Content auditing is a vital process for any content strategy. It helps you evaluate the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your existing content, and identify gaps, opportunities, and improvements. In this article, you will learn how to audit your existing content in four steps: defining your goals, gathering data, analyzing data, and creating an action plan.
Before you start auditing your content, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Your goals should align with your content strategy and your business objectives. For example, you may want to audit your content to improve your SEO, increase your conversions, enhance your user experience, or update your brand voice. Having specific and measurable goals will help you focus your audit and evaluate your results.
In my experience an audit can be as simple as gathering thumbnails of all your content into one place. This can very interesting exercise to look at branding, visual consistency, topics and overall connectivity. You could then marry this up with some top-line performance metrics (eg: awareness, engagement) and it should start to paint a picture of what the challenges and opportunities are that lie ahead.
It's great to have goals in mind, however, approaching your audit with an open mind is also a great tactic. Oftentimes, you come across problems or issues that you weren't specifically looking for, making your time spent all the more valuable.
You can't measure the success of your content without first specifying what success looks like. What are you trying to achieve? Do you have different goals for each marketing channel? Who do you want to reach? Are there any KPIs already in place? Once you know those things, you can go ahead and perform a content review to work out whether your current content is hitting or missing the mark in those areas.
The next step is to collect data about your content and its performance. You can use various tools and methods to gather data, such as content inventory, analytics, surveys, interviews, or audits. A content inventory is a comprehensive list of all your content assets, such as web pages, blog posts, videos, or podcasts. It can include metadata, such as titles, URLs, formats, or keywords. Analytics can provide you with quantitative data, such as traffic, bounce rate, engagement, or conversions. Surveys and interviews can provide you with qualitative data, such as user feedback, preferences, or pain points. Audits can help you assess your content against specific criteria, such as readability, accuracy, consistency, or accessibility.
Qualitative information is useful but quantitative is where the gold is. So often I see fancy analytics reports but they have no narrative. It's the stories that the lie behind the data that help create the meaningful change. Getting quantitative information takes a certain bravery, however. Sometimes there are difficult conversations to have and a willingness is needed to really hear people when they tell you what isn't working for them.
Once you have gathered enough data, you need to analyze it and draw insights. You can use various techniques and tools to analyze data, such as spreadsheets, charts, dashboards, or reports. The key is to look for patterns, trends, gaps, or issues in your content and its performance. For example, you may find that some content is outdated, irrelevant, duplicated, or low-quality. You may also find that some content is performing well, generating leads, or satisfying user needs. You should compare your findings with your goals and identify what works and what doesn't.
Tailoring content based on feedback from analytics might help narrow down your selected audience but also might prevent you from thinking about possibilities outside of a narrow, hemmed in vision or audience. The landscape changes with just about every daily pulse so strategizing for a static goal might be detrimental. Analytics should hep you understand who is looking at your content based on how it is presented and what the actual content is but should never solely decide your vision. That voids creativity. I make the analogy to present day BI users who are crafting dashboards and decks for presentations when what they are actually doing is using what are quickly becoming legacy tools. In 5 years AI will eradicate current workplace tech.
The final step is to create an action plan based on your analysis and insights. Your action plan should outline the specific actions you need to take to improve your content and achieve your goals. For example, you may need to delete, update, rewrite, or create new content. You may also need to optimize your content for SEO, usability, or conversion. You should prioritize your actions based on their impact, urgency, and feasibility. You should also assign responsibilities, deadlines, and resources for each action.
Creating a content strategy document is our compass for auditing existing content. It's not just a document; it's our roadmap to understanding what's working and what needs improvement. This guide helps us assess our content's performance, relevance, and alignment with our goals. It's about optimizing what we have and ensuring every piece serves a purpose. With this document, our content audit becomes systematic, strategic, and an essential part of our journey to content excellence. ??????