Here's how you can conduct a content audit in a content strategy project.

Conduct a content audit by gathering all existing content, evaluating quality and relevance, identifying gaps, assessing performance metrics, and documenting findings to inform your future content strategy.

Having a Content Management System (CMS) in place helps a lot when you need to build an inventory of your existing content. Many CMS solutions automatically catalog blog posts, articles, videos, and more across platforms. They also capture essential details like URLs, titles, content types, publication dates, and performance metrics. A centralized CMS database streamlines the process, making it easier to evaluate each piece against your objectives. A CMS helps to identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement. If a CMS isn't available, use a spreadsheet to manually record each piece of content, noting key details. It's more time-consuming, but the end result will help you ensure your content aligns with everyone's needs.

By analyzing your existing content, you can identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to optimize your approach. Start by cataloging all your content assets, including blog posts, web pages, social media content, and any other relevant materials. Evaluate each piece based on metrics such as traffic, engagement, and conversions to determine what's resonating with your audience. Assess the content's alignment with your brand messaging and target keywords. Use these insights to refine your content strategy.

Always get clear on your goals when it comes to your content strategy. I always think of it like this: If you don't have a goal to aim at, then you'll never score and win the game. It's as simple as that.

Analysing data from a variety of sources as part of your content strategy provides you with a concrete understanding of what works and what doesn't. This way you can identify areas that are not working, and areas that you need focus more on. It's part of an iterative and continuous process too. It's something you should do on a regular and consistent basis

Start by assessing performance metrics like traffic, engagement, and conversion rates to gauge effectiveness. Next, review each piece for accuracy, freshness, and alignment with your brand voice and messaging. After that, check for SEO optimization, including keywords and metadata. Identify outdated or redundant content, and determine whether it's worth updating or repositioning. If it's not, then remove it from every channel in which it's posted. How well does each piece meet your audience's needs and your business objectives? Answering this question will help you ensure your content remains valuable, relevant, and aligned with your strategy.

A content audit determines what you have, what's working, what isn't working, and why. The latter is often the hard part, since content success can be influenced by factors outside the content strategist's control, such as marketing, promotion, or brand influences. So you may need access to data from outside your silo.

Many people forget to document and analyze audience and user feedback. These insights help us assess how well content meets audience needs and expectations. Another common oversight is neglecting to set clear objectives for the audit. Without defined goals, it's challenging to measure success or identify areas for improvement. Overlooking the importance of auditing multimedia content like videos and infographics, is a common mistake — as is forgetting to track internal links and their effectiveness, which can lead to missed opportunities for better site navigation and SEO.