A content audit refers to the process of collecting and analyzing assets on a website, such as landing pages or blog posts.
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Benefits of Content Audits
Your content audit is supposed to help you bring your content up-to-date, boost the rate of your web pages, and make the website you offer to readers straightforward and free of error. In addition, content audits:
- Give a data-driven understanding of the performance of your content, assisting you in making knowledgeable decisions according to accurate information rather than just assumptions.
- Specify areas for content repurposing or updating where numbers are lower than expected.
- Learn more about your audience.
- Content maintenance becomes more straightforward when you understand what you’re delivering.
To guarantee your website content audit is valuable, carve out enough time to complete it. Any professional digital marketing company will do. If you’re doing the job yourself, you must do this.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to be in it alone — there are plenty of templates to direct you through a content audit if you’re unsure where to begin.
How to Run a Content Audit in 5 Steps
1. Think of your goals.
First, think about what you desire to accomplish. When you have your purposes in mind, you will better understand how to categorize your audit later.
Finally, a content audit identifies engaging content for your audience and can include SEO and conversion rate information. One goal could be determining which of your pages require to be SEO-optimized. Alternatively, you may think about finding the most exciting and best-performing
content for your website visitors and put that on your homepage or in an email newsletter.
Determining company goals will ensure your content audit helps bookkeep and update your strategy with improved tactics. After this is done, then it’s time to collect your content.
2. Gather your content.
Which content are you going to audit? The audits are typically for product descriptions, blog posts, multimedia, and publications. Determine this, and collect the backlog of all of that content.
To accomplish this, gather the URLs of the selected web pages to audit. If you own a small website, you can do this manually and put them in a spreadsheet. Nevertheless, there are also online devices to do it for you.
3. Categorize your content.
After obtaining your audit, categorize it on the spreadsheet. Some online tools classify the information for you, but it’s also doable to do it yourself. The categories will keep you organized to ensure your content audit meets your requirements.
Another essential category is metrics. Some online tools will have them in the audit, but Google Analytics can also pull data for you. Metrics can deliver more information for your analysis later. This data will be
4. Analyze your data.
Now, it’s time to consider your data critically. This step of the content audit will give you a fair measure of the state of your content. When analyzing your data, here are the things to take note of:
- Content that is missing — What is your audience interested in that you haven’t wrapped?
- Outdated content — Can it be updated or reworked to support optimization if you have an old range?
- Home run content — Content that has performed exceptionally well.
According to the results of this analysis, manage them in the spreadsheet. A way to do this is to set various colors according to your research and highlight the rows with those colors. Hence, you have an idea of which category and ones take up the most significant portion of your overall content library.
5. Make action items.
In this step, you will complete and clean up your audit. You now know what to focus on in the analysis and can go from there. Think about which posts to delete, update, re-write, and re-structure.
To manage these action items, add one last column to the spreadsheet — one near the front so you can keep tabs on it. This column will let you know the action to take on a particular URL.
If you intend on ranking by the importance of including a timeline for this audit, now would be the time to have that. Some organizations utilize full-blown content calendars, while others don’t require them. Making or ordering them on your digital marketing services is totally up to you. To make a priority timeline that fits best with your content audit, consider your purposes and which items make sense to enforce first.
6. Optional: Choose a content audit tool
While not a requirement, selecting a content auditing tool can assist you with your process. The most crucial benefit of utilizing a content audit tool is that they are fast, helping you save considerable time. Rather than gathering URLs manually, the device can automatically aggregate the content you’re looking for and display metrics for you to see.
Final Thoughts
All in all, Content audits maintain an inventory of a website and deliver insight into which content to develop, update, re-write, or delete. After all of this, aren’t you curious to see how to write better content 2 times faster?
