Consider all of the content you produce for your website, both good and bad, as well as the ones that require an inordinate amount of time.
Now think about how you’ll organize all the content produced? How do you maintain track of the performance of your content? Another question, do you use any metrics to help you better your campaigns in the future?
If the above given questions confuse you, then it is time to invest in a content audit. Content Audits serve as a great planning tool and roadmap for future content creation. They also help you to keep track of analytics so you can go back to high-performing posts if necessary.
What is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a method of reviewing all of the information on your website methodically. This activity allows you to examine your optimization efforts in detail in order to assess how well they are helping you reach your company goals. When done effectively, you’ll be able to identify any content gaps and change your method to better serve your target audience.
Content Audits will allow you to develop your digital content strategy so that your business can supply the content that audiences require more effectively and efficiently. So, what kind of information do you think you’d like to examine? There are various content types, such as…
- Core website pages
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
- Learning center articles
- Guides
- Webinars
- Videos
- One-pager
- Podcasts
- Success stories
- Benchmark reports
- Battle cards
- Slide decks
- Boilerplates
- Branded templates
In this blog post, we will only focus on the audit of content that is on your website. We will leave auditing other forms of your content for another day.
Now, what kind of data do you think you’d like to look at? With Google Analytics and the human eye, you can find anything.
What’s my point? The definition of your content audit is determined by the amount of content you’re reviewing, the tools you have, and the goal of the audit—which we’ll discuss shortly.
Why do a Content Audit?
Only 38% of websites update their blogs. And with Google’s requirement of fresh content, you may well know what happens to these blogs. With the help of a content audit, it becomes easy to examine the relevance of your content in accordance with the desires of your audience.
It will serve as a reminder of the elements of your content strategy that are working. It may even inspire new user experiences. In most cases, only 5% of content creates 90% of all engagement. A well executed content audit can help you make 95% of your content work.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
1. Make your content marketing approach more informed
Regular reporting will help you keep on track with your organic content marketing strategy, but audits will allow you to get a wider picture and see where you need to make changes, as well as dive down and fix a specific problem or optimize for a specific goal.
A content audit can help you enhance SEO, identify strengths and weaknesses, uncover new themes, better understand your audience, and identify possibilities to verticalize, scale, or repurposing your content.
2. Develop your brand and reputation
Every piece of content you present to your audience communicates with them in some way. Do you want to send the message that you’re out of touch, thoughtless, or inept? No, I don’t believe so. Your industry, products and services, and brand are all changing at a rapid pace, and you need to keep on top of it.
As a result, content audits assist you in maintaining consistency in style and tone, information accuracy, and a clean online presence. To stay up with competitors and industry developments, you might incorporate comparisons to other brands.
Regular content audits guarantee that every interaction with your material is a positive one, conveying authenticity, knowledge, and trust.
3. Enhance the output of the organization
To build and maintain a content library for your company, you’ll need to do a thorough content audit. A shared content library, on the other hand, is a gold mine.
As a result of having access to the content team’s content, other departments can easily recycle and repurpose it for their materials, saving time and improving content quality (think one-pagers, slide decks, sales enablement pieces).
If the content team has access to internal and external content from sales, product marketing, branding, and public relations, they can find critical themes to weave throughout their work, important topics to address, and context for departmental demands.
Another advantage of a content library is that it makes it easier for new team members to get up to speed, whether they’re managing or consuming the content.
How to do a Website Content Audit?
Although content audits are time-consuming and tiresome, they are necessary for producing high-quality material, enhancing your brand and reputation, and increasing your team’s overall performance. More importantly to keep your audiences glued to your website.
Here is a checklist with step-by-step instructions, that we follow here at Missive Digital:-
Step 1: Export the data from your website
To begin a quantitative inventory, export all of your website pages and views from your Google Analytics account for a good duration of time. We recommend it to be a year. Note that data should be pulled up to the date of the audit.
Now, in the bottom right, increase the number of rows to show as many as possible.
Finally, save the data to a spreadsheet using the export feature in the top right corner.
You now have a spreadsheet containing all of your site’s pages that have been seen at least once during the timeline you chose, which in our case is a year.
Note: If your Analytics account indicates that there are more than 5,000 rows, you’ll need to re-pull this and combine the exports to acquire a complete data set.
Remove the first few rows and arrange the sheet by range to see pages sorted by pageviews from highest to lowest.
You’ll undoubtedly scratch your brain when you see something like this.
Don’t be concerned about it. Google Analytics appends total page views by date for the whole date range at the end of the data. We don’t need this information, so just get rid of it.
Step 2: Get rid of anything that isn’t essential
Sort your sheet for obvious non-pages such as search queries, website back-end pages, and so on. For this data, I usually look at 1-page views as well as page URLs.
Step 3: For your evaluation, create manageable tabs based on the content type
Make a tab for each component of the website. Especially if your site architecture follows the navigation and employs subfolders depending on primary navigation paths, your navigation is usually an excellent place to start.
Notice the “blog” subfolder in the URL?
Create tabs for aspects of your website that are important to you, such as services, goods, industries, blogs, case studies, and about. Depending on the complexity and volume of material in your organisation, you may wish to divide apart distinct services, product kinds, industries, and other categories.
