Comprehensive Guide On Conducting Content Audit

Comprehensive Guide On Conducting Content Audit

The best content writers and search engine optimizers striking out with a new piece of content is a fact. Sometimes, despite best efforts, fail to rank in search results. Use these less-than-successful pieces of content to figure out where you went wrong, take action to correct it, and use that new knowledge for creating stronger new content.

What is a Content Audit?

Content audit is like spring cleaning for your website. It is a systematic review of all your site’s content to ensure that each piece is contributing to business goals and search engine optimizations (SEO) performance. Evaluating everything from blog posts to landing pages, a content audit helps in identifying what is working and what needs to improve, and what should be removed or repurposed.

Types of content to audit

Conducting a website content audit enables reviewing various types of content, including blog posts, landing pages, product pages, videos & infographics, and social media content.

Website content audits are crucial for maintaining a strong online presence, helps in ensuring that your content aligns with your SEO strategies, providing a user experience, and ultimately driving organic search traffic and conversions.

Role of content audits in SEO strategies

Content audits are a cornerstone of effective digital marketing and SEO strategies. Regularly auditing your content aids in identifying what is driving traffic and what is holding your site back. The ongoing process helps you stay competitive in search engine rankings and adapt to changes in algorithms and user behaviour.

Tools for conducting a content audit

Using the right tools streamlines your content audit process.

• Google Analytics and Google Search Console
• Traditional SEO tools and keyword research platforms
• Technical SEO tools
• Content-first SEO platforms
• Excel and Google Sheets for audit spreadsheets

How To Conduct A Content Audit

Step 1: Set your goals

Its is important to start with clearly defined objectives about what you want to accomplish. There should be at least one goal for auditing and determining the metrics with which success would be measured. Things include:

• Improvement in SEO results for specific pages or the entire website
• Enhancing engagement and/or conversions
• Removing out-of-date or redundant content
• Improving the standard or existing pieces of content
• Deciding new organizational structure for your site.

Step 2: Collect and categorize content

Defining what you are hoping to accomplish, work on inventorying what you have published. Do determine which types of content you are going to be reviewing and collect URLs. Either do this manually via Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet, or use an online tool such as HubSpot, Semrush, or Screaming Frog.

Further, then, categorizing content helps in keeping you organized as you determine which existing pieces are okay and which need to be updated or removed. Structuring the information would be determined by your goals.

Step 3: Track Metrics and Analyze Data

Tangible KPIs enabling you to assess the health and performance of your site. The content data portion of your audit needs to come with its own handy-dandy Excel doc.

Perform a past audit

It includes backtracking and auditing past-produced content. knowing published content aids in gauging what kind of content you need to create in future and what not.

This part of the content audit is time-consuming, and you will need to decide how far back you want to begin your content audit.

Many website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or Semrush’s Content Audit tool, can quickly inventory your content based on sitemap data, thereby providing a list of content URLs to audit.

Perform Yourself for Ongoing Audits

Metrics that need to be tracked for your content data audit:

• Comments
• Social shares
• Organic traffic
• Bounce rate
• Backlinks
• Time on Page
• Unique Visitors
• Pages Per Session
• New Vs. Returning Users
• Traffic Sources
• Conversions

Additional Information to track includes:

• SEO title & meta descriptions
• UTM parameters
• Lead sales
• Email metrics

Keep track of repurposed content and see how repurposing benefits content strategy

Step 4: Take Actionable Steps and Develop a New Content Strategy

Once you have all the information needed for determining what content is working and what isn’t. now information is used to create a plan to improve it. Adding another column to your spreadsheets, indicating what action is needed for taking each piece of content.

Determining the priority for each action and deleting content is quick and usually easy. To keep track of what is most urgent, you might find it useful to include a priority column in your spreadsheet. This is also an ideal moment for creating a new content strategy, as your content audit should prioritize popular subjects and popular postings.

Describing how and why your marketing material will be used, as well as how it will assist you in achieving particular objectives.