Introduction
Creating an inventory of the content assets on your website and evaluating them in light of a set of criteria is the process of conducting a content audit. It allows you to keep track of the content you have produced, identify the assets that require improvement, and decide which subjects to handle next.
There are various content types you can check:
- Core website pages
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
- Learning center articles
- Guides
- Webinars
- Videos
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- One pager
- Podcasts
- Success stories
- Benchmark reports
- Battle cards
- Slide decks
- Boilerplates
- Branded templates
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Reasons to Conduct a Content Audit
A content audit should be done for many different reasons. Consider checking to see if your material is in line with the requirements of your audience. To cut down on unnecessary spending and improve your content marketing or SEO approach, you may also perform a content audit. Here are some other strong reasons to perform content audit:
Knowing What Works
Knowing which types of content provide the best returns on investment would be ideal for every business owner. Knowing enable the owner to significantly lower his costs and post the exact content the customer wants to read.
To Achieve Objectives
Every business has a goal that it wants to reach, so online firms must develop a plan to do just that. With content playing a significant part in it, it is essential to audit content to see whether it is contributing to the goals' achievement or not.
To Prevent Outdated Content
People enjoy routinely consuming new stuff. If a website hasn't updated its material in a while, it may be out of date and no longer useful. It might not offer the buyer any genuine value. The crawl budget and rank in the search results can both be impacted by outdated information.
For Providing Correct Statistics
Some websites make up the majority of their material with facts and figures. These figures and data become dated with time. Such drugs run the danger of giving users false information, which could damage the brand's reputation.
Build Brand Reputation
With the use of content audits, you can keep your online presence clean, your information accurate, and your design and tone consistent. To stay current with rival brands and market developments, you might incorporate comparisons to other brands.
Content audit softwares
It is vital to have a purpose or target in mind before beginning the audit. A clear purpose makes it easier to create a plan of action to reach that objective within the allotted time. Data collection can take a lot of time. With a limited amount of time, we would want to gather information that is essential for an audit and will enable us to save time and money. The time that is saved can be used more effectively for in-depth analysis, which is important for producing more useful material for the business.
The process of content auditing is not complete without the use of software tools. The following tools can help you automate most of the process so that you don't have to manually walk through your website and note every problem one at a time.
How to run a content audit?
Consider Your Aims
You will have a better concept of how to organise your audit later on after you have your goals in mind. A content audit ultimately finds interesting content for your audience and may provide data on SEO and conversion rates. Finding out which of your pages needs to be improved for SEO content could be one goal to take into account.
As an alternative, you might consider locating the information that is most engaging and effective for your website visitors and displaying it on your homepage or in an email newsletter. A content audit will be useful for bookkeeping and modifying your approach with better methods if company goals are identified. It's time to gather your content once this is finished.
Assemble Your Content
Which content will you be auditing? Usually, product descriptions, blogs, multimedia, and publications are the subjects of audits. Make a decision, then compile the backlog of all that content. Gather the URLs of the websites you've decided to audit to do this. You can do this manually and enter the results into a spreadsheet if your website isn't very large.
However, there are other online programmes like SEMrush, Screaming Frog, etc that can perform it for you. Based on your sitemap, SEMrush and Screaming Frog will present this data. A sitemap is a file that contains all of the data about your website and may be made for free online.
Sort Your Content by Category
Sort your audit into categories on the spreadsheet after collection. It is possible to categorize the material manually, but some internet programmes will do it for you. You may make sure your content audit fulfils your demands by staying organized with the help of the categories. You can include categories like content format, authors, publishing date, and content kind. Consider the categories that can be learned from various types of content.
Metrics are yet another crucial category. Metrics can give you extra data for your study in the future. Your spreadsheet should now have the URLs for your content, categories, any included information, and metrics.
Analyze Your Data
Now, in this step it's time to take a critical look at your data. This stage will provide you with a reliable assessment of the quality of your content. The following points should be noted when assessing your data:
- What information is lacking that would be of interest to your audience?
- Which pieces of underperforming content aren't generating the desired results?
- Can it be revised or updated to retain optimization if you have old material?
Sort the information in the spreadsheet based on the findings of this study. To help you identify which category is which and which ones make up the majority of your entire content library, you can assign various colours depending on what you're analysing and highlight the rows with those colours.
Make a List of Actions
You will complete and organise your audit in this step. Based on the analysis, you now know what to concentrate on and can go forward. Consider which posts you should rewrite, edit, or reorganise. Create one final column towards the top of the spreadsheet to group these action items so you can keep track of them. You can use this column to find out what to do on a particular URL. For instance, will you rewrite, alter, delete, or maintain that blog post?
This would be the moment to include anything else, such as a priority ranking or a timeline, for this audit. While some businesses utilise comprehensive content schedules, others don't. Consider your goals and the actions that make the most sense to take first as you create a priority timeline that works best with your content audit.
Content Audit Checklist
Here is content audit checklist to consider.
- Titles: Page titles may vary from their SERP titles; this is a factor to take into account for consistency across your website and to make sure that your anchor text and CTA buttons match the page for a better user experience.
- Meta tags: it the URL's title that appears on the SERP and it has a relationship to click-through rate (CTR).
- Meta description: This is the succinct description of your page that appears on the SERP. To make sure they contain keywords and adhere to the current Google meta description character limit, you should include this in an SEO content audit.
- Average time spent: Any website would like to produce content that can hold visitors' interest and time. The likelihood that a person will convert increases with time spent on the website. In the opposite situation, if a person spends less time on the website, it can mean the information is less engaging and not hitting home with them.