The idea is to match similar content with similar stuff. You may undertake a quick study of outstanding high and low content performance this way. Visitors respond differently to different sorts of content, so you shouldn’t compare the performance of a service page to that of a blog article, for example.
Individual tabs also make it easier for you to manage and delegate audit tasks. Someone who is familiar with the content in a particular tab should review it. As an example, you could have your industry marketing lead look at the industry tab, your blog manager looks at the blog tab, and so on.
Step 4: Gather some buddies to help you evaluate your work
You’ll now enlist the aid of your companions (hopefully). Sort tabs by columns such as page views, time on page, entrances, and page value, then color-code outliers.
Make those cells green if some pages of a certain category perform very well for a specific measure. Make the cells red if any pages of a certain category perform very poorly for a specific measure.
Step 5: Choose which content to keep, delete, or clean up.
You now have a basic visual snapshot of content performance by page type after color-coding the sheet. Align yourself with your coworkers and mark the following stuff as “to kill”:
Unless something else stands out, anything with pageviews over/under X. If a lower-traffic page is for a certain specialty yet does well otherwise, don’t get rid of it.
Case studies, blog pieces, news items, events, and marketing campaign pages you forgot existed. I’m sure you’ll find some of these!
Key Things to Note About Doing Content Audits
There is no right or wrong way to perform a content audit, and there are no set protocols to follow, but here are some pointers to help you get started.
1. Set a particular objective for yourself.
Content audits can quickly turn into a black hole. There are a plethora of metrics to collect. And once you get started, you’ll nearly always find new metrics to collect. So make sure you have a clear aim in mind so you can only acquire what you need. It will be tough to extract clear insights if there is too much data.
On that subject, having a defined purpose will assist you to distinguish necessary improvements from ‘nice to have’ ones.
2. Maintain your organization
This will be in the form of a spreadsheet. Here are a few pointers to help you stay organized:
- Open-ended cells should be kept to a bare minimum, especially for major audits. Once you’ve finished, you’ll be able to organize and sort your data in any way you wish.
- If you have numerous persons auditing the same sheet, you may wish to build drop-down functionality with distinct alternatives.
When dealing with a variety of content kinds and formats, color coding might be useful.
Quantitative measurements require date ranges to be specified.
To keep huge audits sorted by content format, use tabs. After you’ve finished, you may always combine them into one sheet. Simply ensure that each sheet has the same column format.
The first tab should be devoted to instructions or checklists.
3. Decide on a format
Your content audit might be formatted in a variety of ways.
The data points in some audits function as both inventory and action items, implying that completing the audit fulfills the aim.
If you’re conducting a basic QA audit to identify and implement tiny but significant changes that don’t need to be tracked, this format will suffice. The action item checklist is available on the first tab, but the second tab only has a title, link, and status column.
For others, the audit entails gathering data and engaging with colleagues to identify action items that are in line with the aim.
For many, it’s a combination. Make sure the action items are specific and have a clear owner, regardless of how and when they are recognized.
4. Make use of content auditing software
The following are some tools that can aid with content auditing:
Google Tools: Analytics, Search Console, Page Speed Insights.
SEO and Spider Tools: Semrush, ahrefs, Screaming Frog.
Inventory Organization Tools: Airtable, Google Sheets.
Content Quality tools: Yoast SEO Plugin, Grammarly, Hemingway editor, and a bulk web page word count checker.
ROI tools like your CRM.
5. Do not mix up auditing and reporting
Regular reporting should not be replaced by content audits. Audits are usually thorough and performed periodically or even yearly (except those needed to troubleshoot a specific problem). Regular reporting is required to ensure that your content meets KPIs and to detect long-term patterns. Getting to know your metrics and content kinds will make selecting criteria for future audits a lot easier.
Website Content Audit Checklist
Here’s a quick overview of how to conduct a website content audit that you can use as a cheat sheet is as follows:
- Establish explicit business objectives for your content audit, such as increasing SEO rankings, audience engagement, or conversion rate. Match them to relevant content data, such as organic traffic, bounce rate, shares, and return on investment (ROI).
- Gather URLs for your content and organize it by stages of the buyer’s journey, content type, author, and other factors that are essential to you.
- Using analytics tools, collect data on the performance of content assets. Assess your content assets using set metrics and assign them to one of three statuses: keep, update, or delete.
- Prioritize your actions based on the business objectives you established in the first phase, and create a plan for each piece of content.
At least once a year, make changes to your content strategy depending on the audit results.
Roll-up Your Sleeves and Start Your Content Audit
When it comes down to it, a content audit isn’t just a one-time thing you undertake now and again. It’s a mindset that should be applied to your website content as well as your other marketing methods.
You can make smart marketing decisions that will help you save time, decrease expenses, expand your brand, and enhance your total advertising ROI by thoroughly inventorying your existing content pieces and reviewing the data you’ve gathered for each item.
And keep in mind that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Audits of content can take many different forms, routes, methodologies, and scopes. It all relies on your requirements and objectives.
It can get overwhelming to do the content audits without any expert auditor. We at Missive Digital provide Content Services that will help you win through your content. Get in touch!
