How to do a content audit

When you employ the proper SEO and content marketing strategy for that website, you’ll help build your company’s reputation on the web, generate traffic for your product or service, improve conversion rates, and grow the bottom line.

For most organizations, attention paid to content often ebbs & flows along with changes in strategy, team structure, bandwidth, etc. and – eventually – organic performance takes a hit. That’s when it’s time to conduct a content audit to maximize (or recover) your website’s performance.

Here’s what you should know about content audits.

What is a content audit?

You’ve probably heard of the term “audit” used in reference to taxes. In these scenarios, companies or individuals will have their financial accounts officially examined, typically by an independent body.

A content audit is similar, and it’s defined as a collection of procedures used to measure and analyze the performance of your website content. Content audits are often used as the foundation for other marketing strategies, and they focus on improving an organization’s content. Below, we’ll review the method for a website content audit and how you can use one to maximize your results.

Why do you need a content audit?

If you’ve never performed a content audit on your website before, you may wonder why it’s necessary.

Overall, auditing website content enables you to identify topic gaps, obstacles, and areas for improvement on your website. If your website hasn’t been actively causing your issues, you may think that it’s doing it's job, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

More often than not, websites I review are undercapitalizing on some massive opportunities in your space. (And frankly, the longer your business has had a web presence, the more likely it is that your site needs a content audit, as years and years of content pile up.)

Reviewing your website and ensuring that you’re producing high-quality content allows you to rank higher in SERPs, earn more traffic, improve conversions, and increase revenue.

Performing a content audit is one of the best steps you can take to improve your content marketing strategy.

How do you run a content audit?

If you’ve noticed your website’s organic performance lagging recently, then it’s likely time to jump into content auditing.

This process will reveal your website’s strengths and weaknesses and allow you to adjust your current marketing goals for improved performance. Here are the steps you should take while performing a content audit:

1. Define your goals and metrics

Auditing your web can be both challenging and time-consuming, so it’s important that you clearly define your business goals. If you don’t know what you want to achieve in your content audit, then you’ll have a difficult time being successful.

Some sample goals for content auditing include:

• Improving your SEO results

  • Identifying web pages with high SEO potential to own Page 1 rankings in SERPs

  • Understanding what content you need to add, update, or omit from your website

  • Checking and optimizing internal linking on your pages to ensure the stragegy makes sense, and no links are broken

• Increasing audience engagement

  • Identifying the most engaging types of content for your audience

  • Emphasizing the topics that your visitors are most interested in

  • Determining what kind of content generates the most engagement

• Improving conversion rate

  • Identifying which pages offer the best user experience for your visitors

  • Finding the content that generates the most leads

  • Defining the most efficient types of content for each stage of the buyer’s journey

For the purposes of the subsequent steps in this guide, let's assume the goal of your content audit is improving your SEO results.

You’ll next need to define the metrics by which you’ll use to measure your success. Generally speaking, content marketing metrics can be divided into the following four categories. These include:

• SEO metrics: organic traffic, clickthrough rate, backlinks, keyword rankings,

• User engagement metrics: pageviews, average session duration, bounce rate

• Sales metrics: number of leads, conversion rates, ROAS, ROI

• Social proof: likes, shares, comments, mentions, reviews

2. Take a content inventory

Before you can evaluate and analyze the content that you have, you must understand all the content currently available on your website. Take an inventory of all your internal content as well as your external publications. To help you gather this, we’ve included lists below of the different types of materials you may have:

• Internal

  • “Core” pages (Home page + everything else in Global Nav)

  • Landing pages

  • Blog posts

  • News

  • Educational materials

  • Categories ("Collections") and Product detail pages

  • External

• External publications

  • Videos

  • PDF

  • Interactive content (quizzes, tests, games, etc.)

What does this look like? For most websites, the XML sitemap will effectively function as a solid list of pages that need to be audited. You can either download these pages from Google Search Console or use a free tool to convert XML to CSV spreadsheets to begin your audit worksheet.

3. Collect and analyze your data

This is the most difficult and multifaceted step in the content audit process. It’s a complex and lengthy process that typically involves leveraging data from a variety of sources and then compiling it in a meaningful format (spreadsheets typically work the best).

Throughout this process, you’ll be able to determine which content serves you best (attracts more traffic, boosts your conversion rate, etc.).

While there is a variety of tech that can be used to accomplish this, these are my favorite essential website content audit tools:

• Google Analytics: helps you to understand which content is performing best in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversion rates

• Google Search Console: allows you to layer in each URL's Clicks, Impressions, Avg. Position, and Impressions, as far back as sixteen months,

• Ahrefs.com: (or SEMRush) useful for pulling keyword and backlink metrics.

• Screaming Frog: this is the magic tool that streamlines the content audit process. Plus, Screaming Frog’s “API Access” feature allows you to automatically pull in metrics from GA, Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz and more. This saves alot of time.

• Google Drive: free and web-based, Google Sheets is perfect for creating your audit and sharing in real-time; especially helpful if you're collaborating.

• Content audit template (optional): if it's your first time running an audit, or you want to improve upon past audits, you might opt to use a preexisting content audit template. WordStream offers several here.

Pro tip: the more Excel-savvy you are, the more time you can save when creating a content audit.

4. Create an action plan

After you have your data, you’ll need to decide how to follow up on that information.

How do you take what you’ve learned and implement it so that it aligns with your long-term website goals? This is where you create the action plan, which simply falls into the “Keep, Update, or Delete” format of next steps.

For each URL you've audited, you'll want to decisively determine whether you:

• Keep pages or content elements as is that are currently serving your organization well;

• Update pages and re-optimize content elements that have potential, but may be outdated or aren’t performing to their best ability; or

• Delete (or noindex) obsolete or irrelevant pages or content elements that may be doing more harm than good.

Depending on the size of your content library, it's also very possible that you'll have a fourth option for Merge, wherein you identify where 2 or more URLs onsite are overly similar, and would benefit the most from merging/redirecting to one singular URL.

5. Adjust your content marketing strategy

Your content audit is intended to demonstrate where you can make changes to your website content for the best success in your long-term marketing strategy.

So, first, refresh the content that you have on your website that were tagged 'Update' in your audit; it's easier to improve what you have than reinvent the wheel entirely. For some pages, it might mean updating several paragraphs, where others might be complete overhauls. Though it's worth noting, changing a title tag or updating the published date likely won't move the needle; updates should be user-focused and significant.

Prioritize a handful of detailed, well-written posts on a topic rather than poorly written posts or pages. When it comes to rankings in SERPs, a single page-one article is worth dozens of posts that never make it to the first page. Then, update your content marketing strategy to match.

And be forward-thinking: with each piece of content you create or update, consider, Will this be flagged as irrelevant in my next content audit?

When you’re creating any new content for your website, ensure that it prioritizes quality content, keywords, internal linking, etc. that’ll ultimately add user value and optimize your ranking.

It's mission-critical that you evaluate the data and take your action plan seriously. Chances are that at least some of your content is obsolete or altogether irrelevant. It’s essential that you take steps to remedy, as quality > quantity is the order of the day.

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Next steps

While running a website content audit may feel overwhelming initially, it’s one of the best steps you can take to improve your content marketing strategy.

When you have clear data on your content, you’re able to quickly evaluate it, make updates, compare stats, and see what’s working (and what’s not!).

Get started on your content audit today! Or contact us for more assistance.