Are you looking to improve your website’s performance and boost your SEO efforts? Are you following an SEO checklist but not seeing the kind of traffic results you want? A content audit is an essential tool that can help you achieve these goals.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of conducting a content audit, perfect if you’ve been creating content for a while and want to optimize your online presence.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is an evaluation of all the content on your website. This comprehensive evaluation helps you gauge the quality, relevance, and performance of all your content. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, especially if you’ve been creating content for a while.
A content audit can help you identify which pieces of content are working well, and which need to be improved.
Why should you conduct a content audit?
Content audits can help you:
- Improve your SEO rankings
- Provide a better experience to your end user
- Ensure your content strategy stays relevant
- Align your content to your business goals
- Solve for intent for your target audience more effectively
Step-by-Step guide to conducting a Content Audit
Step 1: Defining your objectives clearly
Before you start the auditing, define your goals clearly. What are your short term and long term goals? These will guide you through your audit process. To effectively measure the success of your content, you need to define parameters. Setting parameters will also shed light on which of your content pieces are serving your content goals, and which need to be modified for better alignment.
Some common objectives for a content audit can include:
- Improving your SEO performance
- Greater brand recognition or recall
- Increasing audience interaction or user engagement
- Attracting more prospects, clients or conversions, via leads, sales, or email signups
- Enhancing the quality of your content
Step 2: Content Inventory
Once you have your goals and objectives in place, it’s time to start creating an inventory of your content. There are a number of different ways to create a content inventory – choose what works well for your business and your working style!
- Use Google Search Console to create a sitemap, or manually go through your website. If you have hundreds of pieces of content on your site, it might be easier to create a sitemap.
- Compile a list of all your URLs as you work your way through your site.
- If you’re a fan of spreadsheets, you’ll love this one – organizing the content. Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel are great options to sort out and organize all your links.
At the end of this step, you should have a spreadsheet with a comprehensive list of all your content URLs.
Step 3: Data Collection and Analysis
Next, we have to put together performance metrics for each piece. These are the data points that will show how the pieces are performing individually.
There are many tools that can help you understand these metrics. We recommend Google Analytics and Google Search Console – they’re free, accurate, and provide a wealth of data. If you’re just starting out with analyzing data and performance, these tools will certainly provide all the information you need.
Some important metrics you can keep an eye on: page views, bounce rates, organic traffic, and average session duration. Choose more metrics based on your goals and the parameters you set above. Add all this data to your spreadsheet as you go.
Step 4: Categorizing content
It’s time to organize again! Organize your content by type – like blog posts, product pages, landing pages, or pillar pages. You can break it down further and arrange by topic as well.
Having this information is helpful in two ways:
- You will be able to identify areas that are performing well, and those that need some improvement.
- You will know how much content you have per type and topic. It’ll be easier to identify gaps and potential future content opportunities.
Step 5: Reviewing your data
It’s time to review your data! Here at Mycoso, we find this step really fun to do. That’s because you can:
- Identify high performing content. If you’ve got a few pieces of high performing content, pay close attention! These are your content pieces that are resonating with your audience – you should create more of these.
Pro Tip:Make sure these content pieces are actually serving your target users.We have noticed a trend in recent times: when clients come to us, they sometimes have high traffic, SEO optimized pages that are useful for their industry or sector as a whole. They certainly do get inbound traffic, but that traffic doesn’t necessarily convert to leads or sales. Why? While such content pieces are useful in a general sense, they might not be what your ideal audience is looking for. So they will come, read, learn, and leave. They weren’t looking for your products or services at that time. What’s the solution? 1. Understand TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU keywords 2. Supplement with content pieces that solve for user intent for your ideal audience Check out this case study to see what we did for an ecommerce client who was facing the same issue. |
- Make note of your underperforming pages. More often than not, such pages have potential for improvement. They may also just need minor tweaks to start performing at a higher level. Just like in the previous point, keep in mind whether these posts are solving for your ideal audience. If not, you may be able to modify these posts to better serve those needs.
- Look for content gaps, or overlapping content. At this point, you may be able to start identifying what improvements might be possible.
When you study and review your collected data, you’ll likely start noticing patterns. Which brings us to:
Step 6: Making your roadmap
Once you’ve reviewed your data, you need to decide next steps for each piece of content. You can choose to:
- Keep the piece as is, updating it with more relevant, detailed, and/or up-to-date information as required.
- Combine or merge pages that may be repetitive or competing for the same keyword on your website.
- Rewrite or refresh older pieces, especially if the core content of the page is good. Sometimes, these kinds of pages just require a little tweaking for them to really shine.
- Delete or archive pages that no longer serve their purpose.
Once you’ve figured out what happens to each piece of content you’ve audited, inventoried, organized, and analyzed, it’s time for the final step.
Step 7: Time for action!
It’s time to execute your roadmap and track what changes. Once you start seeing the impact, you’ll have solid data on what is giving you good results. You’ll have granular insights into what’s working, so you can refine your strategy further.
General Tips and Thoughts on doing a Content Audit
A content audit can be done using free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. For spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets will do everything you need.
A content audit is an ongoing project of sorts. It’s not a one and done task, but something that you periodically revisit and refresh. When you make it a regular part of your content goals, you can incorporate these learnings into your overall content strategy. Content audits can provide valuable insights that can inform your content strategy as a whole. It can also help you optimize your website performance and SEO. Before all that, the first thing you need to do is your comprehensive content audit.
If this seems like a lot, know that you can do this over the course of days or even weeks. The important thing is to collate this information so you have it ready to refer to. Content audits and strategy roadmaps are one of the services we provide at Mycoso Media, so reach out if you’d like us to take a look!
Key Takeaways
A content audit is a valuable process that can help improve your SEO, website performance, and content strategy. Insights from a content audit can help refine your strategy further – and help you create more content that aligns with what your target customer is looking for.
It might seem like a time consuming process (and it can be!), but it’s worth doing. It’s okay if it takes a while – do it at a pace that is comfortable for you and your business. This step-by-step guide can help you through the process, and you’ll start seeing patterns and finding insights in no time. Ultimately, this will help you refine your content strategy as a whole. Once you’ve done the audit, revisit it regularly and see what you can learn and implement. At the end of the day, the goal is to create and deliver content that is meaningful and provides value. A content audit is part of the process that can help you achieve this goal.
If you want us to take a look at your content strategy or help you out with a content audit, contact us or book a call!
Check out our Resources for more information about content marketing and what it can do for you.