A content audit helps you to identify content that needs to be revised or improved in other formats, such as images or infographics.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is a process of analyzing, and assessing the content on your website. It helps you to know your strengths and weaknesses and come up with new strategies and adapt your content as per current marketing trends.
These are the five steps on how to conduct a content audit:
Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Metrics
Step 2: Prepare a list of your content
Step 3: Collection and Analysis of Data
Step 4: Prepare an Action Plan
Step 5: Change your Content Marketing Strategy
Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Metrics
A content audit has to be clear with defined objectives as it is a difficult and time-consuming process.
Firstly, identify your business goals. What are the benefits you acquire from a content audit? What is the outcome you are looking for?
Goal 1: Improve Your SEO Performance
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Look for web pages with a high possibility of ranking in search engines.
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Identify which content you need to remove or update on your website.
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Optimize your internal linking metrics.
Goal 2: Improve your Audience Engagement
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Figure out the most engaging content type for your audience.
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Identify topics your audience is interested in.
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Examine what type of content brings the most social media engagement.
Goal 3: Conversion Rate Optimization
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Find out the pages that offer the best user experience.
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Identify the content that generates more leads.
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Determine the efficiency of content types in each stage of the customer journey.
Now that you have defined your goals, let's try to match them with the relevant content.
So, content marketing metrics can be divided into 4 categories.
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SEO metrics: Organic traffic, keyword ranking, incoming backlinks, and dwell time.
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Behavioural metrics: pageviews per page, average sessions, bounce rate
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Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, and mentions
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Sales metrics: leads, conversion rates, return on investment (ROI)
Step 2: Prepare a list of your content
Before preparing a list of URLs, it is important to decide what type of content you are going to review. You can audit your content, such as blog posts, educational materials, product descriptions, videos, pdfs, and landing pages.
Here, the focus is on how to perform a content audit of the textual content that is published on your website.
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Collect Your URLs
Start by creating a list by collecting all the URLs of web pages you want to analyze.
You can get this done by using an online content audit tool like Semrush Content Audit.
It helps you to get a quick audit of your content based on your sitemap data and provides a list of URLs and their associated metrics. You can analyze a section of your domain, e.g., subfolder/blog.
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Organize your content
The next step is to use an online tool or a Google spreadsheet to sort them by different criteria and track them.
Organize your content into the following categories:
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Stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision)
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Type of content (blog post, product description, landing page)
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Content format (text only, images/video, with or without call-to-action)
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Word count
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Publication date or latest modification
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Author (if you have more than one writer on your website)
It is also important if you collect metadata like titles, descriptions, and header tags, so you can easily check and update them. Finally, create columns and track metrics for individual web pages.
Step 3: Collection and Analysis of Data
The collection of data is a complex and lengthy process. You need to look for data from multiple sources and add it manually to your spreadsheet. You can avoid it and save time by using a content audit tool that automatically collects data for you according to your metrics.
The Semrush Content Audit tool audits your website content and gives you various data points, such as social shares from Twitter and Facebook, backlinks, metadata, content authors, and content length for each URL.
You can also connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to add depth to your data. You’ll be able to find more metrics for each URL, including sessions, average session duration, page views, average time on page, bounce rate, and search queries.
If you are looking to capture a wider range of data, then, Google Analytics will help you to understand which content performs best in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. You can also estimate how effective your content has been in achieving your marketing and business goals.
Step 4: Prepare an Action Plan
Once you have assessed your content, you need to strategize and plan to improve it. The action plan will be based on your goals and the conclusions obtained from your analysis.
Step 5: Change your Content Marketing Strategy
It is important to keep in mind your long-term marketing strategy when performing a content audit because you can track your success, measure your failures, and adjust as per the reach, thereby improving your conversion rates.
Make a note of what works for you. Find your least performing content, and check your competitors’ similar good performing content to see how you could improve your content.
Reviewing your content marketing strategy is something that needs to be done at least once a year to make sure your tactics and activities still fit your company’s objectives. You have to keep up with the changes and find innovative ways to keep reaching and engaging with your audiences.
