How to conduct a comprehensive Content Audit for your business?

Published on: Nov 12th, 2024 8 min readWritten by: Approved by: bhagart singh

Last Updated on November 12, 2024 by Admin

Of course, writing new articles for your website is necessary, but increasing the effectiveness of the existing ones is even more essential.

Conducting content audits on a regular basis helps you check if your content is fresh, optimized for SEO, and responds to content marketing strategies and objectives.

This comprehensive guide to the content audit for content marketing strategy will detail the process of assessing and implementing the changes to improve website content, traffic rates, conversion, and user experience.

What is Content Audit?

A content audit is the assessment of all the content on your website, analyzing its effectiveness and identifying areas that need fixing or even omission. It assists in tracking the various contents’ performance toward the overall strategy to analyze the website’s improvement.

What is the Purpose of a Content Audit?

The primary use of content audit for content marketing strategy is to get the best out of your content marketing and confirm that the content you are putting out in the market serves the purpose of the business. Here are some key reasons to conduct a content audit:

  • Identify top-performing content to replicate success.
  • Uncover underperforming content that needs improvement.
  • Find content gaps and new topic opportunities.
  • Ensure content aligns with your brand voice and style guidelines.
  • Improve SEO and organic search visibility.
  • Increase user engagement and time on-site.
  • Boost conversion rates and lead generation.
  • Remove or update outdated or irrelevant content.
  • Streamline content production and resource allocation.

How to Do a Content Audit (Step by Step)?

Auditing content for content marketing strategy can be a time and labor-intensive process. Still, the information you gain from this process will be instrumental in helping you shift your content marketing to the next level. Follow these detailed steps to perform an effective content audit:

1. Define Goals and Metrics

Before you launch into your content audit for content marketing strategy, ensure you know the goals. Do you want to enhance the site’s rank in search results, draw more attention to the content, or encourage visitors to take action? During the audit, you will have metrics depending on the goals you set for the company or the project.

Key metrics to consider tracking include:

  1. Organic traffic: The percentage of visitors entering your content through the search facility.
  2. Keyword rankings: You need to know where your content stands in terms of the target keywords.
  3. Backlinks: The power of the links pointing to your content: the total number of such links and their quality.
  4. Time on page: As long as visitors are interested in your content.
  5. Bounce rate: The number of visitors who only consume one page of the website.
  6. Social shares: The frequency of your content on social media platforms.
  7. Conversion rate: Percentage of first-time versus repeat visitors. The proportion of people who visited the website and performed a specific action that the marketer wants them to do (sign/make a purchase, etc.)

2. Take Inventory of Your Content

List all your content assets in a single document. This is an essential step for the content audit concerning content marketing strategy. Your inventory should include:

  1. Blog posts
  2. Landing pages
  3. Product pages
  4. Videos
  5. Infographics
  6. Whitepapers/eBooks
  7. Case studies
  8. Podcasts
  9. Social media posts
  10. Email newsletters

Use a spreadsheet to catalog each piece of content along with relevant metadata such as:

  • URL
  • Title
  • Publish date
  • Content type
  • Target keywords
  • Word count
  • Author

3. Review On-Page SEO and Content Establishment

As part of your content audit, you will need to score the on-page SEO for each piece of content. Look for the following elements:

  • Title tags and meta descriptions: Make sure that your title tags are keyword-rich for the right keywords and that your meta description is engaging and consists of the main keywords.
  • H1, H2, and H3 tags: Header tags are important in improving website usability for users and ranking well in search engines. Just as with the text failed, make sure your content and information can be scanned by the reader and arranged logically in the order of presentation.
  • Internal linking: Internal linking helps balance your site’s page authority across multiple pages within a short span of time. Make sure all the internal links on the site are relevant and not broken.
  • Keyword optimization: Determine how effectively your content targets its primary or initial keyword. You can also use Ubersuggest or SEMrush to assess the performance of your content for the chosen keywords.

