When was the last time you performed a content audit?
A content audit is vital for maintaining a strong online presence and ensuring your website aligns with current search engine trends. In fact, relevant and unique content is an integral part of boosting search engine optimization (SEO) performance, and it’s one of Google's most important ranking criteria.
Businesses that take their marketing strategy seriously reap significant returns. According to Statista, global content marketing revenue is expected to be nearly $108 billion by 2026.
Image via Statista
A website content audit helps you assess the present condition of your website content and improve your overall content marketing strategy.
While conducting a content audit, you need to ask yourself:
Conducting a thorough content audit can help you find all these answers and figure out ways to improve your content strategy.
Let’s get started.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
A content audit refers to the process of collecting and analyzing all of the content assets on your website, including landing pages and blog posts.
Conducting a content audit will help you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and optimize your content plan to meet your current marketing goals.
A content audit is a powerful tool to check the ongoing health of your content and optimize it to drive maximum traffic, leads, and conversions.
That’s why most companies conduct content audits at least once a year, and some conduct them more than three times yearly.
Some of the major benefits of a content audit are:
A significant benefit of a content audit is that it helps you optimize your website for SEO. It can help you identify the underperforming pages and rectify the content gaps.
You can also eliminate duplicate content using free canonical tag checker tools, which might harm your SEO performance. A website content audit also helps improve internal linking, making landing pages more appealing to search engines.
The primary purpose of website content is to engage your visitors with valuable information. Conducting regular website content audits helps improve the quality of your content and aligns it better with the user’s search intent.
If you want the visitors to stay on your website for a longer time, your content needs to be more than just informative. Conducting a content audit allows you to experiment with different content structures and formats to improve dwell time.
This process can also reveal inconsistencies that may be impacting the overall user experience. A content audit can help you address these issues, enhancing the experience for your potential customers and search engines.
A successful content audit allows you to track the performance of your content strategy. By analyzing key metrics like traffic, engagement, dwell time, and conversion rates, you can determine how successful your content marketing strategy has been.
You can repurpose high-performing content on your website to attract more organic traffic, and a content audit helps you identify such content. You can repurpose your popular blog posts or interviews into short-form videos, podcasts, social media posts, or even infographics.
A content audit involves gathering and analyzing data to derive valuable insights. These findings will help you get a comprehensive view of the present state of your website content and help you make informed content marketing decisions.
Content audit data can provide insights into several SEO metrics and help develop a more precise roadmap to achieving bigger business goals.
How often should you conduct a content audit? Well, there is no fixed answer to this question. Experts suggest conducting content audits annually. However, the frequency may need to increase depending on the nature of your content and specific SEO needs.
Here are a few scenarios when you should consider running a content audit of priority.
Running a content audit may seem time-consuming, but it will help you save time and resources and generate better ROI from your content marketing efforts.
Here is the step-by-step process you should follow to conduct a content audit:
Just like other marketing initiatives, you should begin by defining your goals clearly.
Evaluate the challenges marketers face in executing successful content marketing campaigns. Prioritize quality content generation, lead generation, and improve SEO ranking.
Image via Semrush
What do you want to achieve with content marketing?
You might want to:
Track metrics such as organic traffic, search rankings, the number of backlinks, and dwell time.
This will help you identify the topics and types of posts that are driving maximum engagement and the ones that are hurting your user experience.
You’ll be able to define the most efficient content types and topics for every stage of your customers’ buying journey.
Compile a list of all of the content assets that you are going to audit. For this, you need to collect the URLs of the web pages and the metrics associated with them.
You can create and maintain a spreadsheet manually that includes details like:
You can also use online tools like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) to automatically identify all URLs on your website, collect various other SEO data points, and download that data as a CSV file.
Another way to do this automatically is to opt for the WordPress Content Audit plugin.
Content analytics involves collecting valuable data from various sources and analyzing it thoroughly. You can use a good content audit template to collect data and consolidate it in a content audit spreadsheet to get it organized and easily analyzed.
Some of the core content marketing metrics you should include in your content audit template are:
Organic Search Traffic: How many users visit your website from organic search results? This metric helps measure the relevance and visibility of your content.
Traffic Sources: Identify the sources from where your website is getting traffic and which ones contribute the most. This helps you focus on the most profitable channels.
Keyword Rankings: Keyword optimization is an integral part of on-page SEO. Tracking your keyword rankings compared to your competitors will help you set goals for future campaigns.
Backlinks: A thorough backlink analysis is essential to establish authenticity. Achieving a higher search engine ranking is easier with high-quality backlinks.
Average Engagement Time: This metric helps assess how engaging and informative your web pages are for visitors. If a landing page has a higher bounce rate, refresh the content and CTA to make it more interesting.
Click-Through Rate: When potential customers read a blog post or watch a video, they are more likely to click the CTA button if they found the content useful. Tracking CTR is vital to measuring content performance.
Subscriber Gworth: A landing page aims to gain more subscribers. During your content audits, measure subscriber growth in a given period and identify the gaps.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics, Semrush, Linkody, Brand24, and Mention.com to analyze the collected data and compare them with business goals.
Using the collected data, you should assess each piece of content and segment them into the types of actions required.
Identify which content pieces you need to:
You can simply create a new column to update the “Action Required” in your content audit spreadsheet. Feel free to highlight them in specific colors to see an overview of the health of your website content.
At the same time, you can add new content ideas that can help fill out the content gaps on your website. Also, research your competitors’ content while doing so.
Once you know what you need to do with each of your content assets, it is time to prioritize which actions to take first.
