There’s nothing a seasoned marketer dreads more than an annual content audit. However, a well-managed audit usually leads to extremely productive insights that can drastically improve your content marketing strategy. Put another way, a content audit can help us identify and alter outdated and irrelevant practices.
What Is A Content Audit?
A content audit is a close analysis, sometimes referred to as a “quantitative assessment”, of every single last bit of content on your website that is conducted to assess its strengths and weakness with the end goal of improving future marketing. These assessments are based on previously-selected key performance indicators (KPIs).
Content audits help companies make critical marketing decisions regarding what content is performing best, what posts were not that well-received, and what topics captured the most interaction. Together, the answers therein will give you a much better idea of whether your current marketing approach is viable. If not, you may need to reevaluate your SEO strategy. If you’re getting ready to undertake your own content audit, here are some essential elements you will need to consider.
Know Why You Are Conducting The Audit
While a content audit could be initiated for a number of reasons, it usually pertains to two: SEO and marketing.
In regards to SEO, a content audit can help you identify chinks in the armor of your site’s search optimization. Logging word counts, keywords, and optimized images and evaluating them against current page ranking data will give you a nice picture of what needs to change in order to improve your site’s ranking.
For content marketing, you’ll be focusing on page optimization elements, including social shares, page length, and visit metrics. Evaluating each area will give you a better idea of how your audience responds to your content.
Evaluate Your Resources
Anyone who has ever competed a content audit understands it is a time consuming process, which is why seasoned professionals usually recommend refraining from initiating one until you have determined whether you have the necessary resources. If the project absolutely has to be undertaken regardless of personal factors, it may be a good idea to tackle the audit in chunks. This could include automating parts of the process with modern tools (as long as it’s in your budget, of course).
Know Your Goal
Audits consume considerable resources, so don’t begin one until you’ve ascertained why it needs to be conducted in the first place. How do you hope to use the information? If you cannot answer this basic question then it may be a good idea to refrain from it altogether. Potential goals could include locating gaps within previously-posted content, figuring out what posts resulted in the highest conversions, generating ideas for future content and engagement, and removing content that is no longer relevant to your business.
As you conduct your audit, you may identify some goals that are not on the above list. Just remember that content audits can take many forms and it is all right to reevaluate. One size does not fit all.
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