Creating valuable content. This is the ultimate goal by any content creator, and marketer.
However, not all content has the same impact on followers or stays relevant over time.
A content audit can be of a great help when thinking about creating posts that are valuable to improve your content marketing strategy.
What is a Content Audit?
Content audits measure the health of your content, and give you an insight on how your publications are performing on your blog, social media pages, and webpages.
You can discover your most powerful pieces of content; the topics that really resonate with your audience.
Why conducting a Content Audit is essential for your Content Marketing Strategy?
Currently, 37% of content marketers never complete a content audit.
Many content creators, and marketers are so obsessed with bulk blog posting that forget how important is to perform content audits on a regular basis to diagnose the state of their websites.
Investigating the reason behind the success of some of your content may be time-consuming, but also beneficial when thinking about what posts to do next.
A good tactic is to analyse your site, find your top performing content, and adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly to produce pieces that follow that trend.
Articles that actually can be reused or updated weeks or months after being published.
The goal is to create content that still is relevant to your audience no matter how much time passes.
If you are thinking about improving your SEO, then a content audit can be core to determine what keywords are used to rank with some existing content, what content should be ranking for which keywords or what types of content perform best on your site.
It can also help you identify what pages are leading to low content performance, and degrading your site on search engine rankings.
Basically, a content audit can get you priceless information about how to boost your website traffic, and increase conversion rates.
The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit
How to do a content audit?
You can use plenty of tools, and methodologies to evaluate how your content is performing, how your audiences engages to it, and how to create future content considering that information.
Check the following guide to conducting a content audit step-by-step.
Guide: Performing a Content Audit
1. Analyse existing content
A content audit always starts with a qualitative analysis of your website’s existing content.
This is the most time-consuming part of the process as you have to look at all the pages from your website that are indexed for search engines.
You can evaluate all the content you have in your site, search for strengths and weaknesses, and then, readapt it wherever necessary to improve the overall quality.
Alternatively, you can focus on specific areas.
Do you want to improve your SEO results? Do you want to boost engagement with your audience? Are you looking for an increase on conversion rates?
Simply define the goals you want to reach, and perform an audit on your content considering specific metrics.
You can use tools like Screaming Frog, Google Analytics and Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush or Site Analyzer to compile, and export all the information.
Tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog are great to get details about backlinks (new, lost or broken) or your target keywords positions.
Simply paste your site’s URL, and begin to explore.
You can also investigate competitors, and see what keywords they are using or which backlinks are pointing to their websites.
In Google Analytics, you can find relevant information about organic search traffic or engagement such as the average time spent on a single page, bounce rate or page views.
To do so, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
Click on the tab “All Users”, and tick on the “Organic Traffic” box, then click on “apply” to see information about organic traffic.
Leave the tab “All Users” selected if you want data coming from all segments, and traffic sources: social, paid, direct, referral, mobile, email…
Select a time frame to compare how your content has been performing over the previous months.
You can add filters to see data from different sections of your website.
If you want to conduct a content audit on your blog, just click on “advanced”, include “page”, and type “/blog” on the “containing” box.
If you want to check information about conversions on Google Analytics, simply go to the side menu, and click on Conversions > Goals > Overview.
Then, select a time frame to see results over time.
On Google Search Console, you can see information about page impressions, visits, clicks, target keywords rankings or average CTR.
You can filter the information by date, and check and compare data from previous months.
Google Search Console also gives you the option to update your sitemap, and see any crawling errors.
2. Inventory: Create an spreadsheet to categorize your content
You’ve gathered all the relevant information. Now, it’s time to classify it under different categories.
Create an spreadsheet to categorize the information.
Excel or Google Sheets are perfect for this purpose.
Make sure you add pivot tables to organize your data.
In such a way, it will be easier to find, and quickly compare information from previous months.
Categories will depend on the metrics you have selected when collecting the data.
As an example, your content catalog can include the following sections:
- Page URL
- Title
- Topic
- Target keywords, positions, search volume, clicks & impressions
- Backlinks
- Length: number of words
- Page views
- Bounce Rate
- Average time spent on the page
- Revenue generated
- Conversion rates
- CTR (Click-throught rate)
In order to analyse your SEO content value, in addition to data about backlinks and keywords positions or impressions, you can include another section with detailed information of whether you have implemented or not specific SEO practices on each page.
You can add details about meta titles, and meta descriptions or target keywords in your headlines, subheadings and in image alt tags.
Social media posts are also relevant.
When performing a content audit, you should consider measuring how your audience engages with the content you create on social networks.
You can add some columns to your spreadsheet with data about the number of total shares, and comments on your social media profiles as well as the number of social shares by channel (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn…).
3. Draw up an action plan: Decide on which areas to wotk on
Your spreadsheet can give you an overview of the status of your content. You can indentify what topics actually seduce your users at a quick glance.
The next step of your content audit is to create an action plan to help you prioritise what tasks do next.
There are three options to consider:
- Keep high quality content: publications that are performing great in terms of SEO, engagement, and conversions;
- Delete content that is low quality: publications that can damage your DA (Domain Authority). This includes posts with keyword stuffing, low-quality guest posts or excess of outbound links. Make sure you create redirections when deleting posts.
- Update & optimize content: publications that were relevant in the past, but now are outdated or have low engagement , and posts that have a lot of potential if you fix some SEO errors. Use Google Search Console to find pages that have a lot of keyword impressions, but not as good on rankings. When updating posts, check if links works correctly, and fix broken links, ensure that images are optimized for SEO, delete obsolete information…
Make a list of pages, and posts that require your attention, and rate them considering which ones need to be updated urgently.
4. Check results & Adjust your content strategy if needed
People say regular doctor’s checkups are vital. So are content audits.
You have to evaluate your website’s content health periodically, diagnose, and identify some symptoms associated to how your posts and pages are performing, and find the best treatment to boost traffic, and engagement.
“Treatments” or strategies may vary over time.
How often should you perform a content audit?
It depends on your content marketing strategy, but checking your site once or twice a year is what’s recommended.
When checking the results of your contents audits, and deciding what strategies follow next for future posts, keep in mind your marketing goals, but also the fact that search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and that they have a direct effect on how your content ranks.
Sometimes, you will have to adapt your tactics, and sometimes you won’t, but the only way to know if any crucial changes have to be made on your website to improve content performance, is by conducting a content audit.
It is the perfect excuse to get ready to adapt your business’ content to current content marketing trends.
