A Guaranteed Effective Guide to Managing a Content Audit

In recent times, content marketing has grown rapidly due to the increasing popularity of online shopping and social media platforms. Marketing strategies through Social Media channels offer businesses great potential for growth because they allow them to connect directly with customers and create brand awareness. Through these content marketing techniques, companies can make sales without having to spend large amounts of money on traditional advertising methods such as television and paper ads.

However, there are instances in a company’s timeline where you are not getting the results you want. So, you try to do a content audit. We know it sounds intimidating but it is actually doable, and it is a MUST.

An effective content audit done annually can deliver some really valuable insights into your website‘s blog and content marketing efforts that far surpasses its lacklustre reputation.

Often, we post something and don't revisit it for years. It becomes outdated, stale, and entirely irrelevant. A good practice would require us to revisit our content periodically to ensure it is always as fresh and beautiful as when it was first published.

We’ll show you the best and efficient method for doing a content audit in 2023. This requires a bit more time but offers more detail. But take it easy. Rest assured we are here to guide you every step of the way.

Let’s kick things off with a clear and broad definition of what a Content Audit is.

An online content audit involves looking at all the content on the site and evaluating it so you can identify which aspects need improvement. It’s an overall analysis based on the metrics you choose beforehand.

To do this, you will need a content analysis tool that helps you get started quickly by providing pre-populated forms and templates.

Once you start working through your content, the next step is to organise your results into categories. You can then create reports based on those categories to help inform decisions about the future of your site. In addition, you'll also learn how to analyse your content across devices so you can better understand what people see and hear when they visit your website.

If done properly, an effective audit not only helps you to determine where improvements could be made but also helps you to answer important questions about the content pieces available on your site.

1. Which of my contents are performing well?
2. Which topics would be interesting for my audience?
3. Which posts have become too old?

An audit will show you where you're doing well and where there are gaps. It might even provide some suggestions for improvements.

Prior to executing your content audit, think about why you are doing one in the first place. These can be some reasons but the main ones are mostly to do a content audit for SEO to determine gaps in your site’s SEO. This is where you can check what improvements can be made for your site’s organic search performance.

One other reason is content marketing. This is to look at the visitors metrics and social media shares to check how your visitors are acknowledging your content. By doing this, you can determine if your content marketing efforts are paying off or you need to improvise to get better results.

A good content audit takes some serious time. If you're currently busy with other things, doing a major content audit might not be the best use for your time or energy. To avoid wasting valuable time, it's probably best to postpone it until you can dedicate the right resources.

There are ways to conduct a content audit. We’re going to show you the best content audit guide.

This is a good starting point for an effective SEO content audit. Here’s what you can do:

1. Make a spreadsheet of all your content .
Obviously, the first thing you need to do when performing a content audit is to locate all your existing content. You have two main options for doing this:

• Use a crawling tool called Screaming Frogto identify all the URLs in your existing website and export them into a CSV file. You can then use these tools to collect additional SEO data.
• Do things manually by logging in the URLS into your spreadsheet. It’s a bit time consuming but you can do it by batches to not overwhelm yourself from working on several URLs in one go.

2. Collect the data from your content.

It doesn't really matter which variables you choose to track, but you need to pick at least some of them.

Find potential SEO data points for your site using Screaming Frog.

• Page title
• Target Keyword
• Meta Description
• Page Headings
• Inbound Link
• Number of images
• ALT tags for the images
• Date of the last update

If you want to see whether your site has been gaining traffic from organic searches, you’ll need to measure page visits.

• Page entries and exits
• Bounce rate
• Average time spent on the page
• Broken links

Data points for potential content marketing.

• Number of words
• Types of content (articles, blogs, informational pages, landing pages, infographics, etc.)
• If your content is out of date, evergreen, etc
• General topic
• Tags or categories assigned to the topic
• Writer/author
• Owner of the content
• Comment count
• Social share count
• Accessibility for both desktop and mobile devices
• CTA or Call-to-Action
• Conversion data

While you may be able to track any additional data you might want to analyse later down the road, tracking just these few metrics allows you to complete your content audits while juggling other tasks. If you decide you need more time to perform an in-depth analysis, you can always come back to them later.

To determine the data points you want to track, you can use:

• Screaming Frog- provides you with page title tags for each URL you’re tracking.
• Google Analytics- provides page visits, bounce rates, and average user types on pages data. It’s great because you can export the data by choosing “Export > CSV” from the menu at the top right corner of the screen and then importing the file directly into your spreadsheets.

3. Analyse the data.

An audit may take several days, weeks, or even months to complete if there are lots of pages. It could concern itself with content quality, the customer's experience, content performance, any combination of these, or anything else. Even if your content inventory is complete, there’s one final step that needs to be taken – actually using everything you’ve created.

To ensure you're getting the most from your content audit, you must first determine some recommended actions for each page. You then need to review the results in order to understand which pages need improvement.

Take the results of your content analysis to identify any patterns that emerge from them. Then think about the best way to address each pattern.

After that, set deadlines for yourself to get started and block out whatever time needed to get things done on your schedule. Add a deadline right onto your spreadsheet.

Keep an eye on your content’s offsite performance.

You can also expand your content audit by including your off-site content (infographics, slideshows, etc.) as part of your analysis. If you're looking at content effectiveness, for instance, you might consider including as much external content as possible.

Depending on where they're hosted, the metrics mentioned here may be different from what you see when viewing the content directly from the original source site. However, if you're able to gather some additional data, then so much the better!

TO SUMMARISE THIS ARTICLE…

A content audit isn't just a one-time thing that you do every now and then. You need to adopt an all-encompassing approach when conducting audits for each channel that you use. You can use your inventory analysis to inform marketing decisions that will help your business cut costs, increase revenue, and improve your overall ad ROI.

There isn't a single way to conduct a content audit. Content audits can be executed in many different ways, depending on your needs and your objectives. If you need assistance with how to properly and effectively audit your contents, contact us now and let our team of experts guide you throughout the whole process.

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