What Is a Content Audit and How Do I Conduct One?
What if you discovered that 3 million of the 10 million pieces of content on your company’s website were never read?
That’s what Microsoft found out.
Even if your company isn’t Microsoft, consider how much time and money is wasted developing content that isn’t even seen.
Content marketing is powerful, but it comes at a price.
If you’re going to spend money on content marketing, you’ll want to make sure it’s working and bringing in high-quality traffic and leads.
How do you make sure your material is effective?
The content audit is an important procedure to implement.
Microsoft was able to begin deleting extraneous information, reusing existing content, and redesigning the site after conducting a content audit.
As a consequence, individuals were able to discover the content they needed more simply, and Microsoft was able to determine what information and resources its audience needed.
A content audit might assist your company in increasing its content marketing ROI.
So, what exactly is a content audit, and how might your marketing team go about doing one?
What Is a Content Audit and Why Do You Need One?
A content audit is taking inventory of your current material and studying the engagement metrics associated with it to identify:
- Existing high-performing content trends.
- Improvements to website pages are possible.
- On your website, there are gaps where content is missing.
- Content suggestions for the future.
- Updates to the site’s structure are suggested.
What Are the Benefits of Conducting a Content Audit?
A content audit ensures that you’re getting the most out of your website and the material you publish by allowing you to:
1. Enhance and modernize current material.
Historical optimization, or updating previous content, can help you create more leads and enhance your SEO rankings.
For example, the marketing team at Nummero. conducted a content audit and noticed that one of their 2014 blog articles, “How to Pitch Your Content to Editors: 5 Elements of an Effective Email,” had begun to rank lower on search engines, resulting in a decline in organic traffic.
In just five months, they noticed the following outcomes after making certain adjustments based on the Nummero team’s findings:
2. Identify the material that performs well.
A content audit may also help you figure out which material is working well so you can utilize that information to improve your content strategy for the future.
Let’s imagine part of your content is 1,200 words long and generates more traffic and leads than other articles.
Alternatively, you could notice that content you published on particular themes generated more leads and revenues than the material you wrote on other topics.
An in-depth content audit will show you which sorts of material are assisting you in achieving your objectives.
This will help you decide which themes to write about in the future.
3. Evaluate the effectiveness of the information.
Finally, a content audit aids organizations in evaluating the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts and making judgments about future improvements.
You may have various objectives for doing a content audit, depending on your scenario, such as:
Duplicate content or stuff that is no longer relevant should be removed.
Identifying which pages on your site perform best and figuring out how to make the most of those assets.
Organizing material so that people may find it more easily.
Tools to Assist You in Conducting a Content Audit
- It’s critical to have the correct content management system in place to manage and improve the performance of your material.
- A content management system (CMS) makes it simple to get detailed information about the traffic and lead-generating patterns for your content.
- You may also use SEO tools to get a complete view of how your content is doing.
Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, and Semrush are a few options:
- Google Analytics is a popular free application that pulls detailed information about a website’s visitors. It’s wonderful for tracking your traffic over time and giving you detailed information about where your visitors come from and what activities they take on your site.
- Screaming Frog is a free SEO tool that audits your site and identifies typical problems.
So, You may crawl up to 500 URLs for free, or upgrade to a license to eliminate the limit and gain access to other capabilities.
- Semrush is a premium online visibility management software that provides a slew of tools to help you assess and enhance the success of your content.
What Is a Content Audit and How Do I Conduct One?
So, Conducting a content audit might appear to be a daunting task.
You’ll have a completely audited site in no time if you break it down and handle it one item at a time.
1. Perform a content audit.
Taking an inventory is the first stage in performing a content audit.
You can accomplish this with a spreadsheet, with each piece of content’s URL and title in its row.
Other crucial statistics, such as average monthly traffic, keyword rankings, and any other KPIs related to your content marketing goals, can be separated into different columns.
Add a status column to each piece of material where you may declare what action you’ll do with it.
You may decide to leave some articles alone, make modest changes to others, or entirely revamp others.
2. Examine the information.
You’re ready to study the data now that you’ve created a content inventory.
The method you use will be determined by your goals
If you want to improve your site’s exposure and traffic through SEO, you may look at what material is bringing people to it.
Some firms want to track conversion rates in addition to traffic.
Conversion rates, bounce rates, and traffic sources are all critical performance indicators that may help you tell the narrative of your content’s success by determining where your readers are coming from and what material they find most engaging.
Ask yourself the following questions to acquire a better picture of how your on-site content and website pages are performing:
- Is this material naturally successful? (For example, organic traffic and keywords)
- Is this information effective on-site? (for example, bounce rate and conversion rate)
- Are the CTAs working as they should? (For example, click-through rate)
3. Perform a market study.
Now that you’ve reviewed your content success statistics, it’s time to compare it to that of your rivals.
So, A competitive and gap analysis can be used to accomplish this.
The data gathered during this study provides useful insights that can help you enhance the performance of your content and achieve a competitive advantage.
Examine your rivals’ keyword rankings, content themes, and general user experience to see if there are any areas where you are falling behind.
4. Make a plan of action.
After you’ve reviewed your data, you’ll be able to select what steps to take next.
Updating, consolidating, or even archiving outdated information, as well as modifying your content strategy in the future, are all possible action steps.
Break everything down into very precise action actions that you may implement to improve your outcomes.
5. Make adjustments to your content strategy in the future.
So,One of the most valuable aspects of a thorough content audit is the ability to change your content strategy to get greater outcomes in the future.
To maintain a wonderful visitor experience and keep your high SEO results, you might prioritize updating high-traffic and high-performing content.
Furthermore, you may make strategic changes to your content production approach to ensure that you’re creating content that generates more leads for your company rather than wasting money on ineffective content.
Conclusion
If you’ve spent time and money on content marketing, you should schedule a content audit at least once a year.
If you’re producing a lot of material, you might want to bump up the frequency to once every three months.
Content audits assist you in identifying future content possibilities, monitoring and improving the performance of existing content, and overhauling your material strategy so that future content produces better outcomes for your company.
So, Get in contact with Nummero for the finest internet marketing services. We are the best digital marketing company in Bangalore, offering excellent digital marketing services, PPC ads, social media management, website development, and more.