Steps To Conduct Content Audit

If you are remotely familiar with digital marketing, you might have heard the quote "content is king." These words were articulated by Bill Gates back in 1996. However, nearly a quarter-century down the road, content continues to be the undisputed king of the digital marketing kingdom. This is one reason why a vast majority of marketers pin their hopes on content marketing when it comes to promoting a business.

That said, you cannot rely on lackluster content to produce expected results. The current breed of customers has a keen eye for quality content. So if your blogs, whitepapers, surveys, infographics, etc., are not coming from the top drawer, your content simply is good for nothing. That is where content audit can win the day for you. It helps to sketch an overall picture of content marketing performance. Broadly put, the content audit enables you to identify the deep-rooted issues within your content, which typically go down unnoticed without ringing any alarm bell whatsoever.

The concept of content auditing is still pretty new on the horizon. Thus, unfortunately, countless businesses have no idea how to go about it. If you are also confronting a similar problem, look no further. We have outlined a step-by-step guide that leads to the quality content audit. Let's walk you through the process without further ado:

1. Outline The Goals

A content audit is a daunting task. But you can simplify it to a significant degree by narrowing down your objectives. For example, broken links are one of the major issues denting the user experience. Knowing that Google downgrades websites possessing an extensive streak of broken links, many organizations conduct a content audit to eliminate this nuisance.

Here are some of the other go-to goals you could prioritize for content audit:

Determining pages with the potential to grab the top position in Google
Figuring out topics that ensure the highest retention rate
Improving the structure of internal links
Wiping out outdated facts and figures and updating content that has lost its relevance over time
Evaluating the top-performing writers
Learning why a certain type of content did not do well

These are only a handful of examples. The content audit could serve plenty of additional purposes as well. Be mindful of the fact that specifying content audit goals could be a time-consuming process because you will have to take feedback from several stakeholders. But it is worth the effort by every stretch of the imagination. Lastly, we would recommend you focus on a few goals at a time. Having too many motives in mind might prove to be an overwhelming challenge.

2. Bring All The Content At One Place

Once you are done defining the goal, the next phase is to assemble all the content in one place. The step requires basic spreadsheet skills. You should start proceedings by collecting website URLs. If the website is relatively new and does not have a ton of content, you can gather URLs manually. On the other hand, if your website is amassed with blogs, guides, product descriptions, surveys, and other content types, you are better off banking on content audit tools. It will save you from plenty of heel-dragging and add to the entire process's efficiency as well.

After listing all the URLs, you should mention categories against respective URLs. You may consider mentioning the following categories in the spreadsheet:

Content title
Wordcount
Format
Author name
Publication date
Targeted keywords
Meta description

You do not necessarily need to restrain yourself to the categories mentioned above. According to content auditing experts, you should ideally include any piece of information that offers extra context. Make sure you put together the content inventory in an easy-to-understand arrangement so that others can also make sense of the document. The internet is peppered with an array of content inventory formats. Thus, you can easily find the one that goes best with you.

3. Evaluate Content

As soon as you have all the relevant information on the table, you can start evaluating the content. Evaluation basically entails whether the content is up to the mark or not. Some of the key content evaluators are as follows:

Accuracy:

Accuracy is the first and foremost yardstick to come to terms with the content's worth. In this step, you should see whether hyperlinks, data, pricing, and addresses are correct or require amendment.

Readability:

What is the point of writing high-quality content if people are not reading it in the first place? Readability has a lot to do with the way you present the information. While assessing readability, you must ensure the content is easy on the eyes.

SEO elements:

SEO makes it a lot easier for the online audience to find your content. So having SEO fundamentals such as keywords, image tags, metadata, headings, etc., in place is pivotal for your content.

Business goals:

Companies seize on content marketing to attain a host of business goals. Enhancing brand awareness, generating leads, and improving conversion rate, to name but a few. You must identify to which extent the content is complementing your long-term business objectives.

Tone:

Not long ago, brands would maintain a hardcore professional tone in their content marketing campaigns. But this trend has observed a decline over the course of years. Today, businesses with frank and humorous tones are more likely to penetrate into customers. If your tone does not align with the modern-day standards, you need to revisit it right off the bat.

It bears worth mentioning that the above criteria are just a handful of suggestions. You may show up with your own benchmarks.

4. Analyze Data

Analyzing data is out and out the trickiest point of the content audit journey. Depending on the scope of a website, drilling down the data could take days, weeks, and even months. So being patient is going to be the key here.

Diving into data helps you to see the bigger picture. That way, you can easily detect unhealthy trends and tweak or eliminate them. Since every website weaves a content strategy to meet different objectives, you have to consider data metrics accordingly.

However, the following are the most common data benchmarks that are typically part and parcel of the content audit process:

Bounce rate:

Bounce rate is a practice that triggers visitors to leave a website after navigating through only one page. It is nearly impossible to reduce the bounce rate to zero. But you should try to curtail it as much as possible. If a web page is keeping up with a high bounce rate, this could mean you have not cracked the user intent.

Backlinks:

Backlinks are an integral component as far as Google ranking is concerned. They indicate the authority of your website to the search engine. At the same time, getting backlinks from spammy websites could go against you and damage page authority big time. You should remove such backlinks right off the bat.

Unique visitors:

As the title suggests, unique visitors are the ones navigating through a website for the first time. An uptick in unique visitors goes to show that your website is constantly gathering steam. On the flip side, if your website is observing a decline in terms of unique visitors, it could account for less ROI.

Organic traffic:

When it comes to a website, it all boils down to the organic traffic at the end of the day. Organic traffic is out and out the most important metric regarding how well a content marketing strategy is performing. People commonly assume if a website does not generate enough organic traffic, it must be due to the lackluster content quality. But this not always the case. At times, lagging behind organic traffic means you are not promoting the content properly. Tapping into traffic sources could give you a better idea about the whole scenario.

Average time spent:

Average time spent can highlight the element of engagement in the content. The longer a visitor holds on your website, the better the engagement rate. If the average time spent is not on the higher side, it can drastically reduce the chances of conversion.

As stressed above, analyzing data could be painstaking. But it is vital to develop a deeper understanding of the content. Once you are done crunching the data, you can make your mind to delete, merge, improve, rewrite, optimize, and repurpose a piece of content.

5. Devise A Final Plan Of Action

By now, you would be able to come up with final recommendations. These suggestions will bridge the identified content gaps and enhance the power of your content tenfold. Of course, the final findings vary from website to website. But we are listing some random recommendations to give you a better idea regarding how to shoulder this responsibility:

Drawing up a content calendar to publish a certain number of bogs every month
Improving link building strategy
Segmentizing audience to create personalized content
Sharing posts on social media during optimal hours

6. Implement Final Recommendations

The wrong implementation can put all the hard work to dust. The best way to go about implementation is to involve every employee associated with content in any capacity. The go-to individuals to be taken on board might include content managers, editors, writers, proofreaders, and SEO experts. You should use project management software to make sure the communication gap does not rear its ugly head.

The Concluding Remarks

We cannot stress enough the significance of content audit. It is literally the lifeblood of your content marketing strategy. Indeed, conducting a content audit is not a cakewalk. But by walking the tight line of steps mentioned in this blog, you cannot set a foot wrong.