- Per-session pages: While user engagement on pages is crucial, how many pages a user explores on the website is also crucial. The more pages a user explores, the higher the likelihood that he will convert. Through the interlinking of material on the website, it can also be useful in determining the sustainability of the sales funnel we have developed.
- Published date: Even though the publish date is already in the URL, you should still include it so that you may organise the traffic statistics by date if necessary and examine it in context. If a piece was published more recently than the others, it may be smashing it despite being at the bottom of a top ten list.
- URL: The content's link like blog post, YouTube link, etc. that the general public can access.
- Best Keyword Positioning: Did a certain piece of content continue to rank first for the keyword phrase it was intended to target? To identify which forms of content have long-term search victories and which types have short-term search wins, take note of the best keyword rankings and how long they lasted.
- Location: Location of the the media file on your server.
- Word count: This can be used to find short posts that can be blended into longer form material with a higher possibility of ranking. If your post is 2,500 words long and it loads in 10 seconds, something is wrong.
- Shares: You're not required to go into your social media accounts and begin gathering that information. But if your blog entries have a share counter, that information can be useful for your audit.
- Images: This could refer to determining whether the content contains images, their quality, whether they should be updated or the veracity of the information they provide.
- Broken links: Broken links can be included in the bad user experience and it can also hurt your SEO.
- Tone: every brand has its own tone to convey their content. You can check weather your content Is the tone consistent or not.
- Language: If your branded phrases have changed, if you've retired a product or service, you might need to go back and modify the language.
- Forms: Test the forms on your landing pages and elsewhere to ensure that users can fill them out easily and that the data is properly sent into your CRM and other automation tools.
- Comments: You can use a comment moderation tool for best results, but if you don't have one, keep this in mind when auditing your postings. A Google penalty for artificial external links could result from spamming comments, so make sure there are responses to both positive and negative comments.
- Offers: Verify that popups, bottom rail, and side rail offers aren't showing up in the wrong places or if they need to be refreshed.
- Readability: Readability scores, although Grammarly and Yoast are limited in their abilities. There are times when you need a person to scan through and make sure the content is interesting, simple to read, and informative.
- Grammar/spelling: The content team does not produce all of the content. This might be helpful for one-pagers, pitch decks, and product descriptions, among other things.
- Up-to-date: The information is current. The statistics might be updated. The tools you listed in your listicles are they still in use? Could some more recent links be added to the content?
- Competitor analysis: Compare to a rival articles written by rival businesses or other companies that are comparable to yours and from which you might learn and step up your content game.
- Organic Traffic: Everyone is optimising the website with traffic in mind. If your content isn't driving enough traffic, your content strategy may need to be adjusted. It could pertain to the item's dissemination, format, or even just the content itself. It's possible that the issue wasn't sufficiently addressed in the page's content or the wrong keyword was chosen as the focal point.
- Bounce rate: High bounce rates on the pages need to be addressed right away because they may indicate that we completely misinterpreted the user's purpose.
- Backlinks: Quality backlinks serve as a vote of confidence for your pages and are a crucial Google ranking element. On freshly developed content pages, a few backlinks are acceptable. Keep routinely assessing your backlinks because sometimes material attracts the incorrect links. Such backlinks that could lower your page authority in Google's eyes must be removed. An SEO company that is cautious of these backlinks periodically audits the backlinks to gain insightful information.
- Unique Visitors: Those that come to your website for the first time are considered unique visitors. A new unique visitor indicates that there are many people seeing the information. Better conversions, shares, and backlinks from content result from having more views.
- Traffic source: You may find out which sources are sending the most qualified traffic by measuring the traffic source. Businesses can consistently enhance content promotion through that channel in order to attract new clients.
- Conversion rate: To determine whether content pieces designed specifically for conversion are yielding the desired results or not, conversion goals metrics must be measured.
- Email Metrics: How did your article perform after being distributed to your email list? Keep track of your opens, clicks, and forwards to identify which material performs best if email interaction is a priority for your content.
Conclusion
The content audit takes time but it is necessary for a online business to impress to google. Firstly, you need to assess whether your content is effective for you in light of your initial content goals. A number of data metrics will be associated with each piece of material you audit. These measurements will show you if you're on target or significantly off. Pay attention to what the audit's details are telling you about the material that performs effectively. Examine the content's type, subject, creator, publication date, and topic. With all these continuous observation and efforts, your website will contain the highest quality content ever.
Interested in our Content Marketing Strategy?
- Result-oriented Content Marketing Solutions
- High Quality Content Marketing
- Compelling Content Development
- SEO-friendly Content Marketing
A
I appreciate the useful information. Although I’ve seen a lot of information on SEO audits, I’ve recently been considering providing a content audit as a business, so it’s helpful to understand the distinctions.
S
Audit checklist is very clear. Thanks for the information.
G
Also should keep in mind that there is no one size fits all answer to this. Content audits can take on a variety of forms, trajectories, methods, and scopes. It all relies on your requirements and objectives.
M
Reasons To Conduct A Content Audit is beneficial.
T
By going through the article I came to know It takes time to conduct a content audit, but it is essential for an online company to win Google over.
T
Content of the article is very useful.
R
By examining the accomplishments and shortcomings of your previous material, you may direct your content marketing to new heights.
K
An excellent technique to determine whether your content marketing efforts are yielding results and how they might be improved to provide even greater ROI is to conduct content audits a few times a year.