The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit

Think about all the content you produce, both good and bad.

One of the instincts for attaining your content marketing objectives may be developing and distributing new content.

Now, if you create all this content, the question arises; how will you organize it? How do you maintain track of the performance of your content? 

The answer is- Content Audit.

A well-executed content audit performed once a year can provide significant information regarding your content marketing strategy.

In this blog, we will share a detailed guide on how to do an SEO content audit and the benefits of doing it.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a process of reviewing the existing content on a website and identifying any areas that could be improved. This can include things like grammar, clarity, and overall quality.

By improving the quality of your content, you can attract more readers and make your website more visible in search engines. Better-quality content can also help you generate leads and sell products or services.

A well-executed content audit will help you identify how effective your campaigns are with regard to the popularity of each piece of text on your website.

Once you have completed your content audit, you will be able to identify which areas need the most attention, and you will also be better equipped to create high-quality content that will help your website rank higher in search engines.

Content Audit Goals

First and foremost, content audits assist you in identifying portions of your website that are not adequately optimized for search engine rank.

For example, if adding a meta description to your articles hasn't always been the case, a content audit can help you identify which posts require updating.

Search engines will be able to propose your web pages to browsers more precisely if they have as much information as possible about the content on your website.

An in-depth site audit will assist you in answering the following questions regarding your site's content:

• Which ones are the most effective?
• What are the types of content that your audience is most interested in?

What are the Advantages of Content Audit?

Your content audit should assist you in updating your content, improving the ranking of your web pages, and making the website you show to readers simple to browse and error-free.

Besides this, the content audit also offers extensive advantages like:

Provide insights into content performance

• Determine suitable pieces for marketing content
• Identify content requiring updates or repurposing.

More vividly, a content audit can be performed for two main reasons:

SEO

Conducting a content audit for SEO purposes will assist you in identifying any areas of your site's search engine optimization that need to be improved.

You should be able to establish what modifications need to be made to improve your site's natural search performance by cataloging the different keywords, word counts, optimized pictures, and other components.

Content Strategy

A content audit also helps evaluate the present state of your content marketing activities.

Instead of focusing on page optimization aspects, you'll focus on page length, visit analytics, and social shares to see how your audience is reacting to each piece of content you've published.

How to do a Content Audit?

1. Set Your Goals and KPIs

Because a content audit is a complex and time-consuming procedure, starting with clearly stated goals is critical.

Some of the goals that businesses usually set are:

• Improving SEO

Determine which websites have a strong SEO potential for ranking in the top ten on Google.

Identify what content on your website needs to be updated or removed, and examine and improve your internal linking.

• Increasing Conversion Rates

Determine which pages provide your users with the best user experience and which content generates the most leads.

You can also determine which type of content is most effective at each stage of the buyer's journey to boost your conversion rate.

• Improve Audience Engagement

Determine the most engaging types of content for your audience, as well as the themes on which they are most interested.

Besides all this, the content audit helps analyze various metrics such as:

• SEO metrics: Organic traffic, backlinks, keyword rankings, dwell time, etc.
• User behavior metrics such as Pageviews, average session duration, high bounce rate and average time.
• Sales metrics like conversion rates, ROI and number of leads.
• Audience engagement metrics like likes, comments and shares.

2. Make a Collection of Your Content

Most content marketers create a separate inventory of internal content, such as blog posts, news, educational content, product descriptions, landing pages, and external publications.

You can also assess other types of content besides text like videos, quizzes, and games!

Here is how to create an inventory of content:

• Gather all the URLs

To begin your inventory, gather all of the URLs of the web pages you want to examine.

You can use an online content audit tool like SEMrush Content Audit or SEOptimizer.

This tool can swiftly audit your content and give you a list of URLs and their associated metrics based on your sitemap. You can also look at a specific section of your domain, such as the blog subdirectory.

You can also use a sitemap generator tool to build a sitemap for your website if you don't already have one. A sitemap is useful for a content audit and helps search engines comprehend your website structure.

• Create Audit Spreadsheet

You can use a spreadsheet to sort the URLs with filters and categories:

• Stages of the buyer's journey

• Type of content (blogging, manuals, product descriptions, and landing pages)

• Content format (text only, images/video included, call-to-action)

• Word count

• Date of last update or date of publishing

• Topic cluster

It's also a good idea to gather metadata (title, meta description, and h1) for each piece of content so you can verify and update all of it in one location.

3. Analyze the Collected Data

Data collection is a time-consuming and difficult task. In most cases, you'll have to manually gather data from several sources and enter it into your spreadsheet.

To save time, you can use a content audit tool that automatically collects data based on your goals and metrics.

This step gives a good insight into the competitor’s data and helps you answer the following questions:

• What are the topics that your audience is interested in but you haven't covered?
• Which pieces of content aren't bringing in the results you want?
• Is it possible to update or revise outdated content to preserve optimization?
  

To get a thorough view of the site's content, look at all of your content analytics.

Your website may receive a lot of traffic but have a high bounce rate and short session duration.

This indicates that customers are interested in your subject, but the content does not meet their needs. In this situation, you'll need to evaluate several aspects of your content to figure out why people are leaving your website.

To assess your data better, you can use three types of filters to your content:

• Keep: You probably don't need to refresh your content if it performs well and remains relevant. Consider repurposing this content as part of your ongoing content marketing efforts.

