Why Perform a Content Audit?
Whether you’re looking to get an idea of what your content is up to, or you want to make changes to your current strategy, performing a content audit can be helpful.
Start by collecting all of your existing content, from your blog posts to your site’s category pages, social media posts and anything else that you might have. This can be a manual process or an automated one using tools such as Screaming Frog, Google Analytics and SEMrush.
Organize Your Content
A content audit is a great way to identify content that doesn’t perform well, has outdated information or could be updated for better optimization. A comprehensive review of your website or digital experience can also reveal opportunities to consolidate and reuse content.
Organizing your content can help you make the most of your audit and save time in the long run. For example, organizing your content into topic maps can keep your readers engaged and allow them to quickly find related topics.
Once you’ve completed a thorough analysis of your content, it’s time to organize it. Start by creating a spreadsheet where you can organize each piece of content that you’ve analyzed.
You’ll want to include URLs, page titles and metadata for each piece of content in your spreadsheet. Organizing this data will help you keep track of what’s been reviewed and how it performs. Then, you can start to analyze it and decide what needs to be kept, updated or deleted.
Gather Data
Content audits give you insight into your published pieces, so you can ensure they’re up to date and provide fresh insights. This helps maximize ROI and keeps your website relevant to searchers, improving rankings and conversions.
To perform a content audit, start by considering your company goals. The results you want to achieve will determine the metrics you look at in your content audit, such as search engine ranking and traffic.
Next, create a spreadsheet or online tool to store all the data in one place. This will help you analyze the results later and identify areas to improve.
Some online tools and plugins can also help you categorize the data, so be sure to check them out if you’re looking for an easier way to keep track of the data in your audit. Adding relevant categories will make it easy to find the data you need and keep your analysis organized.
Analyze Your Data
A content audit is a key part of your digital marketing strategy, but it can be challenging to do. You need to set up clear business goals for your audit and then analyze your data accordingly.
For example, if a blog post isn’t converting or failing to rank on Google, it’s time to take a closer look at that page. If it’s not contributing to your business goals, you should either update it or remove it.
However, before you can do that, you need to gather your data. This can be done manually or using a tool.
You need concrete data about each piece of content so you can decide what action to take moving forward (update, rewrite, delete, or keep as-is). It’s best to start by creating a spreadsheet that includes the URL, title, and metadata information for every piece of content on your website.
Take Action
A content audit is the only way to truly understand your website’s content. This will help you identify which pieces are high-performing and what needs work.
You can use a variety of metrics to perform an audit. For example, you can track how many conversions each piece of content is generating.
The data will allow you to make decisions about whether it should be updated, rewritten, or deleted. You can also use this information to improve the performance of your existing content.
Performing an audit manually can be time-consuming, but there are tools to automate this process. For example, Screaming Frog and Google Analytics have great features that can help you efficiently crawl your site to find all of the content you have.
After you have gathered your data, set thresholds or baseline benchmarks for each metric that you’re tracking. This will help you determine which action steps you should take for each piece of content in your audit.
