Is your content all messed up? Think of all the good (or bad) content you published, the problem is such pieces often get buried deep inside, is rarely revised and reused.
According to the SEMrush survey, 51% of marketers reports that updating or repurposing existing content is one of the most powerful content marketing tactics. This means you need to do repetitive checks to provide readers with fresh, updated, and engaging content all the way to the bottom.
But how do you identify content that needs improvement? Well, you can do so with the help of aContent Audit. It can help you to evaluate your existing content on your website and navigate the content that has to be deleted, redirected, or improved. Either your content isn’t driving good results, or they are missing on certain trendy topics and keywords altogether. This could be the best solution to find your strengths as well as weaknesses and shape a future content strategy.
Let’s dive into what content audit exactly is, why does it matter, and how to conduct one to keep your content up to date, error-free, and valuable.
What is Content Audit?
A content audit is a process of systematically evaluating and optimizing all the content on your website, with the aim of gathering information about how each individual piece has been performing and fits into customer experiences and further makes the right strategic choice to boost the sales funnel.
This will help you to find out which pages are bringing superior outcomes, which pages needs improvement, and which pages should be pruned or consolidated with others. In simple words, it can help you to identify the areas of your customer journey that require more attention and refinement.
Why Content Audit is Necessary?
When it comes to accomplishing your content marketing goals, the primary impulse might be to create good content to maximize your results. Valuable content gives marketers a much-needed level of perspective and considerable attention. It gives a real-time update on what’s working and what’s not.
A content audit should be performed for two main reasons, that include:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO):It gives an opportunity to optimize your current content, highlight weak areas of the site’s search engine presence, and present new ways that seem more relevant to the business.
- Evaluate Existing Content Advertising Efforts:This can help to expose channels that aren’t contributing well to the growth and highlight high-performing mediums. You can analyze how content is contributing to newsletters sign-ups, social shares, and page visits.
If your business has both of these elements to perform, a content audit will serve valuable insights about your content base, strengthen your SEO strategy, and overall business bottom line.
How to Conduct a Content Audit?
1. Define Your Goals
In the beginning, first, think about what you want to achieve. When you have your goals in place, you will have a better knowledge of what you should do next to bring effective results. Eventually, an audit will help to identify genuine content for the audience, including data on SEO and conversation rates. Thus, one goal should be to determine which pages are SEO-optimized. Alternatively, you can figure out the most interesting content as per the number of visitors, page views, etc. to improve your overall strategy.
2. Gather and Categorize Your Content
Have you thought of which content you’re going to audit yet? The common content forms include product descriptions, blog posts, titles, publications, and multimedia. So decide this and accumulate all of them for further process. If you have a small website, you can manually put them in a spreadsheet or instead, use online tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush.
3. Evaluate Your Data
Now, it’s time to take your collected data more seriously. This step will give you a clear understanding of the exact state of your content. When assessing your data, here are a few things you should keep in mind:
- Missing Content– What your audience finds interesting but you haven’t covered it?
- Underperforming Content– Which content aren’t bringing good results you desire for?
- Obsolete Content– If you have old pieces of content, can it be updated or reworked to reach a wider audience?
- High-Performing Keywords and Content– Which content and keywords are performing extremely well altogether?
Based on these analyses, organize them properly in a spreadsheet. The best way to attain a clear understanding is to highlight which category works best and which isn’t.
4. Finalize and Clean Up Your Audit
You might have understood by now what you should focus on based on your evaluation. So it’s time to decide the posts that need to be deleted, updated, rewritten, or restructured. To organize these action elements, make a separate column of them in a spreadsheet with a specific URL to plan your priority timeline.
Now that you have gathered ample knowledge about how to evaluate your content, how to run an audit, where to include important elements, and so on, you’re all set to fully incorporate them into your content marketing plan to drive more effective results.
So what are you waiting for? Give it a shot and focus on it to improve your next marketing campaign.