• Repurpose: The content audit may assist you in identifying underperforming web pages. You might also come across some content that contains obsolete information that needs to be updated. Examine this content and consider how you can improve it.

• Delete: If you can't improve a piece of information or updating it would be too time-consuming, removing it from your website may be the best solution.

4. Create Content Action Plan

After assessing your content and having an idea of what to do, you need to make a plan of action, such as improving the text or adding links.

Every dollar spent on your content strategy should be directed toward a specific business purpose.

Then, prioritize your actions based on how feasible your business goals are compared to the effort necessary.

The next step is to create an actionable plan for each URL separately.

• Repurpose your content 

• Rewrite your content

• Update your content

• Structure your content

• Add videos

• Optimize metadata

• Organize interlinks

• Use redirects

5. Create Content Marketing Strategy

It's crucial to keep your long-term marketing strategy in mind when conducting a website content audit.

You may guide your content strategy in multiple directions to appeal to your target audiences in new ways, alter assets for greater organic reach, and enhance conversion rates.

You should review your content marketing strategy to ensure that your techniques and activities align with your company's objectives.

If your industry is constantly changing, you'll need to conduct more regular reviews, such as once a month or a quarter.

However, you might need a content audit tool for this.

Best Content Audit Tools

1. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a tool that crawls websites and checks their links to make sure they are relevant. It's free if you have fewer than 500 URLs in your sitemap.

The desktop version of Screaming Frog is fantastic since it gives you a lot of information about your website and categorizes it for you. Because the audit is SEO-based, it also includes advice on enhancing your SEO, which may or may not be valuable depending on your objectives.

Screaming Frog has a plethora of advantages. It has features for fixing and analyzing broken links, messy title tags, missing meta descriptions, improper redirects, and other issues. It's essentially a technical SEO paradise.

But that's only the beginning. This tool is primarily a data collection one; however, after getting the data, you may analyze it and do other interesting things.

2. SEO Audit Tool by Contentlook

Contentlook is an SEO tool that comes loaded with features. Depending on your needs, you can choose between the free and paid versions. The free version gives you recommendations for improving SEO, but not so much about content marketing (only expanding your footprint).

This tool will provide you with information on what is broken on your site as well as ideas on how to fix it. This is a good starter tool in my opinion, and it's also pretty strong and feature-rich.

You'll be able to keep track of your website's progress, stats, and tasks for each page. A total of 300 pages is possible (this can be upgraded).

It also helps you identify pages that perform exceptionally well for your company and others that do not.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that helps understand how people use your website and if they find it useful.

This information will help you make decisions about the future of your business, such as whether to move your target audience to a different geographical location. 

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that is also quite easy to use. You can instantly see if your traffic is increasing or decreasing, which channels are the most successful, and which pages are the most popular.

If you set targets, you can quickly look at conversion rates and see your website funnel. This will help you get started on the road to improvement and optimization.

In fact, this tool has the added advantage of helping you with conversion optimization or improving your actual business KPIs.

4. Yoast SEO Plugin

Without a doubt, this plugin is an excellent content analysis tool for improving the searchability of a WordPress site.

Yoast Plugin is an amazing tool for WordPress sites.

It has several features that assist with site structure and more technical changes (URL updates and redirects), while others assist with content optimization.

One of the most useful features while producing a blog post is their writing audit, making it easier to optimize an article for a specific keyword.

This plugin addresses all major optimization issues, both in terms of articles and overall structure. You can use it to personalize the blog headers, articles, categories, pages, and media files, among other things.

5. Ahrefs Content Auditor

You can find content analysis tools on Ahrefs, a very advanced tool that allows you to examine organic (non-paid) and social data.

This tool uses the same search algorithm as Google but offers much more functionality than the basic WordPress dashboard libraries; it has continually evolved into one of the most popular tools available, with more features being added regularly.

With domain analysis, page analysis, backlink reports, and rank tracking all available, this tool is an absolute powerhouse. That's what the "normal" SEO reports look like.

"Content Gap," another useful statistic, shows you which keywords your competitors rank for but you don't.

Overall, Ahrefs is ideal for planning and researching content, as well as monitoring, analyzing, and auditing.

6. SEMRush Content Auditor

SEMRush is another tool that helps you create a site structure and comprehensive content for your blog.

It offers analysis tools that are not just about improving keyword rankings.

It includes backlink analysis and metrics like time on site and referral traffic. And their algorithm will even show you which keywords you might be able to rank in competitive areas.

SEMrush users can get a thorough audit in three easy steps. You'll get a personalized report that shows you where you may improve your site by entering the desired URL.

If you want to view more information about your sitemap, such as which posts are the most engaging for your audience, you can connect an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics.

This data can be used to establish a strategy by recognizing content that performs well for your target audience. It will thus give you an idea of what to cover.

Conclusion:

Content audits are a great way to better understand how your content is performing and whether or not it's being used as intended. 

Content audits should definitely be done every once in a while; I like to do them quarterly for most of the aforementioned metrics, though some you should do more often.

The biggest thing is the content gap, so make sure you have enough content coming out to keep up with your monthly traffic. You can try any of the content auditor tools given above and use the one that suits your needs.