Content Audit – Anything and Everything You Should Know

When you are into digital marketing, creating, distributing, and organising new content might be the most impulsive task to achieve your content marketing goals.

And the bigger problem lies in the fact that, despite having sufficient amounts of good content, this content gets buried under other stuff and is rarely used or revisited. Naturally, losing track of the treasures you already own becomes the harshest reality. And you won’t be able to implement those just because you can’t update your pre-existing content, which might have the potential to be your most efficient content marketing strategy.

It isn’t a sustainable approach when running an online business. So, go for a regular, well-conducted content audit to identify which content you need to improve, with the spark of repurposing it in a new format.

Now, the first question that would arise in anyone’s mind is,

• What Is a Content Audit?

Content auditing is nothing but a systematic approach to analysing and assessing all the content you have created so far and whatever you have on your website. The main objective of a content audit is to have a clear idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and its implementation tactics so that you can adapt content related to your workflow and plan contrivance accordingly to achieve your marketing goal. Using it correctly is one of the best business plans, irrespective of your size – whether it is a small business or a multinational corporation.

So, here we are listing out five essential critical points on how to audit your content successfully.

Step 1: Define your marketing goal and its corresponding matrices

Step 2: Before you do anything else, take an inventory of your content

Step 3: Prioritize your efforts in collecting and analysing your data

Step 4: Figure out your proper action plan

Step 5: Rethink your content marketing strategy

• What Type of Content Should You Audit?

Auditing content is nothing complicated if you know which types of content you need to audit and what kinds of data you need to choose for analysis.

Here we have made a complete list of content that should be hierarchised for your audit.

• Core Website page content

1. Content on Landing Pages
2. Blog posts
3. Learning Central Articles
4. Guiding content
5. Content on Webinars
6. Video content
7. One-pager
8. Podcast content
9. Testimonials
10. Reports on benchmark

• What Should Your Content Audit Goals Be?

Before setting up your goals, be convinced that running a content audit can prove the most beneficial for your traffic and will improve the experience on behalf of your readers.

Content audits help you evaluate the entirety or bulk of your brand’s content to understand what isn’t working for readers and search engines. For example, you might add keywords in your articles nowadays as part of your current strategy – but if that were never done before, a content audit would help you locate which pieces need to be updated.

A content audit also gives you a heads-up about the new SEO opportunities and how to implement them on your website—like adding keywords to your content’s heading gives search engines more clues about your web page.

Running a content audit makes sure your website’s content is still up-to-date and easy for visitors to understand. For instance, you may not know that the links on one of your product pages are broken, but running a content audit will provide you with a reminder to fix this as quickly as possible. Here’re some additional benefits below.

• Why Should You Conduct a Content Audit?

Yes, we agree that content auditing is time-consuming and tedious, but this is not really a choice; it is a necessity if you want to produce high-quality content. Because high-end content will only increase your brand value among your readers, enhance your reputation, and improve your team’s output.

Let us now focus on some crucial points of a content audit:

1. A content audit will track your content marketing strategy. Because it will allow you to broaden your vision and adjust your marketing strategy according to your needs, which will help you better understand and improve SEO and the strengths and weaknesses of your targeted audience.
2. Every piece of content you put in front of your audience communicates something to them. Do you want to convey that you’re behind on the times, careless and inept? Chances are, this may not go down well with your followers. A content audit is solely responsible for all of our brands (and their followers). It makes your reader understand that you’re trying your best to go above and beyond.
3. It is pretty evident now that a comprehensive content audit can create and maintain a wholesome content library for you. And the shared content library has now turned out to be a goldmine. Because if every department has access to the content, they can reuse, format, and recycle it for their own needs, eventually improving the content quality.
4. It will also help you get the best SEO opportunities and a clearer vision to implement them on your website. The search engines will be able to suggest your web page to the browser more accurately if you give most of your information in your content.

• What Should Be Your Primary Focus While Operating a Content Audit?

There are hundreds of purposes that a proper content audit can serve. So, it is not practically possible to give a cut-and-dry list of what kinds of data points you should collect. Hence, I am giving you an out-and-out list of information, and you have to make your choice.

But, again, please be alert that it is not a wholesome, concise list, and maybe some data points will fall into more than one category. So, don’t collect all of them and follow them blindfolded; instead, choose your information wisely based on your intent.

1. Content Audit Based on Informational Checklist – Informational data is the fact that gives you the objectives of which content is significant for audit. Here, you can either run your audit manually or use plugins and tools and let them export data for you. But whatever process you choose, focus on the summaries. Suppose you are going to include meta descriptions in your audit – in that case, the title to consider maintaining the homogeneity between your page and the SERP is your URL’s meta title, and the last and most crucial point is the meta description.

Other vital points that need to be focused on are – publishing date, last modification date, supporting products or services, URL, location, keywords, word count, and lastly, number of shares.

2. Qualitative Content Audit Checklist – Qualitative data gathering is essential while performing a content audit. Though you only need to gather your data manually, it is impossible to maintain your brand’s reputation, content quality, and consistency without completing it.

But what key points should you focus on here? Anchor your process around images, broken images or links, tone, language, forms, comments, offers, spelling, grammar, accuracy, uniformity, and readability.

3. Quantitative Content Audit Checklist – You need to try and avoid getting lost in the numbers. This will enable you to work more with your gut, which is crucial when deciding whether to step things up a bit. Numbers are convenient when figuring out how things are operating on a grand scale, but they can also keep you from focusing on the details, which are just as important.

• What Are The Benefits Of A Content Audit?

A content audit can help improve the quality of your content. It’ll make navigating your site a lot more effortless by helping avoid confusion and mistakes. It can assist in optimising your website so that it will get less traffic in SERP results and visitations. And finally, a well-executed audit or review is full of information you otherwise would not have known, like how much work was devoted to specific pieces of content that may need improvement. For example, you may notice some areas where readers seem to engage less with the content than others. It’s an insightful skill to identify these instances where one might consider rewriting content to better create understandable text for any obscure words or phrases that could be cutting off the effectiveness for readers. An excellent way to have an effective content audit is to use a template.

A content audit will also reveal various ways to improve your SEO results. It is an efficient way to boost your ROI, as well as an opportunity to identify your top-performing pages, optimize internal linking where needed, and remove pages that are no longer relevant. Hiring an SEO agency is highly recommended to make sure your site’s ranking on google and other search engines is not negatively affected when making these tweaks.

Lastly, before running an audit, think of your goal, categorise it accordingly, gather all of your content, and backlog them; after completing your audit, organise them into a spreadsheet, do whatever is needed, and analyse your data to create action items. And you are done.

Keep in mind that this audit is vital to any online marketing strategy you may have for your website in the future. If you plan on creating a system based on this audit, you can set up an excellent timeline that coincides with this audit by including it now, if necessary. Some organisations can directly translate their findings into actionable items like “publish widget reviews on October 15th”, while others will need some planning to create their strategy-based timelines. So go for creating a content calendar suited to your needs, start thinking about what makes the most sense, set priorities for your business or digital marketing goals, and align these dates with what you’ve written in your audit findings.