A content audit is an essential step for any content marketing effort. With so much data available, ensuring that all information is relevant and works to inform, educate and sell—rather than just button-pushing is crucial.
Content auditing is the process of analyzing and reporting on content strategy, execution, and effectiveness. Content audits help you develop an understanding of how well your company is progressing in terms of its online presence and the marketing effectiveness of its content strategies. A content audit aims to identify areas that require further analysis and improvement to maximize conversions and improve results.
What is a content audit?
Most marketers define a content audit as a systemic analysis and assessment of all content produced by a business’s website.
The aim is to view if the marketing strategy in place is adequate. But beyond that, it takes an in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of the content produced, the system in use, the content development process, and how it fits into your marketing goals.
Auditing is a way to prove the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. It gives you a few fundamental data that you can use to adjust or keep up with your competitors. This is often an overlooked or forgotten step in the process, but building a successful and ongoing relationship with your customers is essential.
How does a content audit work?
An audit is a detailed review of your website’s content and how it compares against its competitors. It will look at any existing issues, such as;
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Is your content lacking? Where and why?
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Are there any spelling errors and hinges in your workflow?
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Is your site easy to navigate?
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Are there too many backlinks or inbound links on one page?
When you build a content marketing strategy, it is essential to assess your current content and determine how to improve it. This process of improving your content is called a content audit. It is vital to do this on an ongoing basis so that you can keep track of your progress and make adjustments as your audience evolves.
An effective content audit is carried out in three stages;
- Define your audience and their needs
- Identify your key topics
- Create content that resonates with the audience
The idea behind a content audit is simple; You want to ensure that everything you have in place is relevant, timely, and valuable for your audience. The more time passes since your last audit, the more likely you’ll miss something that needs to be updated or updating it wouldn’t be valuable anymore.
What are the benefits of a content audit?
One of the most important benefits of a content audit is that it can save your organization money or restructure how money is spent.
A content audit allows you to identify content and how to use it. This will enable you to determine whether or not your organization has the same message across multiple channels and platforms.
Once you know where your organization stands, you can create a plan for how you want to position yourself in the market and compare outreach to other companies that are doing the same things as yours. You can also use the information to find new ways to reach potential customers.
The benefits of a content audit are numerous and include the following;
- It is a great way to discover gaps in your content marketing strategy. It will help you identify which types of content you should be producing and what audiences you should be targeting.
- It will help you determine the best approach for developing your content strategy, including determining how much time and money you want to create it.
- It will provide insight into how your company compares with others regarding the quality and quantity of content produced.
- A content audit can be used as an ongoing process that helps improve your overall marketing strategy by providing data on what is and isn’t working so you can update your strategy over time.
- A content audit identifies areas for content repurposing. The failure of content to meet specific marketing objectives doesn’t mean it should be scrapped but repurposed. For example, the goal might have been to increase product sales, but it instead increased engagement. You can use that content (blog posts or article) subject matter to increase engagement on social media because it is still relevant to your audience.
- It will help brands evaluate the quality of the content on their website. In addition, Google ranks content based on quality and length, so a website content audit allows brands to see which of their content falls short on these factors and how these brands can update it.
- An in-depth audit of your website’s content will lead to more substantial content generation. The audit will focus on bounce rates and page views, leading to better search engine indexing. With these factors being monitored, the significant aspect that will continually bring people and search engines to your website is the quality of the content published. Remember that users are looking for valuable information when they scour the internet.
- A content audit will also enhance your website’s usability. For instance, what use is good content if people cannot effectively use your website? For example, a content audit will measure if your website is overly complex, busy, or full of misdirection.
Content Audit Checklist
A contain audit typically contains the following information;
URL
- The URL is the link to the content you wish to perform an in-depth audit on.
Category
- This is a description of the content topic and format compared to its relevance to your brand and target audience.
Metadata
- This section of the content audit includes the utilized keyword, the content’s meta description, its title, and header information. In addition, you can check the content’s SEO rating by revisiting the metadata.
Metrics
- Metrics is a broad overhead term covering the backlinks, shares, organic traffic, bounce rate, and content sessions. Businesses use audited metrics to gauge the performance of the content against the marketing objectives.
