A solid content audit will provide useful insights into your site, blog and overall content marketing strategy. One of the key purposes of a content audit is giving your existing onsite content a new purpose.
Think of it this way – how many times have you published a blog or article and never gone back to it? It may become outdated or less relevant over time. Well, an audit helps you to return to that older content and keep it fresh.
What does an audit involve?
When done correctly, a content audit will provide you with the answers to the following questions:
- Which pieces of content are performing best?
- What topics do your consumers connect with the most?
- Which posts are outdated?
- Do you have a consistent brand voice?
Following an audit, with insight from both an SEO and content perspective – – you should be left with a clearer understanding of where you need to place your future content marketing efforts.
Content audit checklist
If you don’t understand your visitor’s behaviour on your site – then it’s unlikely you will be able to create content that they resonate with. A content audit is a way of getting to know your customers alongside your content marketing initiatives.
There is no doubt that reviewing and analysing the progress of your content is going to contribute to the growth of your business. But we do think it’s important to consider a few things before getting started with an audit. Let’s start by reviewing why we’d do a content audit:
Why am I doing a content audit?
There is no right or wrong answer here – this could be any number of reasons. However, the reasons for doing an audit will impact the steps you take along the way. We most commonly recommend audits for two reasons: search engine optimisation and brand growth.
You can conduct an audit to optimise your content for search engines – or you may focus on improving your content marketing efforts without a focus on SEO. Of course – you could also choose to combine both. We’ve explained this below:
SEO
Performing an audit with an SEO focus means you will be identifying any weak areas in your websites search engine optimisation. You will likely be looking at things such as:
- Keywords
- Word Count
- Links
- Meta Description
- Optimised Images
By looking at these aspects of your content along with your current position on SERP (search engine results pages) – you will be able to establish what you need to change to improve your organic ranking. A content audit which considers SEO is a great way of ensuring you are driving as much organic traffic as possible through your content efforts.
Content Quality
In this case, you will be focusing on how your existing blogs and articles are performing in terms of quality. Your primary key performance indicators will be based on how much engagement your posts are driving. So, instead of looking at optimisation factors (as mentioned above), you will focus on things like:
- Length of Content
- Visitor Metrics
- Social Shares
- Comments
- Passive / Active Voice
Your main goal will be to understand how your audience are directly responding to each piece of content you have shared. As a result, you can determine what you need to change or do more of to drive more engagement.
From a digital marketing perspective – we would recommend considering both SEO and content in your audit. The two typically go hand-in-hand. For example – when analysing your SEO metrics, you’ll likely spot those weak areas in your content too.
Whether you choose to focus on SEO or content – or both combined, being clear about your goals before starting an audit will help to streamline the process and maximise results.
What are my content audit goals?
Before getting started – we recommend establishing why you are doing an audit and what you hope to achieve from it. The idea is that you will take action based on your findings – so, what is that action going to lead to?
We’ve highlighted some of the most common content audit goals. You might resonate with one or more of them:
- Find out how to improve organic search performance
- Establish which content marketing pieces have performed best previously
- Determine the topics your audience are interested in
- Locate any content gaps
- Identify any overlapping content
- Find and optimise any pages with high impressions but low conversions
- Gain new and exciting content ideas that will resonate with your audience
- Find any existing content that no longer resonates with your brand voice, niche or goals.
Which tools or resources will I use?
A solid content audit is a time-consuming project and may feel a bit overwhelming – especially when you’re just getting started. This may be the case if you’ve got other active campaigns or accounts to work on at the same time.
The good news is, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you throughout the process. We suggest researching any content marketing tools / SEO that could help you before you start your audit – i.e. by providing you with a template. We’ve listed a few of our favourites below:
- SEMRush – We use this tool regularly here at our London agency. It can provide you with a full site content audit showing you areas you need to improve. Things like alt tags, links and keywords can help you to improve your SEO.
- Screaming Frog – Use this SEO spider tool to crawl your website and improve your onsite SEO.
- Google Analytics – You can use Analytics to find out who is visiting your site, where they come from and how they travel through your site.
Get in Touch
We would recommend performing a quarterly audit which covers all aspects of your content marketing activities. Do you want to perform an an audit for your site? We’d love to work with you to improve your content through content & SEO optimisation. Feel free to give us a call or drop us an email with any questions.