a content audit is essential for any bsuiness or marketers to analyse their content marketing efforts. let’s take a look at what a content audit is, how it is done and why you need it.
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is the process of qualitative analysis of all content published online by your company. It tells where your content actually resides, how it performs, and where the thematic gaps are.
Before you auditing your content, you need to create a content list, a detailed list of the location, name, and description of each property published in your brand.
Why You Should Conduct A Content Audit
- Goals: Is your content achieving its goals? Are you getting any ROI from the content you produce? You will not know until you measure the performance of your content and track it through regular audits.
- Staleness: Your content may become stale or outdated over time. Stale content is not always your fault. What was relevant two years ago may no longer be as relevant. You may need to add a bit extra spice to it to suit the time on the bright side.
- Incorrect information: The age of your content, facts and data that were once accurate can be inaccurate. Regularly running an audit through your content will ensure the accuracy of your posts and protect your brand’s reputation.
- Know what’s working: You will never know what type of content or which blog post is your most successful if you never hold back from auditing all your content pieces. Perhaps pumping out 3 blog posts a week is really just tiring and not really producing any results. You’ll never know if you haven’t gone back and do a content audit to see which pieces performed the best and which were the worst.
How to Run A Content Audit Perfectly?
1. Think of your goals
Think first of what you want to achieve. When you keep your goals in mind, you have a better idea of classifying your audit later.
Ultimately, an audit identifies content that is attractive to your audience and may include information on SEO and conversion rates. One goal to consider may be to identify which of your pages should be SEO-optimized. Alternatively, you can think about finding the most exciting and best-performing content for your website visitors and place it on your homepage or in an email newsletter.
Identifying company goals will ensure that your content audit helps for both bookkeeping and update your strategy with tactics to improve it. After successful completion, it’s time to collect your content.
2. Create a Spreadsheet of All Your Content Assets
Unexpectedly, the first step in completing a content audit is to search for all your content. To do this, you’ve two different options:
Use a crawling tool to identify all the URLs on your existing website and download that data as a CSV file. These tools are capable of automatically collecting various other SEO data points for you.
Manually enter the URL into your spreadsheet. The most straightforward way to do this is to log into your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Posts> All Posts, and then click each to get its URL. Fancy? No, but it does the trick.
Enter all the URLs you can find in an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet or leave a lot of columns for the data collected in step # 2.
Most audits use a spreadsheet to organize data, but this is not the only way. If you despise Excel for some reason, you can opt for the WordPress Content Audit plugin. This tool allows you to create content inventory directly in the edit screen in WordPress. Set some conditions, and you are good to go.
Go with whoever is most comfortable with you. Set yourself up for success using the tools and methods that work for you. To upload your CSV file to Google Sheets, select File> Import> Upload and save the File from your computer.
3. Evaluate your content data to inform your strategy
After deciding what to do next with each asset, you can deeply consider your data to inform your content strategy. If you did a competitive analysis to identify the content gaps in the final phase, you could leverage those insights to develop a plan for building new content assets that fill those gaps.
You also have to analyze factors such as which types of content get the most engagement, rank the best, or convert more than others. For example, if you find that your video content gets more social share and you’re looking to increase your social media visibility, devote more resources to producing video content related to your top-performing topics.
Want to create more backlinks? Look for the types of content that earn the most backlinks. Then identify the topics that resonate with your audience the most, and create new content assets on topics that format. Conduct outreach campaigns to generate more backlinks and increase your results.
Want to rank high in SERPs? Take a look at content formats that rank better than others. What made you different for your top-ranking assets? Research the SERPs for your target keywords to determine what type of content is ranked on the first page. Use insights to develop a targeted content strategy to improve your SEO.
There are several ways to evaluate your content audit data to inform you about your content strategy. Follow the data, research the Search engine result pages, and analyze your competitors to create an effective content strategy that meets your business objectives as well as the needs of your audience.
4. Map Your Content
When you have tagged all your assets, you will end up with a beautiful content map. You will be able to see which personas, buying stages, and themes you’re serving with content and where you need to step up.
Sort through your content map and identify where the loopholes are. Then, find out easy ways to brainstorm with which you can fill those gaps. Perhaps there is a whitepaper or e-book, which you can reproduce to serve a different audience. Or you can plan to increase your social promotion to feed the top of your sales funnel.
5. Add success metrics
Once you have all this information, it is time to add success metrics to each post. Although, the metrics you want to measure will vary depending on the goals you’ve set for your content strategy, but here are just a few to get you started:
- Page view
- Time on page
- Social share
- The conversion
- Backlinks
- Rank in search engine
No collection of material is ever “complete” – it will always have some lag.
Conduct a content audit regularly to identify your most significant weaknesses.
This is a ton of work and leads to even more work (taking action on your results), but it is a highly effective way to improve results from your content marketing continuously. If you want to perform a content audit of your site, you can always contact us. Our Digital marketing experts will give you a free consultation regarding the same. Call Now