If you are a marketer, generating large amounts of content for you website is a big part of your job, but consistently creating content isn’t enough. You need to go through your content regularly and update, trash, or repurpose it to keep it relevant and competitive against other companies like yours. You need to make sure that your high-quality content is organized and approachable so that it is attractive and helpful for your customers. If you’re coasting along in auto-pilot with what you put on your site, you may not be creating the type of content that your readers want to see.
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Most online businesses have a few areas that are lacking in the content creation department. The content could not be performing well, or they might be missing content on some highly sought-after topics and keywords. If you feel that your content marketing does not work as well as it should, you may need to do a content audit.
A content audit is a thorough inspection of the content on your website that gives you the opportunity to look critically at your optimization efforts and determine how well you are meeting your business objectives. When done correctly, a content audit will let you see what is missing and make the necessary adjustments to provide what your audience expects.
Here are some steps to follow when performing a content audit.
- Make a list of all your content.
Taking stock of what you have on your website is the first step of a content audit. Make a spreadsheet that lists all of your URLs through software such as Screaming Frog. Your list should give you valuable insight about your content, including its quality and level of optimization.
- Decide on the metrics for your content.
You will need to decide on the content metrics that you will use to measure success. There are four types of metrics that you can use for your content audit:
- SEO – These metrics look at your backlinks and the kind of organic traffic you get so that you can understand how the search engines are ranking your site.
- Behavioral- These metrics monitor things like bounce rate and average page view time to help you see how different content is working compared to others.
- Sales – These are metrics to measure how your content influences the amount and kind of sales that you get.
- Engagement – These metrics show you how many comments, shares, retweets, or likes you get on the different pages. It can help you understand what your visitors like and don’t like when they go to your website.
- Use a fine-tooth comb on your content.
At this stage, you need to go through every piece of content that you were able to retrieve and evaluate them based on how they performed. You need to check how your content aligns with your goals, customer service, PR, SEO, and social media.
- Start culling, modifying, and updating.
As you go through your content, you should be able to rank the pages based on their performance, and then you’ll have to decide how those rankings fit into your goals. If you notice that you have some outdated but highly downloaded content, consider updating and reposting it. If some material is incorrect or poorly received, you can delete it altogether.
- Make your plan work for you.
Once you have the result of your content audit, you need to use that information to benefit your marketing strategy. Take a good, hard look at your findings and your company’s goals, and make any necessary adjustments. Performing this type of audit can be tedious, but content marketing can pay off.