Moreover, determine the quality of the content. It is positive to ask questions such as ‘Is it relevant for today’s audiences? Does the content match the tone of voice and image of the brand? Does it meet the needs of your audience?

Poorly designed or outdated pages should be updated or completely changed. When creating or updating content, ensure it aligns with Google’s EEAT principles to improve rankings and meet audience expectations.

4. Identify and Fix Content Gaps

Another purpose of a content audit is to identify specific content gaps, including areas or topics within your website that need to be catered to with adequate or helpful content. These could be topics your audiences are looking for but have not found on your site.

This can be done using Google Search Console or Ahrefs, and you can see which topics or keywords your competitors have touched on, but you haven’t. Finally, you should plan to develop new content to fill these gaps. It will also be quite beneficial for the website’s overall SEO and user experience.

5. Categorize Your Content

Based on your activity and post analysis, you will need to decide on your content’s future, wherein you choose to keep updating, retain, or delete a particular piece. Here’s how to approach this:

  • Keep: Effective content that requires no update.
  • Update: Content that requires minor revisions and enhancements (for instance, updating some statistics, including new data).
  • Consolidate: Content that can be opted for merging for better performance and to overcome keyword cannibalization.
  • Rewrite: The content underperformed and necessitates changes; it is below average and requires significant revisions.
  • Remove: Old and useless topics that should be removed or reclassified.

6. Analyze Competitor Content

Conducting a mini content audit of your top competitors is necessary to identify ideas for content audits for content marketing strategies. This can allow you, for instance, to discover what your competitors are up to and what areas you can exploit.
Look at:

  • Topics they cover: What subjects are they discussing that you are not?
  • Content types they use: In addition to formats such as videos or infographics, are they employing formats that you have yet to consider?
  • Content performance: What content pieces are their audience more active with?
  • Content frequency: How frequently are they posting it or updating their website?

7. Develop an Action Plan

In light of your audit’s results, prepare a proposed action plan containing concrete recommendations for improving your content. This plan should include:

  • The list of content that requires updates and additional information about the changes needed.
  • A schedule of ‘spam’ content elimination/redirecting.
  • A content calendar for responding to perceived content deficiencies.
  • Ensure to create a plan and measure the outputs by tracking the performance indicators and then adjusting.

8. Monitor and Measure Progress

After making all the necessary changes, it is important to measure the process’s effectiveness. Go back to the audit spreadsheet and see how the new performance measures compare to the ones used prior to the change. Monitor the trends in the organic traffic, bounce rate, and conversation rate over time.

A content audit for a content marketing strategy is different from a ‘one-off’ process. It is suggested that you create an audit schedule (for example, on an annual or semiannual basis) to check how relevant and efficient your content is. The next audit will be easier because you are repeating the same process and have performance data to benchmark against.

Best 5 Content Audit Tools in 2024

To streamline your content audit for content marketing strategy, here are the top five tools you should consider:

  • Google Analytics: A solution that can be used to measure website traffic and bounce rate and follow users’ behavior.
  • Screaming Frog: A powerful tool for site analysis that can show a site map, broken links, and problems with SEO.
  • SEMrush: It is helpful for ranking and analyzing keywords, backlinks, and competitors’ content.
  • Ahrefs: Stands for its thorough backlink analysis and rich SEO optimization options.
  • Moz Pro: Provides a set of SEO utilities, such as a website crawl for audit, keyword suggestions, and on-site analysis.

Conclusion

An effective content audit is essential for ensuring the relevance, accuracy, and overall business impact of the content on your website. If you follow these steps and apply the right tools, you will enjoy better SEO ranking, better user engagement, and better conversion rates overall. Audits also help check whether or not your content marketing strategy still fits the business objectives and if the content you are creating is still relevant.

If you are looking to elevate your content plan and want professional content marketing services, then you should turn to AlgoSaga. Their talented pool of content writers can assist you in achieving your content goals of generating traffic conversions and, hence, growing your business.