Picture this: You’re in a room with 100 people, and at the center is a delicious layer cake. You and around 70 others have forks in hand, ready to dig in. Sure, your fork gives you a shot at a slice, but many others are vying for the same piece.
So when you’re standing face-to-face with your competitors, lining up for cake or conversions, how can you get to the front of the line?
73% of B2C and 70% of B2B companies use content strategies. The key to getting ahead is maintenance: Testing and refining your current position keeps your foundations strong. In this article, we’ll show how conducting a comprehensive content audit can help you have your content cake and eat it, too.
Why Audit Your Content?
An audit works through your content inventory to check performance and identify gaps. The idea is to ensure that not just your current and future content is working for you, but that anything you’ve posted in the past is pulling its weight as well. Here are a few good reasons to audit your content:
- Align your marketing goals: An actionable content audit clarifies your objectives, ensuring content is aligned with broader marketing goals.
- Evaluate your achievement: Learn whether your content performance delivers on expectations and where there’s space for improvement to cultivate greater growth.
- Identify what works: Dive into your content marketing history to explore what’s hitting the bullseye, what’s not — and why.
- Plan for the future: Insights from your audit will help you craft a smarter content strategy as you progress by pushing assets that absolutely rock and toning down or refining underperforming content.
Setting The Audit Process and Scope
Like Cinderella’s glass slipper, auditing your content assets is not a one-size-fits-all job. Take a topographical view of your overall marketing strategy, including where and how content contributes. This should inform how you move ahead with your audit. You can go one of two ways:
- Website content audit: Get under the hood of your website content. You can then update and optimize outdated content for better results. To polish your search engine performance, you may limit the scope to blogs and landing pages. Or, to optimize for user engagement, you may run eBooks and infographics into the audit as well.
- Content marketing audit: If you’re going wide, your scope should define whether you’re looking into emails, social media or video platforms — and what you plan to action. Can you refresh descriptions, realign your hashtags or create new media relevant to your industry? Socials have a ton of metrics to check, but don’t worry — there are plenty of social media audit hacks to make the process less intimidating.
What You Should Check For
The goal is to make sure your content still meets user needs, drives metrics and complies with content standards, rather than just spinning the wheels. Here are a few metrics to check for:
Content Quality
Does your content truly add value to your audience? Value means audiences can derive new, relevant insights in an approachable, easy-to-read format. Consider whether your content:
- Addresses user needs: Is your audience visiting your page to search for information, compare options, make a purchasing decision or get in touch? How well does your content support them in achieving their goals?
- Adheres to content standards: SEO content needs to be optimized, include high-quality metadata and reflect your brand’s tone and style. Good content should also include clear headings, digestible chunks of information and reflect design principles.
- Delivers on goals: Is your content designed to drive traffic to your website, sell products, generate leads or otherwise? How effectively does it achieve these goals?
User Engagement Analysis
For website content, tap into your core web vitals such as bounce rates, organic visitor volume, keyword rankings and total time spent on each page. A broader marketing audit may mean checking your email subscriber volume, open rates or social media impressions and engagement.
Understanding how these figures have changed over time creates a yardstick to measure your current and past content performance. Naturally, this feeds into your overall success in the content marketing world as you continue refining and analyzing in the future.
Competitor Comparison
Once you know how you compare to your own past performance, it’s time to take a peek into the competition and see how your content stacks up. A competitive analysis identifies any content gaps — such as keywords — to keep you playing on the front line. It can also reflect changes in Google’s algorithms that require small tweaks to get you ranking again.
Checking industry benchmarks will unearth ways to maintain or improve your position, as well as which updates are needed for outdated content.
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Conversions Rates
The content that gets the highest conversion rates reveals important insights. For starters, you could learn which audiences genuinely engage with your brand and refocus your strategy to target them. Second, you might discover that the content eating the highest budgets (hello blogs and videos) isn’t producing as many conversions as email marketing campaigns, for example.
In this case, should you reallocate your efforts to hone in on what’s working or brush up on the lower-performing areas? How can you ramp up your ROI?
Steps For Conducting a Content Audit
An audit is only as effective as the planning that goes into it. If this is your first rodeo, keep in mind that your efforts will become more procedural with time and practice. A combined 54% of marketers audit their content two or more times per year, according to a Semrushreport. Of those marketers, 53% report increased engagement following an audit — so you’re on the right path. In the following section, we’ll outline the steps to get you started.
Set Goals
Get clear on what outcomes you want to achieve, which should encompass the breadth and scope of your audit. Search engine optimization is a good start, though generating additional value, ramping up metrics and enhancing user experience are all valid targets.
Create an Inventory
Create a Google Sheet to track your content inventory. This provides a high-level overview of your content to refer back to during reoptimizations. Your inventory should include:
- Content title (if it doesn’t have one, give it a clear name).
- URL or link to where it’s published.
- Author or owner.
- Topic or keyword.
- Content type (for example, blog, video or infographic).
- Date of creation or last modification.
- Metadata (Title tag, meta description, etc).
- Evaluation metrics.
- Content quality score.
Track and Measure Metrics
Move through your website or channels, page by page entering the details for each content piece you’ve shared online. Some metrics will require deeper research. Your content management system should show authors and date of publication, for example, and Google Analytics can gauge user engagement.
Consider whether you need additional qualitative or keyword research to determine whether your content addresses audience needs. If there’s anything you’re unsure of, note it in the document. Uncertainty gaps can drive critical process and documentation adjustments in your strategy.
Analyze The Data
Follow the data to determine whether your content delivers on objectives or it’s just floating through the abyss. Then, decide what to do with each piece of content. It boils down to three options:
- Keep: Any content performing well and still relevant to your business objectives can stay exactly where it is.
- Update: If you need to review and update information, brush up on metadata or reoptimize for SEO, record all necessary improvements in the inventory document and assign them to the person responsible.
- Discard: If underperforming content cannot be salvaged and isn’t driving metrics or adding value anymore, give it the chop.
Again, not everything at this stage will be black and white. Uncertainty here will point to gray areas in your strategy or content creation process, which is invaluable for building a slicker procedure moving forward.
Create A New Strategy
Use your learning to create a fresh and effective content plan. As you build your strategy, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Where can I identify gaps from a competitor analysis or discarded assets that need to be filled with new content?
- In what ways could I repurpose rejected content?
- Which metrics can I start measuring to make the next audit easier?
- What can I learn from competitors to enhance my strategy?
- How can I better align efforts toward content that drives results?
- Where are my blindspots and how can I address them?
The goal of your new strategy is to ensure your content works round the clock for you. Identify any trends in your audit to enhance or address — and remember to evaluate how often you want to analyze content performance.
Refine Your Strategy and Keep Content Fresh With a Content Audit
Conducting a comprehensive content audit fine-tunes your strategy and enhances your marketing efforts. By diving into your data, you’ll spot what’s working, what needs tweaking and what’s holding you back. Freshen up SEO, update key content or cut what no longer serves your goals.
It’s all about refining your approach and making your content work harder for you. So, if you want a slice of the content cake, dive into your analytics, polish your strategy and enjoy the sweet taste of success.