Business Benefits
Identify strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and opportunities to reach goals more efficiently.
Decide how frequently to conduct a content audit, based on the volume of content your brand produces and the availability of your team’s resources.
Once a year is usually a good standard. However, the applicability of your content might Conducting an annual content audit is a good standard to follow for most businesses, although some may find that they need to audit their content more or less frequently. However, your exact publishing calendar may increase or decrease your content audit frequency. For example, websites that do monthly guides on the best new products in their industry may need to do audits every 3-6 months.
Review your brand’s content strategy goals to inform the direction of your audit.
For example, if your goal is to grow your brand’s audience and improve relationships with existing followers through content, use your content audit to focus on searching for opportunities to increase the number of engagements you receive on posts.
This auditing process can also be used to measure how effectively individual pieces of content are performing in various stages of a business’s marketing and sales funnel.
Use the content audit frequency and your content strategy goals to identify audit objectives, and how far back you’ll look to evaluate your content.
Create a spreadsheet for your content audit, adding column headers to track Title, URL, Author, Publish Date, Content Type, CTA, Tags, Page Views, Bounce Rate, Engagement, Google Rank, Update Status, and Date of Update.
Using a tool like Google Analytics, HubSpot, XML Sitemaps, or SEMrush can expedite the process of pulling basic data such as page titles and URLs that can be copied into your content audit spreadsheet. Consider adding other headers to track more information, like:
- Content Goals.
- Content Length.
- CTA Goal Completion.
- Projected Revenue per Page.
- Evergreen or Timely Content.
- Time Spent on Page.
- Backlinks.
Fill out the spreadsheet for each content piece within the scope of your content audit.
Refer to your web analytics platform for any key metrics you’re measuring. Record the information in your spreadsheet.
Review the data for each piece of content to determine how well it’s performing by comparing the success metrics you recorded in your spreadsheet with your content goals.
Look at metrics such as Page Views, Time on Page, Engagement, Google Rank, Backlinks, and CTA Completion. Teams can also benefit from scanning content pages for quality or comparing pages with competitors’ content that is competing for the same keywords.
Analyze the data to determine what factors might be contributing to the content’s high or low performance.
Identify patterns in your audit data, such as certain categories that remain consistent across either high or low performing content. Some things to watch out for may include:
- Day or time of publication.
- Channels used for content promotion.
- Topic or keyword optimization.
- Content structure or length.
- Audience engagement.
- Conversion and CTA effectiveness.
Scan through your content to identify pieces that require updates for outdated information.
This might include outdated facts or details that have changed since the original publication of the content, broken links, quotes or references that can be updated to be more timely or relevant, or content that can be re-optimized for different keywords.
Update any pages to the best of your team’s ability, but do not delete outdated content if it no longer serves an active purpose in your content strategy. To avoid losing any contributing site authority created by internal links and backlinks, these outdated pages can be redirected to a more helpful, relevant piece of content for your web visitors.
Develop a plan for how your team will improve your content based on the findings of your audit.
Some ways your team can use this auditing process to improve your site’s content include:
- Deciphering which topics and types of content that your audience enjoys and responds to most.
- Revising outdated content or re-optimizing it for new keywords or a new funnel stage and CTA.
- Identifying opportunities to repurpose content into new formats, such as videos, social media posts, and infographics.
- Identifying gaps in your content that can be filled with new pieces.
- Planning ahead in your content calendar with more of the content topics, formats, and styles that perform well.
Conduct ongoing content audits, based on the frequency your team determined best for your brand.
Monitor changes and trends in your content performance by comparing the most recent content audit with past audits to track improvements in your team’s overall content strategy. For future content audits, you can create a fresh copy of the spreadsheet to record newly updated metrics. You can then compare the most recent audit report to past reports to monitor changes in your content performance.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:30:35Z