Status
- This covers the progress carried out in the content audit. Is the audit in progress?
- Has it been canceled?
- Has it been completed?
Priority
- How essential is the audit of this content? Does it pertain to a forthcoming campaign?
- Can it be repurposed? Is it drawing adverse reactions?
- Is it highly engaging content? These factors make it easier to determine the priority of the content and how when it should be audited.
Result analysis
- After a review, brands are to determine if your brand will scrap the content, if it is still beneficial and achieving marketing goals, or if it should/can be repurposed for a different marketing campaign.
How do you conduct a robust content audit: Step-by-Step Guide?
The overall objective of a content audit is to expose the weaknesses and strengths in a brand’s content development and marketing strategy, thus making it a step that needs to be conducted regularly. But how does one carry out an intensive audit?
A defined goal and metric system
A content audit involves intrinsic details and can be time-consuming, but approaching it with an explicit content objective makes it easier to carry out. What you hope to achieve from this content audit is a factor that should drive every content audit. For example, how does this content audit done at this point benefit your business? What metrics are you going to use to analyze the content?
A good example(s) of the goals of your content audit can be an increase in brand awareness, raising SEO rankings, increased conversion rates, and even audience engagements.
Total content inventory
Before beginning your audit, you need to know what content type you aim to examine. For example, is it short-form or long-form content?
Is it social media campaigns or blog posts?
Are you auditing the success of previous competition content? The content reviewed can be internal (via the website) or external links with third-party applications. In addition, you collate your inventory through the URLs and break down the content into various categories.
Data collection and analysis
Data collection and analysis can be a time-consuming process if you choose to organize it manually. Still, there are various content audit tools that you can use in place of manual collection. These tools collect data from a specified set (either on your website or external links) based on content data inputted. SemRush and Google Analytics are great examples of these tools. The results would show detailed responses on each piece of content you have published for your brand. After analyzing the impact, you must create an actionable plan to implement changes based on the result.
An achievable action plan
The achievable action plan should be based on the results provided by the data analysis. The program can be as easy as updating your content marketing strategy or scrapping it altogether if required. For example, consider your content objectives and brand voice when determining the following approach for your content. It would be best if you didn’t choose a method because it is “successful” among competitors but because it is the right fit for your brand. Each URL should have its plan for what the content aims to achieve. For example, a content audit only provides one-size-fits-all results when done right.
Updated content marketing strategy
Since one of the objectives of a content audit is to expose the weaknesses in your content strategy, it is ideal for checking how the results fit into your long-term marketing strategy. For example, a content audit allows businesses effectively redirect their content goals and make them fit into their marketing strategy. Other content created or repurposed should adhere to the general objectives of the marketing strategy. For example, the content audit brings your brand face to face with what works and what doesn’t; it is an effective development tool.
Key Takeaways
A content audit being time-consuming does not mean it has to be complicated. Before, during, and even after your content audit, you can use the information provided as a guideline to see how well you fare;
- Have clear-cut brand goals for your content audit. Remember that measurable metrics should accompany the plans; it makes it easier to track them that way.
- Analytics tools are your friends. These tools simplify the data collection and even analysis process. Most templates available can be customized and adjusted to the status of the content audit.
- The determined actions for each piece of content should align with the preset goals at the beginning and the content marketing strategy.
- After collation and analysis, use the results to update or revise your long-term content marketing strategy as required.
Conclusion
One of the beautiful things about digital marketing is the outsourcing ability available for work that can overwhelm you. While content auditing is needed, we have explained how it can be time-consuming and intensive and how content auditing tools exist that can simplify the process. Kaku is definitely not a SaaS or web tool dedicated to performing a content audit, but we know what works as a brand that has produced result-driven content for years.
Kaku allows you to audit your content and make changes to it in real-time, saving time and money by reducing the amount of manual work required.
We’re a team of highly skilled professionals who can take on any project you need to do. We can deliver high-quality results quickly, which means we can get your project back on track more quickly than other companies in the industry.
At the end of the day, the route followed is dependent on you and your brand. Have you contented an audit before for your brand? What was the process like? Do you believe in outsourcing content? We would love to hear from you, so please share in the comments below.