.)
• Content condition (evergreen, seasonal, out-of-date, etc.)
• Call to action
• Mobile or desktop access
• Call to action
• Conversion data

Step #4: Analyse your data

You have collected all the data you require for your audit. Now you must take a close, critical look at the gathered information. This step will provide you with a good measure of the current state of your content.

Data observations you make can vary drastically. For instance, you may find out that in-depth blog posts are bringing in more organic search traffic for your website than video-centric posts. Yet your video posts might be doing a better job of retaining visitors. What does this reveal? Well, it may be a wise idea to combine the two content types to ensure organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. numbers are high while also ensuring users stick around for the ride.

Here are a few other points to ponder when analysing your data:

• Missing content: Have you failed to cover content that is interesting to your audience?
• Underperforming content: Content that is struggling to gain any traction. Can anything be done to improve the situation, or is it simply not resonating with your audience?
• Successful content: Content that has hit the mark in terms of visitor numbers and conversions. A great example for future content.
• Outdated content: If the content is out-of-date, look for ways to update it and bring it back with more relevancy.

When the analysis is done, and you’ve found areas where you can improve your existing and future content, it is all about putting your research into action.

Don’t forget the competition

Admittedly, this isn’t a step towards completing an audit on your content. However, don’t ignore the opportunity to conduct a competitive content audit.

Your competitors’ sites can be a goldmine of valuable information. You can find out what they’re doing right with their content. You can see what SEO techniques they’re implementing and the backlinks they are gaining. You may also find potential gaps where you can improve on their current offerings.

A competitive analysis is more limiting in terms of metrics than performing an audit on your own site. However, the data you can acquire is worth the effort.

Whether it is your website or a competitors’ site, a content audit is a required part of any solid content strategy template. However, an audit can be a laborious and complex process – particularly if you’re dealing with a data-heavy website. Therefore, you may opt to go with a specialist content audit agency like ours. We offer a range of content audit services that not only save you time and resources but can also supply insights you may have otherwise missed.