A content audit is a process to analyse the content published on your website. It includes auditing all the types of content available on the site, such as web content, blogs, images, videos, and many more. A content audit is essential for every website to keep its performance good.
There are many benefits of content audit. However, its benefits will only unlock when you do a successful content audit that needs the expertise of a content writing agency. So, let’s learn the best content audit process with this step-by-step guide. But before that, let’s know why content audit is essential.
Why is content audit important?
There are multiple reasons which make content audit an important practice. Content audit helps to achieve various objectives related to content marketing. Here are some of the benefits of a content audit.
It helps to increase the engaging content
Engaging content is the content on your site that gets the most public interaction. If ten blogs are uploaded on your website, not all these must be engaging. It depends on many factors, such as trends, quality of content, and many more. So, if you run a content audit, you can identify the engaging content on your site and further create content on the related topics. Moreover, you can also delete the content which is not contributing to the engagement at all.
It helps you to create a good content refresh strategy
In their study, Hubspot found that 76% of the total views that their blogs are experiencing are from older blogs. In addition, the leads generated from these older blogs were 92% per cent of the total leads. So, it reflects how refreshing old content can be a great and cost-effective solution to get engagement, leads and sales. With a content audit, you can identify the old but high-performing content and refresh it with new data, stats, relevant content and keywords.
It helps you identify your best writers
Writers often have a genre, content format or industry, which they do better than other genres, formats or industries. However, it is not easy to identify it at first glance and saturate writers based on what they are best at. So, with a content audit, you can know which content is performing and which is not. Moreover, based on it, you can identify the writers that are good for your content needs and further identify their preferred content type and genre.
These are just some things that can be done with a content audit. You can do much more with content audits, like identifying which type of content performs better or which is outdated.
How to do a content audit?
- Get rid of the trash
The first and foremost action to take is to delete the totally dead content by engagement. If any content you find is attracting no organic traffic, leads and sales, get rid of it first. It is important as the primary goal of Content audit is to enhance the performance of your web content, and if the content has no engagement, it’s better to trash it to cut the auditing time.
Here, you can use Google Analytics to find the non-performing content. Just go to site content and then landing pages. Here you will have to sort the “sessions” with low to high filters. Delete, merge, or redirect the content according to your understanding. For example, if the content has left no relevance in the present time, just delete it. But if there’s a relevant page but the content is not good, you can redirect it to any other page with similar content.
- Evaluate the content that is left
Once you get rid of the trash, you can move on to evaluating the content left on your site. There can be many factors to evaluate your content based on. But, since the purpose of content marketing is generating engagement, leads and sales, the best metric to consider is the traffic that the content is driving. However, you can add other factors that align with the purpose of your content audit.
For example, if you are doing a content audit to create a Content refresh strategy, the time when content was published can be a factor as you will be refreshing the old content, not the new one.
Similarly, if your purpose is to improve your backlinking, then the highest number of backlinks can be a factor, as it is possible that a page with low traffic has the most backlinking due to the type of content it has.
- Make improvements and launch again
Once you are done with the content evaluation, you can turn up to improve the content based on
Your purpose. Some of the very obvious changes that are common to almost any purpose are:
- Adding images to content
You should add relevant images in the content with no pictures or media. Moreover, replace old images which have lost relevance by any chance.
- Adding CTA (Call to Action)
If there are content pieces whose CTAs (Call to Action) are outdated or need a rewrite, do it as well.
- Update the stats and links
If stats in your content have changed over time, update them with the correct ones. Also, replace expired and non-working links in your content.
- Give a new look to content based on the latest SEO keywords
If you are refreshing old content, then implement new and better-performing keywords in the content.
Along with all this, you can also make other changes necessary to increase performance.
- Create insights and learning for the future
Lastly, capture the insights from the audit. It can be anything you think is important to remember for future content marketing strategies. For instance, if a particular content type is performing well or not performing well, note it down for future reference.
To Sum Up
A content audit is ultimately the best way to look at your content and its performance for various purposes. Whether it’s a content refresh strategy, deleting non-performing content, or any other reason, it will always help you to get actionable insights.
But you must know that content audit requires expertise. So, it would be better to consult with a content writer agency. You can contact an SEO agency in delhi or your city to get a content audit done for your site.
