Your content team is running like a high functioning engine. You’re pushing out content fast, but how do you know if the content is truly engaging your audience?

A content audit can help you figure out if your content is meeting your marketing goals. While content audits can be a bit time consuming, we have some tricks to help you make it faster!

What Are Content Audits?

A content audit is an analytical approach to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

They take a look at every piece of content, including blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics that you produced and decide if they have a strong ROI.

Content audits help you determine what won and what failed in your content marketing strategy so that you can adjust accordingly.

 

Why Should You Conduct Content Audits?

The apparent benefit of conducting a content audit is determining if the effort of producing content is worth it. But there are several other benefits to consider:

  • Remove content that no longer serves your business
  • Discover which content is performing best
  • Find gaps in the content marketing funnel
  • Brainstorm new content ideas
  • Reveal what content has low conversion rates
  • Improve SEO performance

Content audits are useful to determine if your SEO or content marketing strategies are successful. The numbers don’t lie when it comes to what your audience is reading and how they’re responding to your content.

As we mentioned, content audits may take a long time, especially if you have spent years doing content creation with no formal editorial calendar to keep track of it, but we can help you get this done in just a few steps.

Let’s talk about how you can conduct a content audit in the simplest way possible.

 

How to Complete a Content Audit in 4 Easy Steps:

You should consider doing a content audit every 3-6 months, as it gives you enough time to see shifts in your audience’s behavior towards your content. Today we will show you how to conduct a content audit in 4 steps, but before you start, you need to lock down your end goal for the audit.

Are you trying to determine what type of content is getting the most attention from your audience? Are you looking for those pieces with the highest bounce rates? Knowing your goal will help you out with step two.

We let’s move on to the first step of a content audit!

 

1. Gather All of Your Content Into One Document

If you already have an editorial calendar (and have had one since the beginning of time), then this may be an easy step for you.

But if you know that you have several blog posts that aren’t in a list anywhere else, then it’s essential to take the time to put them into one central document.

If you fall into the latter category, here are some tools that can help you with this step:

These tools crawl your website and return every URL you have. It’s a lot easier than manual entry into a spreadsheet.

 

2. Track the Metrics of Your Content

Remember the goals you set earlier? Now it’s time to determine what metrics you need to understand if you met those goals. There are numerous metrics, and not all of them will be necessary to analyze depending on what your goal is, so you need to focus on the few metrics that show your results.

For example, let’s take a look at standard metrics for SEO.

  • Target Keyword
  • Inbound Links
  • Page Visits
  • Page Bounce Rate
  • Page Entries and Exit
  • Average Time on Page

If your marketing goal is increasing customer engagement, then the metrics or topics you may want to look at include:

  • Number of Comments
  • Number of Social Shares
  • Type of Content (You may notice your audience engaging with a certain type, like video, more than others)
  • Content Topic & Tags
  • Call to Action (How many people followed the call-to-action of your content? Which ones worked?)
  • Belongs to Which Content Marketing Funnel Stage

 

3. Time to Do Some Data Analysis

Now, this is the fun part, as it includes turning data into actionable insights for your business.

One way to do this is to develop your grading section from A-F. Depending on how well the content did with their metrics, you can give them a grade based on your business content standards.

The content’s grade determines what you plan on doing with that content. For example, an A grade means that the content stays as it is. C says that content needs an update with new information or different keywords. An F means that it needs to be redone entirely or removed from your site.

 

4. Create An Updated Content Marketing Strategy

You did it! Your content audit is completed. By this step, you’ve learned a lot about how your content is performing.

Now it’s time to adjust your content marketing strategy based on what you learned. Take a look at your editorial calendar and make deadlines for content that you identified needs an update.

Or maybe you learned that blog posts with videos improved your average time spent on a page, so you decide to increase your video budget.

Regardless of what you learned from your content audit, it’s time to put it into action in your content marketing strategy.

 

Keep In Mind

Content marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach. What works for one company may not work for you. Conducting content audits are so important because they can save you valuable time and money in the long run. Your content needs to fit what your audience wants and nurture them into becoming your customers while also staying relevant and up to date.

Have you done a content audit before? If not, what’s your biggest takeaway from this blog post?