Content is king, but not all content is created equal. If you want to stand out from the crowd and reach your target audience, you need to audit and analyze your content regularly. This will help you identify what works, what doesn't, and what you can improve. In this article, you'll learn how to conduct a content audit and analysis in six steps.
Before you dive into your content, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. What are your business objectives, your audience needs, and your content strategy? How do you measure your content performance and success? Having SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) will help you focus your audit and analysis on the most important aspects of your content.
An audit is the starting line of any new project. Use this audit to know where you are, so you can get to the goals you and your marketing team set. An audit is the 'status quo' of your content - once you have that on paper, you can work towards improving it!
The next step is to create a comprehensive list of all your content assets. This includes your web pages, blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and any other format you use. You can use tools like Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, or a spreadsheet to collect and organize your content data. You should include information such as the URL, title, format, topic, keywords, date, and metrics (such as traffic, conversions, engagement, etc.) for each piece of content.
Inventorying your content is key to be able to audit it and understand: - duplicated efforts/content that can be joined in one - pieces of content that could perform better - topics that you still don't have And so on. Inventory your content once and keep updating it.
Assessing the quality and effectiveness of your content is essential. To evaluate it, you can consider criteria such as relevance, accuracy, clarity, engagement, and optimization. Relevance refers to whether your content matches the audience's intent and expectations, as well as aligning with your goals and strategy. Accuracy refers to whether the content is factual, up-to-date, trustworthy, and free of errors. Clarity looks at if the content is easy to read and understand, with clear headings, subheadings, and paragraphs. Engagement is about capturing and holding the audience's attention with compelling headlines, images, calls to action, and encouraging interaction. Optimization is about following SEO best practices with relevant keywords, meta tags, links, fast loading times, and device compatibility. You can use tools like Yoast or Grammarly to help you with some of these aspects. Additionally, you should use your own judgment and feedback from your audience to evaluate your content.
I have been working in the news media industry for decades. And our understanding of quality content can be divided in two: 1) how does the individual content piece perform 2) how does the media consisting of all content available for readers perform Often you tend to look at the simplest stats such as pageviews per article. Pageviews per visit and so forth. But they are really poor measures. You rather want to understand to what extent the readers are engaged. So, instead you should focus on ratio of recurrent visitors, interactions such as comments and likes, and reading time per visit. Theese are by far more relevant mettrics.
In evaluating content, it is important to refer back to your guiding light: insights. In those I like to have the lingo, the angle and the tone of voice that will appeal to the persona the content is meant for. You should have identified pain points and drafted key messages. Addressing problems and showing how similar people have matched these challenges with tips and solutions are to me the goal of each content piece.
Based on your evaluation, you can classify your content into four categories: keep, improve, delete, and create. Content that meets your goals and standards and performs well with your audience should be kept as it is or updated occasionally to maintain relevance and freshness. Content that has potential but needs improvement should be revised to make it more relevant, accurate, clear, engaging, or optimized. Outdated, irrelevant, inaccurate, or low-quality content should be deleted or redirected to a better piece of content. Finally, new content needs to be created to fill any gaps in your strategy or your audience's journey.
I would add repurpose and reformat/upcycle to the list. You might have a great piece that can be used elsewhere (e.g. a guide for a legal audience might be simplified for small business owners). And you might have struck gold with an article and use the same theme and angle in a video to use on different channels (I used to do that a lot at @Kannelleapp).
Once you have categorized your content, you need to prioritize your actions. You should start with the most urgent and impactful tasks, such as deleting or redirecting the content that is hurting your performance or reputation. Then, you should focus on improving the content that can boost your results or conversions. Finally, you should plan and create the content that can add value to your strategy or your audience.
Of course, it’s important to let go of content that might hurt. But it doesn’t happen often (unless you changed positioning or the keywords you target). More importantly, I would double down on winners. Especially hidden nuggets that you might have discovered in your audit. Milk it!!
The last step is to monitor the results of your actions and measure their impact on your goals and metrics. You should use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or social media analytics to track and analyze your content performance. You should also collect and review feedback from your audience, such as comments, reviews, or surveys. This will help you identify what works, what doesn't, and what you can improve further. You should also repeat the audit and analysis process regularly, at least once a year, to keep your content fresh and effective.
Though important, this step often takes a backseat due to the time, resources, and expertise it requires. To overcome these challenges, a clear plan and strategy need to be in place that includes goals, metrics, and methods for collecting and analyzing data. Interpreting data and extracting meaningful insights can be quite challenging, especially if you're not a data expert. That's why it's essential to have a dedicated team or individual who can help translate data into actionable insights. Getting feedback from the audience can also be difficult, particularly if your content is niche or your audience isn't actively engaging with it. Proactively reaching out to your audience and incentivizing them to provide feedback might work.
Don’t forget to be both respectful of your audience (avoid clickbait - if a piece of content does well in driving trafic but lacks quality, improve it) and original (let your company values and quirks shine through).