How to Audit & Update Your COVID-19 Content for 2022 & Beyond [Template]

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It’s been almost 3 years (!!!) since COVID-19 overturned our personal and professional lives. That’s nearly 3 years of researching and publishing clear, trustworthy COVID-19 content for consumers.

And it’s been A LOT of content.

We created most of our COVID-19 content to be temporary. In the beginning, we just had to get some helpful content up quickly, and we figured the pandemic would be short-lived. (Lolsob.) Now we know that COVID-19 — and the content we wrote — is here to stay. We need to make sure our content remains up to date and reliable.?

But while COVID-19 is far from over, how we think and talk about it has shifted. We have more evidence-based information than ever before. All your published COVID-19 content should be current. If COVID-related searches turn up outdated results from your brand, you could confuse your audience — or worse, contribute to the spread of misinformation.

To make sure your healthcare website’s coronavirus content is evergreen, perform a COVID-19 content audit. We’ll walk you through the steps of the audit and share advice for refreshing old content. BONUS: We have a free (no email required) template to make this task as efficient as possible. Get it here.

If COVID-related searches turn up outdated results from your brand, you could confuse your audience — or worse, contribute to the spread of misinformation.

Note: If you developed an audit and updating process for your COVID-19 content from the beginning and your team followed it closely, you might not need to perform a full-blown audit. This is the perfect time to review your audit process to ensure you didn’t miss anything over the past 3 years.

4 Simple Steps to Audit (and Update) Your COVID-19 Content

1) Set some ground rules and guidelines?

Before you dive into the audit, answer these questions:

1. What type of audit are we doing? Think about business goals, audience needs and institutional knowledge. For a COVID-19 content check, do a combination of quantitative and qualitative audits. Look at content volume, results and details.
2. What do you want to update? List the topics that have changed the most over the past 3 years. (What? That’s everything?) Include vaccine approvals and eligibility, treatments, personnel protocols (vaccination requirements, sick leave for exposure), visitor protocols (masking, number of visitors allowed) and vocabulary.

2) Start your content inventory

Follow these steps:

1) Download our template for your COVID-19 content audit.

2) Use Google Analytics (or another tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs) to search for URLs containing COVID, coronavirus or another naming convention your organization uses. Export the list and copy the URLs into our template.

3) Sort the URLs by performance. Your higher trafficked pages have more visibility than lower trafficked pages, so update those first. That way, you know your most influential content is up to date and accurate.

4) Review each URL to examine the content. Search for words like vaccine, treatment, isolation, quarantine, mask, visitor restrictions, social/physical distancing — many of these were used in copy that changed often. Flag which URLs need updating by coding them for:

• Up to date
• Needs updating
• Remove (some content might be irrelevant, so you can remove it from the website. Before deleting anything, make sure it doesn’t have any backlinks or high traffic. Removing content with valuable backlinks and high page authority can negatively affect your entire website.)

Your higher trafficked pages have more visibility than lower trafficked pages, so update those first.

5) Check the links within the content. Whether it’s an external or internal link, make sure the hyperlink has up-to-date information. If it doesn’t, change the link to a page that is accurate.

Ready for step 3? Jump to our blog for more.