How To Do A Content Audit For Your Blog

How To Do A Content Audit For Your Blog

If you are looking to drive more organic clicks to your website, the first solution you might think of is creating new content. Although that sounds like a great idea, a content audit might be the most efficient route to go.

When done right, regular content audits can help you identify existing content that can be made better, which will deliver an improved ROI.

What is a Content Audit? 

A content audit is a complete analysis of every piece of content on your website to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy and how close or far off you are from your marketing goals. Regular content audits help you do more of what is working well and reevaluate your failures.

Benefits of Regular Content Audits 

A content audit on your site is as important as creating new content. Here’s why: 

Improved Content Quality

Content audit helps you understand your reader’s preferences and helps you provide them with the right content. 

Benefits Site’s SEO

Content audits help you uncover and fix the SEO problems you probably didn’t know you had like keyword cannibalization, duplicate pages, broken internal links, outdated information etc.

Determines Strategy Focus

A content audit helps you direct the energy you put into your site and gives you proper strategy focus. You’ll likely be putting your energy into content that doesn’t work for your audience if you do not take the time to analyze each piece of content already on your site. 

How to Do a Content Audit In Simple Steps

Here is a six-step guide on how to perform a content audit on your blog below: 

Step 1: Have Specific Goals

Determining goals for your blog makes content audit a seamless and productive process. Blog A should have a different content goal and audience from Blog B. So, you should have a goal you want to achieve.

It could be to improve your search ranking or to find out what content drives the biggest leads to your sales pipeline. The point is to have a specific goal. 

Step 2: Identify Your Performance Metrics 

Here are some content marketing metrics you’ll want to identify and track for your content audit:

Behavioral metrics: If your goal is to build a community, then the behavioral metrics will put you on the right track. It helps you know the kind of content that generates conversation from your followers and tells you how they react to your content. The metrics include comments, bounce rates, likes, and shares.

SEO metrics: The goal of every business is to be successful and the success of a blog is seen in how good its ranking is. So, if your goal is this, then you want to take a proper look at your SEO metrics. These metrics include keyword research, backlinks and internal links, organic sessions, etc. 

Quality metrics: when you gain your readers’ trust, you automatically gain the trust of Google. These include how helpful your content is, its relevance, word count, visuals, readability, etc. 

Step 3: Take Inventory 

Creating an inventory of your content helps you determine the ones you want to audit. So, start by gathering all the URLs you want to work on and their associated metrics. 

Step 4: Collate Your Data

After setting your goals and identifying your metrics, it’s time to pull out a spreadsheet and collate all the data you’ve gathered. You can use a Google spreadsheet or an Excel sheet. Create columns for basic information and your strategies. 

Step 5: Assess Your Data

Now, this is where most of the work is, and where you decide what to do with each piece of data you have gathered. 

To make it easy, create a status column on your spreadsheet to tag each content you work on. The statues could be either “keep, update or delete” depending on how each piece meets your goal. 

Step 6: Adjust Your Strategies 

After accessing your data, the next step is to adjust your content strategies to suit your audit — to match your goals and audience. 

Conclusion 

A content audit can be quite demanding, but what you get back in return can be invaluable because you will gather a lot of valuable information through this process about your company and your audience.

Contact our team to run a FREE content audit for your website.

Having a solid understanding of content audits, how to prepare them, where to get them, and what to include in them, you are fully prepared to use them to assess the success of your content strategy on your blog. Best of luck with your audit!