Ah, the dreaded content audit. It’s not a lot of fun to think about. You’d much rather be in the process of creating fresh, new content – not analysing and assessing what’s already on your website.
However, without the assistance of an audit, you could be letting weak links in your content strategy go undetected – much to your site SEO’s dismay. Plus, a content audit also helps with better time management, enhanced content performance, improved website quality, and a whole lot more.
There’s just one question, though: what is a content audit, exactly?
That’s where this guide comes in to answer this burning search query. Not only will we explain what is content audit in simple terms, we’ll also detail how to audit website content successfully – step-by-step.
What Is Content Audit?
Before learning how to conduct a content audit, you first need to understand what is content audit in terms of digital marketing.
In short, a content audit is a process wherein a brand collects and analyses assets on its website. Assets, aka content types, can include everything from blog posts to meta descriptions, and the audit is intended to identify strengths and weaknesses in these assets.
So, why do a content audit? To demonstrate the importance of a content audit, here are a few benefits to keep in mind:
- Gain a data-driven insight into content performance, which helps with making informed decisions about your brand.
- Discover content that performs to a high level, using this information to structure future content plans.
- If content metrics are lower than expected, the underperforming content can be updated or repurposed to hit those desired numbers.
- Learn more about your target audience, including the content they like and dislike.
- Keep content up-to-date, remove errors, improve web page search rankings, and boost overall website performance.
How to Do a Content Audit
You know what content audits are, and you know the answer to why do a content audit for your website. Now, it’s time to learn how to perform a content audit.
Running a thorough content audit requires various steps. Here’s how to audit content effectively:
Define Your Goals
The first step in learning how to do content audits is identifying your goals. What do you hope to accomplish from your content audit? Once you understand your objectives, you have a clearer idea of your audit strategy and how to categorise it.
As an example, one goal could be to improve the SEO side of your content. This objective could involve looking at important elements, such as keyword implementation, backlinks, titles, meta descriptions, etc.
Sure, this may be an easy initial step, but it’s an important one in the ‘how to conduct a content audit’ guide. When you’re clear about your goals, you can implement the right tactics for your audit strategy.
Collect Your Content
When it comes to how to do a content audit, this is the most obvious step of them all. Without content, there is no audit. Therefore, you have to gather up all of the content that’s relevant to your business goals.
For instance, suppose you want to audit your product pages to see where improvements can be made. In that case, you’ll need to gather your current product descriptions. How about improving your blog content’s organic traffic? If so, you’ll need to collect your blog posts.
Your objectives and website size will play a huge role in this task. For example, if your site is relatively new with a minimal number of pages, there won’t be much content to gather – even if it’s a sitewide audit. You could probably get away with using a simple spreadsheet to collect all your URLs.
However, if you have a massive website with a giant backlog of content, getting everything together can be quite an arduous job – atleast, that’s the situation if you don’t utilise a specialist SEO tool. With something like SEMRush or Screaming Frog supporting your efforts, you can grab all of the content you need to gather automatically.
Categorise Content
As you learn how to do content audits, you will realise the importance of categorising your content. Ultimately, you want to highlight various data points within these categories so that you can measure your content properly.
The category choices you make are dependent on the type of content audit you perform. Say you wish to learn how to content audit your blog posts. In this situation, the data you should pull includes:
- Content type
- Metadata
- Author
- Publication date
- When updates were last made (if applicable)
Another category that needs to be covered is metrics. To truly understand how your content is performing, you need to utilise metrics such as organic traffic, average time spent on page, and bounce rate.
Analyse the Data
So, you have the data listed in a spreadsheet. The next step in how to do a content audit is to assess all of the facts and figures.
When performing this task, there are several points to highlight. These include:
- Top content: Make a note of the content that’s hitting home runs.
- Content missing the mark: What web pages are not hitting your expected numbers?
- Outdated content: Do you have any old content? Can this be updated to bring it up to speed? Or does it need removing and replacing entirely?
- Missing content: Have you discovered any content gaps that would interest your audience?
Design an Action Plan
When learning how to do a website content audit, the last critical step is to create action items. This plan takes the information you’ve collected and analysed, and then puts it into ‘action’.
Say you’ve discovered an outdated blog post. The action here would be to keep the content as it is, delete it, update it with new information and SEO-geared text, or do a full rewrite.
Remember the first stage of this how to do content audit guide? Going back to your audit goals you determined right at the beginning is crucial if you want to know what actions should be prioritised.
Conclusion
You now know how to do a content marketing audit. Although, what’s the point in learning how to conduct a content audit if you don’t put this knowledge into action? By following the above steps, you can collect, analyse, and discover new information about your content, helping you refine your digital marketing efforts.
Do You Need a Professional Content Audit?
Undertaking the time-consuming and complex job of a website audit can be a real headache, particularly for those with no experience or who simply don’t have the time to perform the task. However, fear not; one of the UK’s leading digital marketing agencies is here to do the job for you (hint: it’s us).
At Click Intelligence, our experts do website audits every day and have been doing so for decades. Focusing on results-driven strategies, our gurus will reveal high and low-performing content and weak areas of your site, after which they’ll construct a bespoke content plan plush with SEO tactics. The results? Our audit masters can help send your brand to new heights, gaining audiences, conversions, and those esteemed higher spots on Google’s search pages.
Enough talking – if you need a professional approach to your content audit, why not get in touch with our specialists today!