You should optimize your content plan to generate better results in a quicker way.
But how?
You can prioritize content tasks that require minimal work and may bring great results. For example, adding affiliate links, optimizing metadata, updating CTAs, and implementing 301 redirects.
Create a content plan with proper tasks, responsible person, and deadlines for each piece of content. And use automated tools to simplify the process and track everything systematically.
Here are some actionable tips that can help you improve the ROI of your content assets:
Alternatively, use the TF-IDF Tool to identify content gaps. Use it to find out if you overuse keywords, discover semantically related keywords, and compare your content to that of competitors.
You should run content audits regularly to review and optimize your content marketing strategy for maximum results.
All the content audits conclude with monitoring and measuring the performance of your renewed content marketing strategy. Use good content marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics, Buffer, Moz, SimilarWeb, and others.
These tools can track the performance of your latest content marketing strategy and compare it with your past performance to measure improvement. They can also run a competitor analysis to compare your results.
Monitoring content marketing metrics can help determine which strategies work best for you. It also lets you spot trends early, create a more precise road map, and invest wisely for better ROI.
Now, you are familiar with the content audit process. Let’s discuss the key elements to include in your content audit checklist for a comprehensive analysis.
A good site audit always starts with analyzing the page structure. You can use an audit tool to assess the content structure on a particular page. Some of the content elements you need to check include:
Each content element needs to be properly optimized to meet search intent and compete with the top-ranking pages on Google.
If there is one thing that can drive away traffic from your website, it is poor-quality content. Thin and duplicate content can harm SEO and thus must be removed immediately.
Content audit tools can help you identify pages with poor content based on various parameters. You can then formulate a content strategy to fill the gaps in your content and optimize it for better user engagement and search engine optimization.
Optimize your existing content for various keywords. But is your optimization strategy working? Run content audits to track the performance of your keywords.
A quick analysis of the existing content is necessary for on-page SEO. Ensure that your main keywords are evenly and strategically distributed on various pages to grab the readers' attention. Remember, keyword stuffing is bad for SEO, and you need to avoid it strictly.
If on-page SEO is one side of your content audits, assessing how helpful it is to Google searchers is another critical factor. After all, Google considers helpful content to be an important ranking factor when indexing pages.
Be it a landing page, product description, or blog post, the content has to fulfill the E-E-A-T criteria: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Image via Semrush
Thus, a good content audit tool can evaluate existing content and improve its relevance and credibility.
Your website should be readable and understandable even to a visitor. A successful content marketing strategy improve your SEO performance and attracts more organic traffic.
Your language, tone, and style should be inclusive to cater to people from all walks of life. When conducting content audits, check each page's readability score, identify the sections that are too complex, and create additional resources to explain the content better.
Content audits focus not only on content quality but SEO performance as well. Content audit tools should be able to analyze your web pages for several technical SEO metrics, such as:
While some of these elements are not directly related to content quality, they will ultimately impact how you get indexed for organic search results. This auditing process will also help you understand how many pages rank well in the search engine results.
You can create your content audit template based on these elements or download our ready-to-use content audit template for your site audit.
Q1. How do I do a content audit?
A. To do a content audit, you should:
Using tools can help you simplify the content audit process and save you time, money, and resources.
Q2. What does a content audit do?
A. A content audit is used to conduct a qualitative analysis of all of the content on a website. It helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy to optimize and improve your ROI.
Q3. Which tool is the best fit for doing a content audit?
A. Some of the tools you can use to do a content audit include:
Q4. How do you do content inventory?
A. Content inventory includes creating a list of all of your content assets, such as landing pages, blog posts, case studies, and more. You can either do it manually or use tools such as Screaming Frog to export a CSV data file.
Q5. What is a content audit?
A. A content audit refers to the process of collecting all of your site content and analyzing its effectiveness in terms of traffic, leads, user experience, and conversion rates.
Q6. When you're running a content audit, what is the first thing you need to do?
A. The first thing you need to do is identify the purpose behind running a content audit. Identify what you want to achieve.
Do you want to improve SEO results, user engagement, or conversions? Or, are you just trying to increase your brand’s online visibility?
The process of conducting site content audits will depend on your content marketing goals.
Q7. How do you review content?
A. You should review content for:
You will need a team of content strategists, writers, editors, and SEO analysts for conducting a thorough content analysis. If you don’t have an in-house team of experts, feel free to hire us.
Q8. How much does a content audit cost?
A. A content audit may cost anywhere between $600-$14,000 depending on the amount of content already published on the site and your company goals.
Q9. What are the 3 goals of a content audit?
A. The 3 key goals of a content audit are:
Q10. What is the difference between a content audit and an SEO audit?
A. A technical SEO audit is a comprehensive site, whereas a content audit is a part of it. An SEO audit checks website structure, security, crawlability, speed, schema markup, and many more elements to give you a vivid picture of your website performance in Google indexing.
The content audit process, on the other hand, checks content quality, readability, relevance, and accuracy to help you engage visitors better and generate leads.
Most content marketers are so busy creating and distributing new content that they seldom revisit old content to check if it performs well. You shouldn’t make that mistake if you want to make the most out of your content marketing efforts.
Many marketers agree that updating and repurposing existing content is an efficient content marketing tactic. You can also leverage this tactic by conducting a thorough content audit of your website and identifying old content pieces that have the potential to perform better after an upgrade.
Do you need help conducting a content audit or creating high-quality content for your business? Hire our experts for competitive content marketing and writing services.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
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