A Complete Guide To Implementing A Content Audit

For most brands, the process of content marketing turns out to be pretty sophisticated and complex. If you are looking to embark on the path of content marketing, you will most likely have a similar experience. To ensure that the journey becomes successful for you and your business, you must begin by carrying out a website content audit.

The process of a content audit will require you to take a close look at the existing content on your website. You will have to make sure that the content you are using currently is engaging, accurate, and relevant to your brand.

A content audit should ideally identify the effective content on the site and reveal the gaps that you must fill. Additionally, you will also get to know which parts of the existing content are outdated or are no more useful for your targeted visitors.

You can increase the efficacy of your brand’s content marketing strategies by revamping your content according to the results of the audit.

A content audit is an ongoing process. You should assess your content’s value regularly if you want to achieve your content marketing goals.

If you are wondering about the benefits of content audit and why should you do it? Let’s look at the ways of conducting a content audit in more detail.

Basic Content Audits Facts

In this step, you will have to gather some basic information about the content. Ideally, at this point, you must gather the following information on each piece of content your site has.

• Author
• URL
• Total time
• The individuals and teams involved in the process of creating the content (social team, SEO team, content team, and so on)
• Date
• Title
• Type of content (whether it is an infographic, blog post, case study, and so on)
• Word count
• Content goal (the reason for creating the content: conversions, traffic, backlinks, etc.)
• Shares
• Comments

Past Content Audit  

Before auditing current content data, you must audit the content you have been using already. Knowing the performance of the past content will make it easier for you to comprehend what type of content the site needs. You will also know the type of content you should add to the site.

You will have to decide how much you would want to go back to begin the content audit. Ideally, you should gather data for the past year and find out how well or poorly the content performed during that time.

This step would require you to gather the URLs of all the content used on your site during the past year. You will not need to do the job manually. There are several tools that can gather all the URLs for a given period.

Ongoing Content Audits 

Once you finish auditing your past content, you will have to do the same for your new content as well. This will be an ongoing process and the audits should take place every week.

Weekly audits are recommended as they will make the job much easier for you. As you will be assessing the content every week, you will incorporate the necessary changes right away. This will prevent the formation of backlogs and your website will always remain up to date.

Related: 5 Important Google Ranking Signals That Content Marketers Need To Know

These are some metrics you must track for a successful content audit:

Organic Traffic: Websites with high-quality content automatically get lots of organic traffic. This means your targeted audience will organically come across your content, read it, and love it. There will be no need of spending any additional amount on advertising to force people to visit your website.

If your content is failing to generate any organic traffic, there must be some problems with your content. The most common ones among them are:

• Wrong content strategy
• Wrong process of content distribution
• Inappropriate content type
• Low-quality content

Bounce Rate: Are visitors coming to your site bouncing off the first page they are stepping onto without checking any other page? This happens mostly due to poor content.

Backlinks: Backlinks that will not add credibility to your content will do more harm to your website than good. Do track every backlink your content creates regularly.

Backlinks tend to change over time. When you will first publish a piece of content, there may be around 2 to 3 backlinks. After a week, there will be more than 10 backlinks. After a year, you may see more than 500 backlinks to your content.

However, you must understand that out of these 500 backlinks, more than 450 would be potentially dangerous for your site. So, you must get rid of those 450 links as soon as possible.

Weekly content audits will help you to remove the harmful links before they start affecting your search engine rankings.

Time Spent On Page: Suppose, you have published a 3000 words content on your website. If you notice that the visitors on that content page are spending just 20 seconds on the page on an average, treat it as a warning. This shows that your target audience is not linking the content.

Unique Visitors: To increase the number of views, you must get unique visitors. The more number of views that your content receives, the greater will be your ROI through engagement, backlinks, shares, and conversions.

Pages Visited Per Session: If users reading your content are not viewing several other pages of your website, you should consider making changes to the content.

Traffic Sources: For your content marketing strategies to show results, you must know from where you are getting all the traffic to your content page. You will have to find out the sources from where your content is generating traffic.

For instance, if you see that a large part of the traffic is originating from Facebook, you should start posting more content on your brand’s Facebook page. If you find that your email newsletters are failing to generate enough traffic, it’s probably the right time to revamp the emails.

Conversions: If you are expecting a newly published content to produce 100 conversions during the next three months, you should monitor its performance closely and regularly.

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